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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 means more gets done easier. …
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What kind of product are you making?
First know everything, then you can automate it! Also, if you can express your problem in numbers, I can tell you if they’re going up or down. A freeform exploration product attempts to enable a customer to achieve understanding and express the problem in numbers. Features may include user-editable schema (traditional database and ETL products) or schema…
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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 better, open new business opportunities,…
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The regrettable features you have to do
Sometimes as a product manager you get a feature request that’s fun and challenging and moves your company forward. Then there’s requests that just make you feel like a sad clown: stuff that doesn’t fit your plan at all. It’s hard work to ignore the nay-sayers and make a new thing. The product team and…
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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 from a non-public newsletter, but…
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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? If that answer is couched…
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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 do. Lots of people. Product…
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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 and were judged on a…
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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 what a Product Manager even…
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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 bit of LeSS. The basic…
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