I really like the NOBL team’s focus on Culture/Market fit in their article The Only Thing More Important Than Product/Market Fit:

Find yourself a healthy market, yes. Then develop a culture that can deliver product/market fit. Your culture is what produces your products and services. You know you have culture/market fit when both talent and customers flock to your company for who you are, even above what you make. You know you have product/market fit when legions of customers buy your product.

Without culture/market fit, sustainable product/market fit (at any size, scale, or maturity) is impossible.

They go on to describe four competing flavors of organizational culture, each with unique traits and competitive strengths.

Ian Bicking makes some very good points in his post “Users want control” is a shoulder shrug:

Control is what you need when you want something and it won’t happen on its own. But (usually) it’s not control you want, it’s just a means. So when we say users want control over X — their privacy, their security, their data, their history — we are first acknowledging that current systems act against users, but we aren’t proposing any real solution. We’re avoiding even talking about the problems.

I like the framing of the broad concept of “user control” in this very Jobs-to-be-Done way. It’s almost like a safe word to watch out for. Whenever we catch our colleagues (or ourselves!) arguing for giving users more control over something, we should immediately stop ourselves and try to uncover what deeper need the discussion about control might be obfuscating.

There are some decent day-to-day work tips in Sierra Newell’s 7 Project Management Principles Product Managers Can Learn From. There’s one principle I wanted to expand on, and that’s “Define the scope and stick to it”. First, from the post:

Product managers should set the scope of their products’ development as early in the process as possible. Learning how to say no to product requests is a valuable skill. But it is also a reactive method of keeping your product’s development on track. Instead, be proactive. Define your product’s scope from the beginning, and keep development within that scope.

I know that “define the scope and stick to it” is fairly common practice, but I don’t think it’s a good way to build product at all. First, that principle tends only to define one side of the spectrum — how not to add scope. It doesn’t, however, talk about the need to sometimes reduce scope. If you define a “fixed scope” and say you won’t go over it, but then things take longer than anticipated (as they are prone to do in software) and you have no mechanism to deal with it, you’re going to get yourself in trouble. Because at that point, you “committed” to a scope that won’t change, presumably saying “no” to a bunch of things, and still you’re “late” in delivery.

This is why I’m a firm proponent of “fixed time, flexible scope” projects. Under that principle, you don’t lock down the scope for forever and ever. You commit to an initial body of work, and an expected timeframe. Then, if something happens along the way — a developer gets pulled into an emergency, or something takes longer than expected — you have a mechanism to deal with it. Since you didn’t lock down the scope, you don’t have to choose between being “late” or the team working themselves to death. You can reduce the scope of your work to fit into the time you gave yourselves to do it in.

There’s another scenario under which I would go even further and advocate for “flexible time, flexible scope” projects. There are instances where increasing scope (and time) is the Right Thing To Do for a project. For instance, if the choice is between a hacky way of implementing a feature, and extending functionality properly with future-proofing in mind, which would add two weeks to a project, I believe it’s pretty much a no-brainer that you need to add the two weeks.

This is why I think fixing scope is a dangerous practice. There are too many unknowns, too many variables, and too many things can change along the way. We shouldn’t let our process get in the way of good product decisions.

Marty Cagan posted another great installment in his series on how to be a good manager of product managers. In Coaching Tools — The Plan he describes the different ways he would encourage product managers to skill up in areas where they need to grow.

It’s hard to pick just one quote to post because the whole article is excellent, but these paragraphs on collaboration particularly stood out for me:

Modern product management is all about true collaboration between product, design and engineering. This begins with ensuring the product manager is knowledgeable about the real contribution of product design and engineering.

The PM does not need to be personally skilled in either design or engineering (most aren’t – although many PM’s think they’re great designers) but they do need to understand and appreciate their contributions to the point where they understand that what each of design and engineering brings to the table is just as essential as what the PM brings.

Shaun Juncal has a good overview of the importance of watching your churn numbers carefully in his post Churn: The Most Important Product Metric for SaaS. It’s especially important to figure out why people leave when they do:

But you can also learn something from that lost customer, namely why they left. Were they drawn to a competitor? Did the value your solution offered fade over time? Was a missing key feature causing them to bail out? Answering these questions can inform what should be done to retain your current stable of paying customers and attract new ones.

A simple churn number can’t tell you why someone leaves, so this is data that has to be collected qualitatively. But how? You don’t want to provide a negative user experience to customers on the way out, so putting a giant hurdle in front of them is not a good look. We solve this problem at Postmark by providing an optional text field on the page where you select your downgrade option:

I’m sure we would get more responses if we made this a required field, or turned it into a pop-up. But at what cost to negative perception would we do that? Following someone as they exit a store is creepy. Don’t be creepy.

Claire Lew’s article on the 9 mistakes you don’t know you’re making as a new manager is written specifically for people managers, but I found a lot of good advice in there that relates to the product management role as well. For example, on how to build trust with a team:

However, in our survey of almost 600 people, we found that team-building activities were in fact rated as the least effective way to build trust. What was rated as most effective? Being vulnerable as a leader, sharing your intention, and following through on your commitment. In other words, trust isn’t about building rapport – it’s about you making clear why you’re doing something, and then acting on it.

I’ve found this to be 100% true — both in my dealings with my managers over the years, as well as building trust with different teams. This is not your usual “listicle” article — every tip in here is gold.

Shaun Clowes shares some really good hiring advice in his post Picking good Product Managers – insightful interview questions. He starts it off with a good reminder that “bad product is worse than no product”:

A product manager without a systematic approach to their discipline has less context than the team members so is less likely to make good decisions naturally. Thus a bad product manager is more likely to cause the team to make mistakes than no product manager at all.

The worst part is that many experienced product managers will be convincing since they’re used to influencing organizations. No matter how convincing the vision a product manager might paint, they need to be able to justify it within the competitive environment, the strengths of the organization, the data that proves the market exists etc.

Seth Fiegerman’s history of Pinterest and their approach to business and product is a breath of fresh air. In The anti-Facebook: Inside Pinterest’s slow and quiet rise, Fiegerman describes a company whose motto might as well be “move slow and debate things”:

Pinterest resisted throwing money at its problems, debated product tweaks extensively and did not rush to copy features that helped larger competitors achieve viral growth, employees said. Fond of touting itself as an anti-social media platform, Pinterest never introduced live-streaming or standalone messaging apps, nor did it become a primary hub for news. These features attracted press and users for other companies, but were also later abused by bad actors.

That is such a good example of a company that knows how important focus is. Their approach reminds me of Richard Rumelt’s succinct summary in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy:

Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.