(These thoughts went out in my weekly newsletter this morning) Ken Norton has an in-depth article pitching a dual-track product management career path. He doesn’t really speak to the economics, but that’s what I want to address because I think this is all about economics, or should I say, outdated economics. When I ran Neo, which was an innovation consulting company, we had this …
Last week’s case prompt, to both the executive cohort and the aspiring-executive cohort (senior/director level) in Case Camp, went as follows: As CPO, you spent 6 months looking for a senior PM to lead up a new effort. You went looking for a particular skillset in wearables, which is in high demand and short supply, and so were excited to …
This post, I admit, is aimed pretty squarely at senior executives, but hopefully others can follow along as well. As an executive, how would you decide between projects that could: a) improve retention; b) increase growth; c) protect against a lawsuit or regulatory fine; d) get ahead of debilitating tech debt; e) improve customer love and brand strength; f) build …
Preface: I’m going to experiment with sharing some cases here. They are always better live, but I inserted a couple of moments for you to think asynchronously. This scenario is based on a blend of real situations, but has been adjusted for learning purposes. Setup One of your teams is really struggling with pace and progress against their goals, which …
Last week, I wrote about the importance of communication as a leader. I gave some examples where I did a less-than-stellar job and left things unsaid. This week, I’ll give three examples where things went well. “This is going to suck” When I arrived at Meetup as CPO, the product management team had about a dozen people. The team had …
I’ve learned more about being a good product leader from people outside of product than inside. There, I said it. Maybe this is because there were fewer to learn from back in the day. Nowadays we have amazing people like Gib Biddle, Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres, Tommi Forsstrom, just to name a few among so many I respect and follow. …
I was listening to a really interesting CultureLab podcast on culture with Patty McCord, the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. She spoke for over an hour with no puffery, zero buzzwords, and total common sense. It made me ask myself a question: what do I want out of a people-ops/HR organization? My answer is three things. The first two …
It’s really hard to interview product designers and product managers. The most effective step I added to my cycles several years ago is a design challenge. The challenges themselves are a 2-hour take-home challenge, and then a 1-hour presentation with cross-functional members of the team. Because of the time commitment, it is best saved for late in the interview cycle. …
Like many of you, I’m constantly playing with how to run and scale effective communication across multiple product managers, cross-functional teams, and a broader organization. Here’s a quick take on some of my current approaches. Across PMs I typically run a weekly hour-long meeting for all PMs. The agenda typically looks like this: 20 min on goals/OKRs, 30 minutes on …
The other day I tweeted, “Every critical metric at a company needs a counter-metric to prevent the wrong kind of optimization.” It got a reaction and I thought to expand on the topic. Have you seen any of these examples of metrics + reward systems gone awry? The marketing and demandgen teams are tasked with bringing on leads, so they …