Moving people forward, together

If you want to know the zeitgeist of an organization, attend a few of its internal meetings. Nine out of ten times, you’ll see room for improvement.

If you want to be agile, or whatever you were told you have to do to become customer-centric and move fast, start by fixing the way your teams hold meetings. This is a surefire way to improve how groups of individuals across your organization interact, make decisions, and organize their work.

For context, let’s start by looking at the following data reports:

I have pulled some templates/frameworks from various articles I have written on Medium and categorized them here for your convenience.

Recruiting (for product managers):

A helpful resource for general PM interview questions:

Explaining the role and responsibilities to PMs:

Getting PMs to competency:

How leaders and teams should interact with product teams:

One way to design a product team calendar to drive out busy work:

Modernizing an organization:

Tracking the health of teams and your organization:

Self-assessment (for all employees):

Deploying the WHY and WHAT and Empowering Teams to Define the HOW

INSIGHTS:

• Strategy is so much more than, say, the outcome of a successful strategy, e.g., such as a desired growth metric (increase subscriptions by 70%). Strategy is thinking about the critical issues worth concentrating resources on and rethinking (or reframing) the initial identification of the key problem area with more than one response to the stated problem. It is to reduce the problem scope to make it achievable.
• OKRs are the tactics that describe what teams need to do to achieve part of a stated strategy, usually on a rolling quarter basis, in a fast-moving and uncertain environment. You do not…

The team topology approach treats humans and technology as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, and thus it takes a team-sized architecture approach (people first) rather than a technology-first approach, e.g., the monolith vs microservices debate. NOTE: If you have microservices but are still waiting to do end-to-end testing of a combination of services, you have a distributed monolith (a distributed monolith is when all changes in a service require updates to other services).

If you know you need to deploy different parts of the system independently, you need to decouple services. In this environment, you should make your teams small and…

What a product leader can bring to the venture capital investment roundtable

If you ask a veteran venture investor what are the metrics that matter, the answers might be (depending on their investment stage focus):

• Payback Period
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• And many other standard accounting metrics, e.g., gross margin
• And, in some cases (such as in B2C businesses), DAU/MAU as the % of users that come back to use x feature(s), i.e., real usage to feed into retention as a predictor over time (driven by the magic moment (desired UX outcome))

These metrics can help you understand what product/market fit…

What people should know about what product people need to know

Disclaimer: This article is not collectively exhaustive as it relates to product management domain knowledge.

Domain knowledge breaks into four components:

1. The market/industry/ecosystem (rivals (direct, secondary, and indirect)), competitive dynamics, regulatory constraints, rising fixed costs, inflection points/attractor states, supply chain, etc.)
2. The product (how programmatic advertising works, how app stores work, how SMS infrastructure works, etc.)
3. The type of problem (podcasts — capturing ear share, games — addictive viral loops, enterprise software — saving companies time/$, productivity software — helping people be more efficient)
4. The customer segments (who are they, and what are their needs, pain points, desires, wants, goals, and motivations?)

The discipline breaks into three components:

• Product strategy management: Connecting…

Making a choice does not always have to be hard

Frederick Taylor is by no means the best source of wisdom for modern product or innovation managers. He did, however, have a few gems.

Andrew Carnegie once asked Taylor what he should do with his business. Taylor said: “I would advise you to make a list of the ten most important things you can do, and then start doing number one.”

The point here is to not pursue multiple ambitious goals at once. …