Tag: Product Management
-
Pushing Back on a Strategy
Let’s say you’ve been told to make a change and you’ve taken it to the team, and after everyone’s calmed down and thought about it, you are personally convinced it’s the wrong move. You now have a conflict, potentially serious, with the organization’s direction. What then? Are you going to…
-
Why Get Product Feedback?
It sounds like a silly question when you phrase it like that, doesn’t it? But really, let’s all look back to the last time that you as a user were asked your opinion of any of the consumer products that you might enjoy / suffer through. Consumer facing apps rarely…
-
QA and Product Development Fashion
I think there’s a lot of survivor’s bias in judgment of what works or doesn’t work in product development. Either you made something the customers needed, in which case whatever path was taken is lauded as the right one, or you didn’t, and whatever path was taken is held unaccountable…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Accidental Contradictory Incentives
Here’s a sad story that happens sometimes: And so now you have regret. Not responding to the market with a product does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. How did you get here? Misaligned incentives of course, but how did that happen? Well, it’s the…
-
Vendor Management and the Unattainable Goal
It starts as a spreadsheet full of tickets. The customer feels that they’re not being heard, and they work with their sales team to produce a record of everything they have ever asked for. This record of course falls victim to the problems described here: 4/5ths of the responses are…
-
How to Present a Product Proposal Executive Deck
I’ve been writing and presenting my entire career, so this set of learnings was definitely puzzling to acquire. But it turns out that you need a different deck for executive presentations than you do for conferences, sales, or product updates. First, a general note for technical or academic people. There’s…
Monkeynoodle.Org 