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how are you?
Rand nails 1 on 1s. Just go read it. Your people are your greatest strength, your greatest asset, the most precious thing. They’re constantly looking at your actions and lack of action, your voice or lack of voice, a thousand tiny signals you give to the people you manage that let them know how you…
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the balance of leadership
There’s a great post on the Reforge blog about people manager responsibilities that lays out the balance of being a manager quite nicely. It’s a balance I’ve always tried to achieve but never really put into words. I love teams. I love working in a team, I love creating teams, leading teams, helping craft a…
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a thousand times – this.
via rawsignalgroup: …what we know about high-performing teams is that none of this management-by-abuse shit actually works. We can have empathy for the bosses who are sitting in the discomfort, reaching for anything to make themselves feel better. We can understand that impulse. We have felt that impulse. But the reality is that, when you…
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i’m looking at the man in the mirror…
I ran across this article in a Product Management group I frequent. A screenshot excerpt: That last line is a major WTF moment. Half your time is spent on firefighting? That’s insane. I mean, sure, shit happens. But… if you’re spending half your time fighting fires, then something else is wrong, my friend.
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riding off into the sunset
So we have this product – an MVP from 2 years ago that never got the love it needed. The little social platform that never was, but with a rich set of profile and content creation tools. And then we built another product on top of those content creation tools with a divergent experience for…
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communication paths restrict the solution devised
Couple items that stood out to me today from Team Topologies, chapter 2: Communication paths (along formal reporting lines or not) within an organization effectively restrict the kinds of solutions that the organization can devise. This was an interesting chapter. When I think about lines of communication between engineering teams that I work with currently,…
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conway’s law for product teams
I picked up Team Topologies the other day and am reading it with the product team mindset – trying to parse some of the example applications of Conway’s law for engineering teams to product teams. Conway’s law, as a refresher: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is…
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a collection of thoughts on one pagers
Great One Pagers, John Cutler on Medium. According to medium, this is a 14 minute read on how to produce a document that can be read in 3-6 minutes. Despite the extensive questions to be answered, he recommends conciseness, leaning toward brevity. In particular, I enjoy the behavioral change framework, the clear distinction between a…
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making something from nothing
Making something from nothing is hard – 0 to 1 product management is full of really hard choices and ruthless prioritization. You’ll question your definition of “necessary” and find ever smaller slices to carve off on your path to making A New Thing… particularly under the constraint of tight timelines. Having done it twice, I’m…