Tag: Corporate Life
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Product Manager to Product Ratio
How many chucks could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It depends on the structure of the organization’s tech stack. A highly structured tech stack provides a format that you can build repetitive products with. Structure makes the design obvious and lets the developers work faster, which…
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Declaring Idea Bankruptcy
It’s obvious that your R&D team can’t do everything at once, right? It’s obvious that items lower on the backlog aren’t going to happen unless they displace something higher on the backlog, right? And yet. Lots of those items are people’s beloved ideas. Good ideas, that would make the product…
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Capitalizing and Operating a Software Business
“As I have noted in the past, this is why the venture capital model that was developed to support silicon so seamlessly switched to supporting software: both entail huge up-front costs to produce zero marginal cost goods, which means capped downside and theoretically infinite upside.” That Ben Thompson quote is…
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Planning your Year
The plan is maybe accurate, but probably not. The act of planning is a useful time to step back, evaluate strategic position and rethink investment. Using financial targets is a mechanism. If target is thirty percent growth, does the product org have a realistic answer for how that will happen?…
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The Mystical Art of Getting New Things Done
The process isn’t actually mystical: it’s selling an idea to everyone who must work together to execute it. People who would use it. People who will fund it. People who will build it. People who will sell it. Eventually, people who will buy it. Tell people what you want to…
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A Simplistic View of Venture Capital
I have a lot of conversations with people. 1:1’s, interviews, &c. When the opportunity arises, sometimes those who’ve done startups will talk about their experiences. There’s sometimes a flag in those conversations about startups that raises my hackles. It’s a description of the money raised as if that were a…
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Product Tempo versus Deal Tempo
Going from sales engineering to product management was a jarring transition at first, because it represented a change in tempo. As a sales engineer, I lived by the fiscal quarter. While a given customer might be a multi-quarter job to convert, my sales partners and I had money to make…
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What does a Director of Product Management do?
I’ve written up some thoughts for the regular work of product managers and product management interns, but have not yet written about the next level up. What’s day to day like when you’re not just helping one team? What makes a director level product manager? Just like the definition of…
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The Innovation Team
A successful company grows. In growing from dozens to hundreds of employees, the company forms a culture of innovation that attracts an extremely capable individual: generalists who also have great depth, potential entrepreneurs, geniuses who can Get Shit Done. They build content, they build sales motions, they turbocharge they company’s…
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Why I Don’t Like the Squad Model
Development teams have a fondness for trying new models… for better or for worse. I’m not a fan of the current excitement around the squad model. What is it Spotify is the purest example, but the model owes a deal to Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, as well as a…
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