An oldie but a goodie from Michael Copeland: Shipping is a Feature—Some Guiding Principles for People That Build Things:

For these five bits of advice, I chose to focus on what I think is the most challenging aspect of being a PM, which is achieving clarity and maintaining a point of view for a product when all forces work against this very thing. What customers value most in a product is that “it just work” or “does what it is supposed to do,” and yet at every step in a product, the dynamics of design work to make this the most difficult to achieve.

The whole list is good, but the one that resonates the most with me is “Can’t agree to disagree.” What to do when you simply have to make a decision that not everyone agrees on:

So if you’re on the “winning” side of such a dialog then you have to bring people along every day for a while. You can’t remind people who was right, or that it is your decision and so on. If you’re on the “losing” side you need to support the team. You can’t remind people when little things go wrong (which they will) that you were right. Once a choice is made, the next step is all about the greater good. Nothing is harder for technologists than this because as technologists we believe there is a “right” answer and folks that don’t agree are simply “wrong”. Context is everything and remember you have to ship–as a team.

This interview with Jonathan Golden, Airbnb’s very first product manager and now Director of Product, is sprawling and worth reading in full. It’s a fascinating look at the company’s philosophy on product and teams.

I was particularly interested in the description of three types of PMs: Pioneers (focused on taking risks and building new things), Settlers (focused on growth and scaling), and Town Planners (focused on infrastructure and platform management). What’s important is the point that companies need all three types, no matter their size:

Even in an established company, all three types of product managers are critical. “The product team needs each of these PMs to be nimble and responsive. Otherwise the business won’t endure for the long term,” says Golden. “We allocate product resources across three main categories: core initiatives that focus on the existing product, new initiatives that explore possible areas of growth for the business, and platform initiatives that focus on building fundamental technological infrastructure.” Pioneers and settlers don’t become obsolete just because you’re at scale.

This is the type of framework that brings up lots of (good!) questions for all of us to answer. Which of the three types of product managers are you? Is it possible to be combination of them? Which might you or your company be lacking in?

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall discuss some fascinating research about how people learn in their essay The Feedback Fallacy:

What findings such as these show us is, first, that learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly. And second, that we learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.

As a parent it’s natural to see the elements of “positive parenting” in this research. We (generally) don’t have to deal with tantrums at work, but it still makes sense people would be more motivated by this approach than by reminders of what they’re doing wrong. Something to keep in mind as we work with our teams.

Product Management podcasts are a bit hit and miss, but this week there were two discussions that I found really interesting and useful.

First, on the Product Science Podcast, an interview with Teresa Torres on continuous product discovery:

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach and the author of the Product Talk Blog. She spends most of her time coaching cross-functional product teams on how to adopt continuous discovery practices. On this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we get into how you can refine your product discovery practices.

And on the Product Experience Podcast, Tim Herbig discusses how to be an effective product leader when you don’t have “official” power:

Tim Herbig has made many mistakes (who hasn’t?). Fortunately for us, Tim not only owns up to his mistakes, he’s written a book to help the rest of us avoid making the same ones. We’ve all had issues with how to work best – not only within our individual teams, but with the rest of the organisation as well. In our conversation, he shares some simple and practical methods to diagnose when you have a problem and how to solve it.

Tim references Teresa’s work in his conversation, so the two episodes are really complementary as well, which is a nice bonus. Tim’s agile peer canvas to foster empathy within a team is also really interesting and worth looking into.

I really like Vrushali Paunikar’s approach to onboarding new product managers in an organization. In particular, the focus on three different time horizons with distinct goals is very important:

The first 30 days are about breadth. Put together a 30-day checklist broken up by people, product, and process to help your PM gain context and develop peace-time relationships.

The first 3 months are about perfecting execution. Give your PM projects she can actually launch within the 3-month window to help her establish early wins as well as learn your product development process.

At the end of the first 6 months, your PM should have a point of view on the direction of her product. Set this expectation early and empower her to own product strategy and vision.

