Product managers need to be multi-lingual. If you do not speak the language of the function you are interacting with, everything becomes more difficult. Conversations take longer. Alignment becomes tedious, if it ever happens. Stakeholders come back after a feature is launched with a list of complaints. The best PMs prevent these messes by speaking […]
Principle 1: More is not better Start with the minimal, most important information: user story, success criteria, & design/ mock. Then, add in additional layers. Fewer people will read long specs. And even fewer will walk away with the right takeaways. Principle 2: Quality matters A bad user story is worse than none. Same for […]
Write a PRD The buzz is don’t write them, that’s for design & eng to build these. But what if you freed them up to work in Figma & code? In our remote world, a collaborative PRD that is iterative and not dictatorial can be high leverage work for a PM. Help QA PMs from […]
Feedback, used well, can multiply your impact. But 9/10 PMs use it wrong: Used sparingly This is the mistake 9/10 PMs make. They are team players, nice, and want to take on problems themselves. Feedback has to be used to shape the team to achieve the outcomes PMs are responsible for. So how should it […]
Too often, the literature focuses on what PMs should do. But what is the anti-pattern? What should PMs avoid doing? Trying to do everything The PM version of gluttony is trying to do everything. Being the “hero” PM does not mean doing everything, it means doing the right things. Acting like the boss “CEO of […]
Adjusting to your situation’s reality is a PM superpower. Good PMs can run the playbook they read about and have run well in the past. Great PMs adjust the playbook for the cultural context they are in. Situation adjustment separates good from great PMs. 3 examples of adjustments: 1. How empowered of a team you […]
As a product leader, and even PM, you can multiply your impact by helping constructively improve your team’s ability to deal with: 1. Unblocking themselves2. Signing up for Action Items (AIs) they won’t complete3. Being product, not feature, teams 1. Unblocking themselves Teaching your team how to translate strategy into implementation without you multiplies your […]
Years of school taught us to apply ourselves across all subjects so that we can get straight A’s. What this instills in us is that we must apply ourselves equally across all areas. In PM, this isn’t true. In fact, this behavior can hinder your success longer term and lead to burnout. “Always put in […]
In the tech world, there are really 3 types of “product teams,” from most to least common:1. Delivery Teams: Non-cross-functional dev teams2. Feature Teams: Output focused cross-functional (XFN) teams3. Product Teams: XFN groups empowered to achieve outcomes As Marty Cagan explained in his seminal piece on Product vs Feature Teams, while feature teams and product […]
As a PM, delivering quality products and results is not enough. You need to singularly improve the company’s trajectory through the products you work on. This is one of the defining differences between good and great PMs. How do you do it? Here at Product Growth, we have been studying many successful examples. What would […]