I’ve always been adamant that Product and Engineering are in a partnership, not a “healthy tension” relationship. So I very much agree with this post:

The problem is in the assumption that Product and Engineering teams inherently have different goals. They don’t. Both teams are responsible for the growth and stability of the company, for revenue and scalability. Neither can succeed without the other. When we assume otherwise, we sell each side short.

How to Scale Yourself Down has some really interesting advice on how to go from leading a team at a bigger company to rolling up your sleeves at a startup. A couple of my favorite quotes:

Avoid process out of practice. Leaders who are successful in a startup are the ones who naturally reinvent their own toolboxes, and question what the process is trying to accomplish before establishing something that might be too heavyweight.

However, process is a double-sided coin. “There’s often an overcorrection when leaders move from big companies to small startups. Folks want to shake off that big company feeling and run hard in the other direction. And while the idea of no process sounds fantastic, issues emerge if you don’t start adding at least a little bit of it early on,” he says.

And:

To me, a well-made decision is one that you can explain how and why it was made. Ingraining this in the culture early on will support transparency as the company grows, promote consistency, and reduce politics. In essence, ‘don’t blame me, blame the framework’.

I didn’t realize that there’s a strategy backlash going on in some corners of the internet, but Packy McCormick has a good defense of the importance of having a good strategy:

Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic. Just as “Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important,” companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the only ones that have a shot. The better you are at execution, the faster you can run in any direction. A good strategy helps you run fast in the right direction.

He also provides a good summary definition of what strategy is, based on the (must-read!) book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters:

A strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty, designed through recognizing the challenge (diagnosis), setting a direction to overcome it (guiding policy), and detailing steps to implement the policy (coherent actions).

The biggest problem I’ve seen in organizations that struggle with good strategy is that everyone wants a strategy but it’s very hard to figure out how to get started with its creation. It is such a lofty, nebulous concept, and everyone has a different idea of how to go about it. So it’s really important to define what it is and what it’s for, and get broad agreement on that, before starting to create a strategy. To put it another way, make sure you define the black hole words.

For more on this, check out my (very long) case study on Collaborative Product Strategy Development.

Here’s a great post by Camille Fournier about The Product Culture Shift, and how every part of an engineering culture needs to change when product managers are added to traditional software infrastructure organizations.

To start, let’s be clear about one thing: as tempting as it might be, just hiring product managers won’t fix this problem. Even if you could find enough good product managers who want this type of job, which you can’t, product managers are only useful when they are paired with willing engineering teams. If the engineering teams don’t feel a sense of ownership for delivering a great product to their customers, product managers are unlikely to close that gap, and they will more likely turn into glorified backlog groomers than true product leaders.

Molly Graham makes a key distinction about good management in the post Manage the What, Not the How:

The key to exceptional management is to get great at defining the “what”. As a leader, you need to know how to create alignment, how to clarify what you expect, and how to communicate all of it. 

She goes on to explain that a big mistake she sees some managers make is to focus too much on how work is done. And when you do have to get involved in the “how”, do it through coaching:

When you intervene, you intervene with coaching. You can say, “That email you sent seemed abrupt,” or “You missed these two points that were important.” You can share examples to learn from. You’re giving feedback and then letting them try it again, not jumping in to micromanage.

Josephine Conneely has some excellent thoughts on the feared P-word in How Process Impacts Your Culture. I especially like going back to the purpose of adding process when evaluating what you have in place:

The aim of process in its purest form is to:

• Facilitate ease of doing work: Design methods for teams to effectively work together, make decisions, and achieve their goals.
• Reduce risk: Ensure company doesn’t fall foul of legal & compliance obligations or go bankrupt.
• Ensure consistency and fairness: Aim for all customers and employees to have a similar experience in their interactions with an organisation.

Oliver Jay wrote a 3-part essay about what he calls “The PLG Trap”, where product-led growth companies grow to a certain point and then suddenly sees that growth slow with no obvious ways through the slowdown. From the introduction to the essays, Oliver says this usually happens after an initial (and initially successful!) expansion into the enterprise market:

Quite simply, despite the complex security and administrative features you’ve launched, your product has not evolved to becoming broadly “enterprise-ready” for the majority of your enterprise prospects.

At this point, you may feel trapped–the PLG Trap. You’ve set growth expectations externally and internally based on how revenue (in particular, from the upmarket segments) has grown in the past few years.

However, what drove revenue in the past, in terms of your product offering as well as your sales and marketing motions, is unsustainable. There is no more bottoms-up, low-hanging fruit to feed the larger sales and marketing engine you’ve built. To pursue sustained revenue growth, you must tolerate a lower efficiency…only to now be punished by the public markets in what appears to be the beginning of a recession.

The essays go through several reasons why companies fall into this trap, and also how to avoid it by making smarter decision about sales, marketing, and product roadmaps early on.

Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t share this talk I’m doing on Thursday when it was announced because as much as I tried, I just didn’t feel like the story was coming together. Writing this talk was much harder than some others that I’ve done, but I think I finally got there last night. So with only a few hours to spare, here you go…

In Life beyond OKRs: Tools for goal-setting I’m going to talk about our team’s foundation (principles & values), how we set goals, and how we plan and execute. If that’s your thing, come join us!