What have we chatted about?

We take notes at all PITA meetups, because our memory is shocking.

 
randy silver randy silver

PITA 019

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TOPIC 1: What’s (one of) the most ridiculous WTF moments you’ve faced with stakeholders or developers as a PM?

  • ‘This goes against everything we stand for, as we believe dev teams should not work together. Or talk to each other.’

  • ‘Enough analysis paralysis - when are you going to stand up and shoot?’ (when presenting that something isn’t yet ready for public consumption.)

  • 10 minutes of feedback on the fonts and presentation format. None on the content.

TOPIC 2: Tech debt and how to create incentives for tech leads towards maintainability

  • Creating more tech debt by addressing something at the wrong time - oops!

  • Openly addressing what the underlying problems are - taking time away from product work to discuss what you could do in an ideal world

  • Be clear on what the end goal of the functionality is - focus on both short and long term at all times

  • Bake in self-time to pay down debt in alternating sprints

  • Any pre-holiday sprint - when planning is screwy anyway - is given over to debt

  • Setting up principles at the start as to when you should take on debt, or how much is too much

  • Put it in economic terms - establish a contract with your counterparts

  • Gitprime & similar do code analysis to look at quality - does this need to be done?

  • best practice metrics tools around cycle times, return rates, number of production and other issues  (e.g. Plandek) - and make these metrics part of the regular catch up and priorities, lots of them are dependent on tech debt

  • Get Dev on support calls to really identify with the real problems

  • Pull in the team and allow them to come up with a plan of attack - so they own ittr

  • Redefine Velocity away from story points and towards value realised. If that slows, address the issues that stop you from delivering value

TOPIC 3: I start a new job Monday - Head of Product and inheriting multiple teams that came from acquisition - what is the best way to bring them all together and think as one product not many?

  • Start with goals

  • Start small, then scale to the bigger team

  • Start by listening, then induce change. Watch the reaction. Deal with that. Rip the band-aid off.

  • I’d speak to people separately too, gather input on what works well and what doesn’t according to them. Also identify the strong influential personalities and focus on working with them.

  • And we’ve said this before - the fact that you’re the new person can be a benefit too, use the advantage to ask more questions and bring a new perspective

  • Identify everyone’s competencies - get a benchmark, as well as their styles

  • Look at end users - what is the experience that they need? What’s working and not working?

  • Get your metrics straight: what is the problem that needs to be prioritised?

  • Do a leadership retro

  • People, processes, prioritisation and perception ; Briefing & back-briefing

  • Take them out of the work environment one on one. I find people open up more when they are outside of a working setting. If you cannot meet face to face then do a walking zoom call.

  • Futurecasting

  • User Story Mapping workshop

TOPIC 4: I have been thinking a lot about boundaries recently. Do you have experiences where you have seen great examples of setting or maintaining boundaries in or across teams?

  • Christina Wodtke, The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership

  • Alternate take: Be a dictator. Set the mission and expectations clearly. Set responsibility: you have to make *this* decision - i.e., Dev makes the architecture decision, but on a tight schedule

  • Team retros, followed by mini 1:1 retros

  • Ways of working sessions

  • Understand the history - why is it working this way?

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 018

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What do we all want to cook? Recipe tips include:

TOPIC 1: Hints and tips for organising large groups of people (initiatives), especially when there are too many cooks and opinions and people are not in the devil detail

  • Map power/influence vs interest to get stakeholders better aligned, figure out influence levers & opportunities]

  • Issue in this case is also a dependency on someone else delivering the functionality

  • Send a long email to get people agitated, at least get them moving

  • Can the programme be broken down into pieces/phases?

  • Deal with influencers

  • Add a 15-minute focused standup on this topic only

  • Push accountability onto the people responsible

  • Programme or Delivery lead might break the deadlock

  • Rotate the meeting chair - change the dynamic

TOPIC 2: Selling stretch goals (aka unfeasible timeframes to get it done)  

TOPIC 3: Best ways to define expectations and manage customer service vs customer support vs customer experience - when it’s one person trying to do it all in a small company, maybe even part time.

  • What gets measured gets done - what is the impact?

  • What metrics are being measured? What is the objective?

  • Service Design approach

  • Support is a signal - what’s wrong and what matters?

  • If support is overwhelmed, consider a LIFO (last in, first out) approach so at least some people get a great experience

  • Is Prod/Eng taking turns on support? (use it as a discovery opportunity)

  • Give a crib/cheat card to the support person so they understand what good looks like, and how to repeat it

  • Buddy up Support with someone else for a day

TOPIC 4: Getting hired and using product management coaching/consultancies

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 017

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TOPIC 1: Winning over stakeholders who aren’t convinced teams should be (relatively) autonomous

  • Try to understand WHY they feel that way

  • I would ask them to describe how they define “autonomy”

  • Look into the limiting factors - setting gates for limited autonomy

  • Walk them through it, do it with training wheels the first time / negotiate a trial period for an experiment with this approach, set KPIs

  • and build on that with good retro’s so people on all sides can learn what works....

  • What is the right thing for this circumstance?

