Product Management
What Makes a Product Professional (In the Age of AI)?
Last Post: 17 Nov 2024A professional is someone who makes a living doing something. In order to be a professional, you must perform that function with high enough quality, consistently, over time, fast enough to pay the bills. People pay for quality. The higher and more consistent the quality, the more they will pay.
If you can’t produce high enough quality work that people want to pay you for it, you aren’t a professional.
Product Ops as the Engine Not the Fuel
Last Post: 1 Jan 2024I had intended to write a big long post on all the things I learned as a Product Ops leader as Tanium for a year, but it got long and rambly, so I’m going to attempt a series of shorter posts that will hopefully get written.
Lesson one, when you are working on process of the product team, you are building engines not fuel. This is a metaphor from my good friend Jack Coates (Part 1 Part 2) that he usually applies to building end user products that need content, and that no one wants to build content and teams want to build engines because they are fun and sexy. Similarly when you are building process for your product management team you should resist the urge to try and do the work of the process yourself.
#Product Operations | #Product Management | #Systems Thinking
Work in Progress and the Kitchen Sink
Last Post: 29 Dec 2023I try to explain work in progress limits a lot and feel like it comes across as an abstract concept a lot of the time. How much work can the team do at the same time? Or it gets a historical example from Toyota about kanban cards and spots on a pallet, which doesn’t make a ton of sense if you’ve never worked in a factory.
Today I have a more concrete example, the kitchen sink and putting the dishes away. My system of washing the dishes starts at the dining room table, goes to the dishwasher or sink then goes back to the drying rack or the cabinets
Rating Customer Insights
Last Post: 14 Dec 2023I’ve been working on implementing Product Management tools for the last year in one way or another. Both Productboard and JIRA Product Discovery allow you to rate the level of impact that a piece of customer feedback has. If your ratings are all over the map it can be hard to really understand what signals you are getting in your prioritization process.
In the interest of having some consistency I’ve come to like this scale for rating customer interest.
#Product Management | #Product Ops | #Product Operations
Keep Your Standards to a Minimum
Last Post: 13 Sep 2023I recently had a conversation with several Product Managers at work who wanted me to step in and set a standard for how and who was responsible for triaging bugs reported to their teams. The question was mostly focused on who inside of the team was responsible. Was that the engineering manager, the PM, the TPM? Between the four folks who came in mass to my office hours, there were five different ways of managing bug triage. This was causing some challenges because there was a RACI being built to set expectations.
I had a very firm “No I won’t create this standard for you”. And I’m here to caution other product leaders and product operations teams not to do it either. When you are operating a dynamic adaptive system with multiple independent teams. It is important to be very thoughtful about where and when you set and enforce standards. Some questions you should ask yourself before establishing a standard that everyone must follow.
#Product Operations | #Product Management
Product Operations Feeds the OODA Loop
Last Post: 18 Jun 2023The OODA loop (Observe Orient Decide Act) is a concept originally coming out of the Air Force for pilots conducting air to air combat. It’s now applied to many different systems thinking and design contexts. This week I was preparing to explain Product Operations to my new CEO and it occured to me that the role of Product Ops is to help power and accelerate the OODA loop for product management teams.
#Product Operations | #Product Management
Balancing Feedback Loops in Product
Last Post: 28 Mar 2023Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.”
My colleague has a great instinct and she isn’t wrong in seeing the gaps that we have in the product and how we produce software. But I think that its important to apply systems thinking to solving these problems. That requires us to understand where we can apply leverage to change the balancing feedback loops that are enabling and constraining our products.
#Product Management | #Systems Thinking
The Product Management System
Last Post: 4 Mar 2023I’m in the midst of reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer (affiliate link) to my list of recommended reads for Product Managers. It is one of those books like Principals of Product Development Flow that show you why things work at a deeper systemic level that you’ve just been emersed in. It’s a book that points out the water for the fishes.
#Product Management | #Product Operations | #Systems
Stoic Objectives
Last Post: 27 Feb 2023Jeff Gothelf has a great post that brings together Product Managemet and my preferred philosophy, Stoicism.
Understanding our customers’ users is key to building products they’ll both love. Measuring your success based on your customers’ behavior is the only way for you to know for sure whether or not you’re delivering value and solving a real problem for them. Any user behaviors that are one step removed from your direct influence pose a risk to your key results.
#Product Management | #Stoicism | #Okr
Mastodon Projects and Failure to Product
Last Post: 4 Jan 2023I’ve been enjoying the fediverse and mastodon as I’ve left Twitter for reasons. But one thing that I’ve been exceptionally interested in has been watching multiple newcomers attempt to build offerings on top of the activitypub protocol, then fail dramatically when they realize that while what they have built might be useful for some use cases that it runs into an incredibly hard wall of fediverse culture.
I’m not speaking hypothetically. In the dying days of 2022 I watched in real-time as this eager young fellow bounced onto the stage and said he had this new full-text thing he was about to launch, it would index all the instances your instance was federated with, and it was carefully built to penetrate various Mastodon blockages. And anyone who didn’t want to be scraped and indexed had to opt out. (He also claimed it was going to be available only to “genuine admins”.)
