Product Ops as the engine not the fuel

I 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....

January 1, 2024 · 3 min · Andy Nortrup

Rating customer insights

I’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....

December 14, 2023 · 2 min · Andy Nortrup

Keep your standards to a minimum

I 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. ...

September 13, 2023 · 5 min · Andy Nortrup

Product Operations feeds the OODA loop

The 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....

June 18, 2023 · 2 min · Andy Nortrup

Balancing Feedback Loops in Product

Working 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. ...

March 28, 2023 · 4 min · Andy Nortrup

The Product Management System

I’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 Flowthat 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. I had a moment of illumination when reading her description of the reinforcing and balancing feedback loops that drive physical systems....

March 4, 2023 · 3 min · Andy Nortrup

Stoic Objectives

Jeff 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....

February 27, 2023 · 1 min · Andy Nortrup

Tensions in Product Ops Tool Design

I think my core challenge with Product Ops, particularly standing it up from scratch, is the tension for modeling systems and processes as they are now vs how I want them to be. Paired with the tension between how much we need to change and how fast the organization is able to absorb change. Especially as the guardian and manager of the product tool stack. I know that if I set up the tools the way we work now, then everyone will continue the way we are now....

January 28, 2023 · 2 min · Andy Nortrup

Mastodon projects and failure to product

I’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....

January 4, 2023 · 4 min · Andy Nortrup

Better Product Management through Bonsai

Two 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....

December 27, 2022 · 6 min · Andy Nortrup