PITA 022
TOPIC 1: Product reporting into the CTO - pros and cons? Any stories to share?
End up focusing on delivery at the expense of working strategically - it becomes a feature factory
Less of a collaboration with tech, less about the user, shoehorning tech solutions into the stories
Focus on process efficiency/automation instead of reaching strategic goals
Lack of board representation for product
But it depends on who the CTO is - are they business focused? If they were a founder, they have already been the de facto PM
What to watch out for: Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap
TOPIC 2: How do you separate FACTS from ASSUMPTIONS & OPINIONS?
Ask: how do you know we should do that?
Team members who think that they ARE the user are part of the problem. They have a lot of confirmation bias
Label things in Prodpad: questions, assumptions, etc - then prioritise for research. We always test assumptions
Write them down - it makes it real and obvious. Especially things learned in research
Get people to identify them as risks - what’s the impact if we happen to be wrong?
Use your own vulnerability on it to model the behaviour “This is my assumption, it should be tested”
Looker and other data vis tooling to validate requests from Sales - share the dashboard
Create a testing culture
TOPIC 3: Can we ever really get away from being asked/giving out dates?
Roadmap is useful to manage stakeholders, but release plan should also go alongside it - nothing is committed to until it’s on the release plan
Dragons den as a tool for agile decision of what should be on the upcoming roadmap/release plan
Just say “End of Quarter, but it might slip” if it’s in the NOW section of the roadmap
Rich Mironov, give the Head of Sales 1 week of Dev time (Silver bullet)
Be transparent about how we prioritise and tradeoffs
TOPIC 4: Authority vs. Influence - why pms are the only role that has to lead only by influence? While other leads all have direct reports (Team Lead, Design Lead,..)
If product people had directs, we would have too many!
Scrum master has the same dilemma
Depends on the maturity of the org. How many of us become Project Managers or BAs because of org immaturity?
It’s a good thing to learn. Keeping managers out of teams can help, as the team is the unit
The trio - Dev, Design/Research and Product leading together (as per Marty Cagan, Teresa Torres, etc)