One crucial point that is implied but not explicitly stated in Vrushali’s post is that PMs should avoid coming in with guns blazing in the first month and try to change/introduce a bunch of stuff. The first month is about really, truly, honestly listening and understanding. You’ll have plenty of time to have an opinion. Make sure you understand the context of the company and the product before you start having and communicating them.

For further reading on this, a while back I also wrote about What a Product Manager should focus on in the first 90 days.

In Egoless Innovation Sari Harrison reminds us that ideas are not personal. As product managers our goal should always be to get the best outcome, not to win or be right or for everyone to “just get along”:

When the idea you are advocating for gets challenged, an egoless innovation mindset means choosing to see the challenge as a gift to the innovative outcome which the idea hopes to someday become. It means looking objectively at the input, responding to it authentically, saying “wow, good point, I’m going to take that back to the team” if it was a point you hadn’t considered and saying “yes, we thought of that and…” if you have. It means you don’t get flustered by questions or negative comments because you are focused on achieving the best outcomes, not your own status. If you can embody this, you will be helping move the culture towards more and more innovation occurring with less and less friction. And you will be more successful.

This is an incredibly brave and insightful post by Erin Chan that I think every product manager should read. In The Hard Thing About Complex Products & How I’ve Grown as a PM she describes a long, failed project at Shopify in detail, and what she learned. The section on creating “tripwires” for complex projects is something I’m going to start using immediately:

A tripwire is a mechanism or an indicator that you define, and when it gets triggered, flags are raised.

For example, you should set the tripwire of ‘time’ when a milestone isn’t completed after a defined period (for me, this should have been two months). When that happens, my recommendation is to have a serious discussion with the team and make your Leadership and stakeholders aware of what is happening. Communicate the changes that you will make to the team or process to get the project back on track. Next, outline what happens if the milestone isn’t completed in three months, then four. These are your tripwires as determined by time, but you can define tripwires in whatever form you see fit for your initiative.

My favorite article of the week is one on change management, which, yes, I know how that sounds. Like you (probably), I hated the phrase “change management”. But in her article How to begin the invisible work of change management Cate Huston defines it as “taking teams that are struggling and helping them focus, align, and start delivering at their potential”, so now I finally understand what it is and I don’t hate the phrase any more.

Anyway, the entire article is excellent. If you’re interested in managing teams at all, you have to read this one. Here she is on diagnosing problems within teams:

Sometimes people look at teams and diagnose problems as an absence of process rather than an absence of values, or cohesion, or delivery.

And on the problem with trying to implement a process without understanding cultural context:

When teams struggle to do retrospectives, often the problem isn’t the lack of retrospective, but the lack of psychological safety that a productive retrospective requires. That might be due to lack of trust or cohesion on the team, or other problems that have not been addressed. You need to address those things first, otherwise the retrospectives will not be productive, and the process will be for naught.

I have Thoughts about the term “Product Thinking”. But as a general progression, I think Sebastian Saboune is right that as an organization grows, product management has to evolve from a thing we do, to a thing we help the entire company do:

Our understanding of our craft has come a long way since 2015. I believe that it is now a good time to evolve product management into product thinking. A philosophy, mindset, a common knowledge. But primarily, something that can be acquired by anyone in the organisation.

The people in charge and at the forefront of this change will be product coaches. They will be the custodians of product thinking within an organisation, and tasked with getting people, teams, and organisations to become more product led through product thinking.

In summary; product management will become product thinking, product managers will become product coaches, and this will lead to organisations being more product led.

Marty Cagan’s article on the characteristics of a good One on One meeting is great advice for managers, but it also includes some excellent points about what makes a good product manager in general. Here, for example, is a section on what it means to think like a PM:

What does it mean to think like a PM? It means focusing on outcome. Considering all of the risks – value, usability, feasibility and business viability. Thinking holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product. Anticipating ethical considerations or impacts. Creative problem solving. Persistence in the face of obstacles. Leveraging engineering and the art of the possible. Leveraging design and the power of user experience. Leveraging data to learn and to make a compelling argument.