#Mastodon | #Product Management
Better Product Management Through Bonsai
Last Post: 27 Dec 2022Two years ago my wife bought me a class to make a bonsai. I made a tiny tree in a small pot. It was generous to call it a Bonsai and most practitioners would look upon it with a sense of “that’s cute”. Since then, I’ve managed to keep that tree alive and now have a collection of trees that I’m slowly turning into Bonsai. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about horticulture and art, and maybe some things that make me a better product manager along the way.
Being a Platform PM
Last Post: 31 Oct 2022I’ve spent a lot of time as a platform product manager. At Splunk I managed the app certification platform that Splunkbase and Cloud relied on. Later I helped build the platform services for Splunk Cloud Services from the ground up. At Tanium I managed the Tanium Data Service which served as a common data layer for all of our modules.
Being the PM for a deeply technical platform team can be really hard. Unless you come from a deeply technical background it feels hard to have a way to helpfully contribute to that effort. A lot of the work that gets done by a platform team will be very in the weeds, or will be in close execution with the consumer up the stack and their PM on the problem you are trying to solve. You are also more removed from the end-user of the product, which can make empathy and understanding harder. That can make you feel like a glorified project manager.
#Product Management | #Platform
Making Yourself Disposable
Last Post: 16 May 2022One of the best leaders I ever worked with was my first XO at 1-14th Cavalry David Polizzotti. One day while we were deployed to Afghanistan I was stressing about something and he very calmly looked at me and told me that I needed to do a better job at accepting that I as an individual was a wholly replaceable cog in the machine. At the time that felt like a hard thing to swallow. I was a primary staff member for a combat squadron in an active combat zone. I felt a little big in my multi-cam britches.
#Product Management | #Leadership | #Military
Manipulating the Sorted Backlog
Last Post: 18 Apr 2022I’ve written recent guides to creating a backlog from scratch and sorting your backlog by value and effort. As part of building and sorting the ideas and initiatives on your roadmap you will start to show that roadmap to other people. When you do people will have opinions about the order that you have sorted things in. In most cases their opinion will either be agreement, or more commonly, they would like the thing that is important to them to be higher on the list. These differing opinions are good, this is why we build a roadmap. It is better to have those discussions when we are thinking about building things then after we have spent time building something.
#Roadmap | #Product Management | #WSJF | #Prioritization
Quick Prioritization of a Backlog
Last Post: 18 Apr 2022There is a lot of complexity in Product Management, but at the very heart of it what we look to do is order all of the things we could be doing to produce the most value possible. To do that we have to carefully weight the balance of value to effort in order to properly sequence the infinite set of work that we could be doing.
Estimating is a tricky and messy business, and I’m frequently skeptical of. But when you are trying to prioritize multiple potential projects as a product manager, having some basic numbers can really help things along. This is a system I’ve used multiple times to quickly establish baseline value and effort estimates. I like it because it is fast and avoids a lot of hemming and hawing. The goal of this system is to get things in mostly the right order and avoid making big mistakes.
#Roadmap | #Product Management | #WSJF
Roadmaps From Scratch
Last Post: 2 Apr 2022Very rarely will you build a roadmap from absolute scratch. But the technique is helpful because you can apply the process to help rationalize or refit an existing roadmap. I’m a strong believer that you should be able to connect all the work you are doing from top to bottom of the company. A developer should be able to look at any task and put it into the context of the larger solution they are building, the problem it solves for the customer, and the business objective that it supports.
#Roadmap | #Product Management | #Cost of Delay | #WSJF
Product Management Scale Up
Last Post: 7 Mar 2022In several PM Communities I frequent I see people who constantly ask, should I take a job a this series A or B startup, or a job at some extreme scale public cloud or tech company. Every time I see it I’m confused by it because I think of those companies being so far apart in experience that you should spend your time clarifying what you want in a job before trying to pick one or the other. In a hyperscale company there is tremendous specialization for products with billions of users. At a small start up it’s all generalists.
#Product Management | #Org Design
What I Look for in Flow Metrics
Last Post: 31 Oct 2021I’ve been pulling and analyzing Mik Kirsten’s Flow Framework metrics for several months at work. I do this with an incredibly ugly Clojure script that I wrote to learn Clojure. But I do think the metrics themselves have been a helpful lens to look at what is happening. Here are some of the questions I ask myself when I sit down to analyze the metrics.
Experimenting With Your Process
Last Post: 27 Aug 2021I spoke recently with someone who was new to Product Management and was trying to learn how to do the job by reading blogs and books that talk about everyone’s ideal nirvana of product management. As he compared that with his organization (a large, well-respected company), he was distressed at the difference between what they saw and what they understood to be best practice. He was even debating if he should leave his current gig to work somewhere he could learn and practice this best-in-class PM craft.
#Product Management | #Process
Against Global Priorities
Last Post: 14 Dec 2020I’ve been working with some stakeholders on how we do prioritization as a Product Management team. I started by trying to build a matrix that would serve as an easy key for keeping product managers mostly on the same page for setting the priority field in JIRA. I think there is value in having common standards. But the more I thought about the problem, I got more uncomfortable, because we can’t prioritize globally and take into account local context.
