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  • Hiking on the Sleeping Giant in Kauai

    How Technical Should a Product Manager Be

    It’s a common struggle for product managers, especially when they’re new to the problem area of this company. It can be articulated in several ways: Why do these questions come up? Because they’re causing friction. The product manager is being asked for input and can’t provide it, which causes self-doubt and fails to assist the

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  • Ad for Premier Cars

    How Do You Measure Product Quality?

    Product quality is a subjective measure, so you have to find ways to objectively track effort without creating a Goodhart’s Law problem. Since you’re not going to get an easy and accurate metric, you’re left to verifying proxy metrics. So, that’s a lot of processes and dashboards to track that the processes are getting used

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  • Elsa suggests that we circle back to this tomorrow

    Defusing Dramatic Conversations

    Change happens. Maybe it’s a new strategic mandate, or altered priorities from customers, or realization that a technical approach won’t work. Your vendor disappears in a puff of smoke, you can’t be ready for unveiling at a conference so the deadline moves, your customer adds more requirements, your executive staff decide the feature should be

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  • Young Mr Incredible is frustrated that the world keeps getting in jeopardy after he saves it

    Product Managers get (all) the jobs done!

    Sometimes in interviewing or training PMs, this question comes up: “Are we really supposed to be doing everything in this team?!” I’d love to answer with a clear “no”, but really? It depends. Product Management is a glue function. We are responsible for overall success, so we can stretch to fix some of the broken

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  • Sweating hero decision meme

    Metrics and Observability

    I wrote this as a Twitter thread in March of 2018, but the character constraints of Twitter at that time made it extremely cryptic. Also, it’s staged as a response to Splunk’s introduction of the metrics index… and to be honest, that’s no longer interesting to me. This is an expanded set of observations about

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