PITA 014
TOPIC 1:
What’s the biggest problem you have NOW? We all went through the 5 stages of grief/recovery during lockdown, and have adapted working styles. A few months in, what problems are you and your team facing now?
Onboarding with/getting to know a new team
The intensity of doing everything via VC instead of a quick call; scheduling 30 mins (or more) for everything,
feeling ok to have gaps in your calendar and getting some actual work done
Stakeholders waiting to get back to ‘normal’
Hard for people understand that I’m busy when my calendar has a free slot
Ambient/micro-interactions between people
Lunchtimes are gone to meetings
But easier to get access to others
Absence of planning, waiting for planning until we get back into the office… but still expectation of delivery
Lack of adjustment to change in scope
The way i break up work has had to change a lot - some is longer, some shorter, hard to adjust to it
Encourage deep work and async comms: Asynchronous Communication: What It Is & Why You Should Care About It - it’s one of the ways I’m trying to leverage the problems most of us mention
Just wanted to say that - as one of them - the introverts have been loving some aspect of this separation, but I’ve now seen some of the extroverts starting to suffer from the lack of company. They’ve started ‘co-working’ as a way to solve this - just having a hangout open together so they can hear keyboard clicks etc.
TOPIC 2:
Does anyone know of a good Product Management Competency matrix (especially for senior product people)?
Marty Cagan’s framework Coaching Tools - The Assessment and Developing Strong Product Managers
This is really contextual to the organisation
Seb Saboune’s model - more at Building Better Product People (podcast episode)
Progression.fyi - from Johnny Burch
Monzo (https://progression.monzo.com/) and GDS (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/product-manager) have published theirs
Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap book has some good stuff on this
Have the teams define the essential skills that they need and work from that
Product Manager expectations by level (Intercom)
TOPIC 3:
What are peoples experience or opinions of product operations as a dedicated product management role (similar to DevOps and DesignOps)?
What the holy hell is this?
Create standardised approaches & resources, tools & platforms, etc
Some companies do this under the COO
Someone who focuses on process optimisation as part of their job - in a smaller org, they do the PM job 70% of the time and spend 30% on this
Having the label can help have some specific conversations
Coordinating between roadmaps & prioritisation
TOPIC 4:
Team effectiveness: how do you define and measure it? (Team and programme level)
Communication is critical - focusing on what the definition of success actually is
Depends on who is doing the measuring - self-assessment or outside assessment?
Feature factory: did they deliver the points/items/widgets?
Flow efficiency (percentage of time elapsed in “active” states rather than waiting on something)
Goal or output oriented? Create an internal NPS to see if you’re satisfying the business owners/stakeholders
How does the team manage conflict?
How does the team manage a challenge/setback?
It’s all about outcomes
If used well (huge caveat), OKRs
Good use of retrospectives to examine pain points and improve
Dave Brailsford, Marginal Gains / Marginal Gains: This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent / THE AGGREGATION OF MARGINAL GAINS: A Fail-proof Blueprint for Standing Out Even When the Odds Are Heavily Stacked Against You
Creating an accountability structure
6-week check-ins with traffic lights for key metrics (processes, reliability, etc.)