#Product Management | #Prioritization
Outcome First Roadmaps
Last Post: 16 Nov 2020I’m sure if you’ve talked to me recently you’ve heard my song and dance on outcomes based road mapping. As I’ve been talking about it over the past few weeks something really clicked for me on why it’s so important to identify the outcomes early in the definition of an idea.
When you are trying to get work prioritized and on the road map, it’s straightforward to start with a name for the solution that conveys meaning and then find supporters who also like the sound of the idea. An easy default is to talk about the solution you are proposing to fix a problem. They go together to help form a narrative story that works well in a meeting. We have this problem, and here is the solution!
While this is really appealing, it also leaves us some challenges on the backend. If we prioritize problems with a measurement of what we are going to achieve better alignment on why we are trying to solve this problem, and allow ourselves more freedom to discover the right solution.
#Product Management | #Roadmap
Enterprise Product Integrations Journey
Last Post: 28 Sep 2020If you start building an enterprise product eventually you are going to get asked to start building integrations with other enterprise products. This is ultimately an essential evil. Your customers already have a host of enterprise products handling the rest of their workflow. Your product is looking to do something with data coming from or going to another part of the business workflow. No one wants to reenter all of their data into a new system by hand, you need to be part of the ecosystem.
#Product Management | #Enterprise Products
Military to Product Management - Level Equivalents
Last Post: 6 Jun 2020Military officers interested in moving into technology should consider careers in Product Management. There are strong parallels between the roles and product management requires many of the skill sets that effective officers have developed in their time in the service. But believing that you would be a good product manager and actually getting your foot in the door for an interview is another story.
When applying for roles, I recommend listing your experience in the military as a Product Manager rather than as a “Company Commander” or “Platoon Leader”. This will give recruiters and hiring managers something that they are familiar with on your resume and will allow you to open the conversation about how the roles are similar and you are trained for it. It is much better to have a conversation with a recruiter that starts with “I didn’t realize that the military had Product Managers”, to which you can answer, “Well my official title was Platoon Leader, but let me tell you about how the roles are very similar…” The alternative is that you don’t have any conversations because the recruiting software is literally looking for the words “Product Manager” in the job titles of your resume and you get filtered out.
#Product Management | #Military
The Self Taught Product Manager
Last Post: 11 Feb 2020I made a career transition into Product Management four years ago. Prior to starting my first role at Splunk as a line level Product Manager my previous experience was in the U.S. Army. I didn’t know that product management was a career field option when I started my job search, and as I look back on it I’m amazed I got any interviews at all. I had no meaningful experience building software, and I made some blind assertions that I had qualifying experience as an Army Officer. I still maintain that those assertions holdup, and I think most companies would do well to hire more Junior Military Officers as Junior Product Managers.
#Product Management | #Professional Development | #Books
The Product Manager as Scout
Last Post: 6 Jul 2019I’ve been a product manager for three and a half years after being an Army officer for eight. Never in that time have I felt like I truly owned all of the products I’ve worked on. I’ve never had the final say in everything, and I’ve never sat to review that every single story met all of the acceptance criteria. Time, team dynamics, and the nature of working on large complex products precludes any single person from being able to exert that level of control. I’m largely in agreement John Cutler about the overload of product manager responsibilities and the danger of centralizing them. I’m here to propose that product managers should think of themselves as good scouts rather than all controlling owners of the product.
#Product Management | #Military
Chief Devil’s Advocate
Last Post: 8 Jan 2018Watching the aggressive use of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit to disrupt American political and social systems makes me think that organizations above a certain size should have a Chief Devil’s Advocate on their team. This exec should be focused on every way that your product could be used for misdeeds.
The term Devil’s Advocate is commonly used when someone wants to sound smart in a meeting by being contrary about the topic under discussion. (See: https://xkcd.com/1432/) But it’s original use was as a formal position in the Catholic church to argue against the canonization of individuals to sainthood.
Continuous Improvement — A Journey
Last Post: 27 Apr 2017I listened to a great episode of Deliver It on DevOps for Product Owners and a comment by the Lee Janson that you don’t have to have perfect DevOps practices right away really struck home with me. Upon reflection it exactly maps to the evolution that my team has been going through over the past year on our developer tool Splunk AppInspect.
AppInspect is a tool that has grown tremendously in my year with Splunk from a something we built for internal assessment of apps that applied for our Certification Program, to a tool publicly available that as both a standalone CLI tool or through an REST API.
Productboard Field Descripsions and Good Process Docs
Last Post: 4 Dec 2015#Military | #Product Management
Why a Military Officer Should Be Your Product Manager
Last Post: 5 Dec 2015Ken Norton in an effort to help companies understand how to hire product managers wrote a guide: How to Hire a Product Manager I’m here to argue that the person you are looking for might just be a transitioning or former military officer. I have never been a Product Manager, but I have spent the last eight years as an officer in the United States Army, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing peers and the honor of leading, coaching and mentoring some very promising young lieutenants.