One of the most important things a product manager has to do is avoid giving surprises, in a context where surprises are coming at you all the time. What do I mean? Never let someone who cares about a particular product change be taken off guard. This applies to changing timing, changing design, changing messaging,… Continue reading
Category product management
Lessons from Tesla on how not to react to an unfortunate event
There is a lot I admire about Tesla, but their recent reaction to the death of someone driving in autopilot mode is a lesson in what not to do for a product manager. I hold no blame for Tesla for the accident itself. From what I have read, the victim was a brave man who… Continue reading
Lessons for New Managers of Creative Teams
I recently took on a new hobby: singing in our church choir. I’m a total noob at the singing part, but it is clear that a successful choir is greater than the sum of its parts. Great outcomes require great leadership, and not just about music but also about people. It got me thinking about… Continue reading
How your team’s qualitative metrics act as the canary in the coal mine
There are three qualitative metrics I find interesting to use with a product team to help spot, and deal with, changes that could be opportunities or problems. 1. Retrospectives: scoring the “sprint” My former colleagues from Edgecase used to have every product team “score” how things felt since their last retro on a 1 to 10… Continue reading
Getting Tactical: the experiment design studio
If you are trying to get your team to think more creatively in terms of experiments, this exercise might be useful. Why? When it comes to creating new products (or even features), experiments help you make more informed decisions. Ideally you make your experiment as small as possible to get believable insights, but they come in all… Continue reading
Getting Tactical: Product Team Working Agreements
We talk a lot about how assumptions in business can kill you. But assumptions on a team can do the same. One of the best way to preserve a transparent, low-politics culture is to keep everything as visible and explicit as possible. This applies to strategy, vision, and values, but also to working methods. We… Continue reading
How to interview a product manager
This is part 3 of a talk given to the CTO School in New York, covering how to interview for a product manager (Parts 1 and 2). While I continually iterate my approach in the hunt to spot talent and minimize disappointments, this is my latest structure. I think of interviewing product managers as having… Continue reading
How engineering leads can work well with product management leads
This is the second part of a 3-part talk given to the CTO School. Part 1 covered good vs bad product management. Here I want to share ten ways an engineering leader can best partner with their product management counterpart. 1. Think strategically about the pressures on the business, not just the pressures on engineering… Continue reading
Good vs Bad Product Management
A while ago, I gave a talk to NYC’s CTO School on product management (good vs bad, working with, hiring). The deck has existed on Slideshare, but I wanted to break it out here into 3 posts. Product management, like “business development” and “UX” means many different things depending on the organization. But it does… Continue reading
Early Stage Lean: Running Weekly Decision Meetings
At Neo (recently acquired by Pivotal), we tried to put lean startup ideas into practice. Several years ago, Time Inc was our first client where we got to dream up and rigorously test new ideas over a period of several weeks. During that initial project, I realized that we needed a weekly ritual that helped us… Continue reading