  • Overcommunicate your intent: risks, intent, how it’s going to work, make them feel safe

  • Try it out with one team (giving them time to adjust after chaos)

TOPIC 2: What's the worst question you've ever been asked in a job interview?

  • So, how do you feel about Porn?

  • Do you plan to get pregnant anytime soon?

  • CV not identical to LinkedIn - why is that so?

  • What social media do you use/follow? What blogs do you read?

  • After mentioning salary expectations: “Show a pay slip from the previous employer”

  • From SF to middle america: So WHERE exactly do you live?

TOPIC 3: For anyone practising continuous discovery, any tips/how’re you managing it?

  • Don't forget! 2 hours every 6 weeks - User research in government

  • Teresa Torres

  • Have some active questions that you want answered all the time -  a backlog of hypotheses

  • Doesn’t have to be interviews - you can do other kinds of research and experiments,some can be automated - a feedback widget, for example

  • Talk to the Support team

  • Watch the space - follow news in the industry, what competitors or conceptually similar products are doing or struggling with, reviews for competitors and such

  • Discovery can be generative, research validates

  • The Mom Test book

  • Talking to Humans

  • Integrating Design, UX and Hypotheses into Agile Development

  • Office Open Hours

  • Sit in on client demos/pitches

  • Sometimes randomly asking certain users to do a self-recorded walk through what they do and think out loud. It’s actually sometimes even better if you’re not there to ask further Qs and can follow up later.

  • Get your boss and other team members involved to get them, committed

  • Also use tools such as Logrocket, although it’s difficult to pick what to go through

  • Ethnographic techniques are good

TOPIC 4: What’s the most important thing for a team without a product manager or owner to know / think / do?

  • Prioritisation - make the decision

  • Communication

  • Strategic and Tactical vision  / stepping back from the canvas

  • Focus on delivering VALUE not just working code

  • Question if product management doesn’t already happen but in different ways - through the CEO, people form the team, etc.

  • Question if the people there understand USER needs or BUSINESS needs 

  • Maybe try an exercise along the lines of… what outcomes is the team trying to achieve this year - how are they being focused on - what do we know about why these are important…and not allow them to mention any specific features

  • Define the PROBLEM and what success looks like, not how to achieve it

TOPIC 5: What are the most common myths in product management?

  • You have to LOVE your product

  • PO is the assistant to the PM

  • The Mythical Man Month 

  • The Product Manager is in control

  • That we can predict the future, as everyone is asking us ‘When can I have it?’

  • That we’re CEO of the product

  • You’re not actually a manager

  • That we’re the most hated person in the company

  • PMs need to be technical

  • PMs should not be technical

  • We’re only there to prioritise

  • You can be a good PM with no domain knowledge -  a good PM can do any product

  • We’re responsible for making the developers happy

  • You can fit anything into a quarter / a sprint

  • That it’s a cool job

  • That it’s fun and not stressful

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 016

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TOPIC 1: Tips for preparing notes / take aways  from user interviews. Is it usual to spend a half day or more writing up the notes?

  • Rev.com & Otter.ai for transcriptions

  • YES, timing is appropriate and worth it

  • NO, that’s too much time to spend per interview

  • 2x length of interview seems appropriate

  • Pulling out quotes and doing affinity mapping is tedious

  • 2 people minimum per interview, pull key quotes during the chat

  • Bullet points at the top of the doc to know what you’re looking for

  • Use templates for note-taking

  • Dovetail: The user research platform for teams / User research qualitative data analysis – Dovetail

  • Focus your notes on KEY things - patterns as we said, or surprises. But also take more notice of how people behave rather than just what they say.

  • Trello & JTBD framework is useful for organising notes

  • I really encourage you to get more people in the loop of these interviews. I do these together with UX/UI/Devs and we make notes in forms of post its (Miro) together. You can later easily cluster them into bigger topics. And another advantage: people are already in the loop, and the discussions around these interviews is super valid (lots of great ideas come from there)

  • The concept of learning velocity to measure research customer and the Delta-Next - a quick reflection exercise to help keep learning velocity visualised (introduced by Jeff Patton at #mtpcon Digital 2020 - his talk on Dual Track Development)

TOPIC 2: A PM portfolio - how have these worked for people?

  • Didn’t work for me, as the work was either confidential or semi-privileged; Testimonials and listing achievements is a good alternative

  • LinkedIn can work as your portfolio - adding projects and media, case studies 

  • A personal site is also really useful

TOPIC 3: Any tips from practice on creating and growing the PM consulting / freelancing / coaching market in your countries?

TOPIC 4: Any tools you just love and why?

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 015

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TOPIC 1: Are Wardley Maps practical?

  • Genuinely useful with C-suite, but hard to get it going - it took 5 people 3 days solid to create the first map, facilitated by a consultant

    1. You need to put the work in to really understand it to explain & facilitate it

    2. My team spent a ½ day on it and didn’t really get the hang of it

    3. Never heard of it, but did similar things with Business Process (BPM) tools

    4. Other value chain mapping tools are available - but Wardley Maps add the evolution axis to help with ‘war gaming’ for strategy

    5. For commodity management, Wardley Map actually shows the value of PRINCE 2 / Exploring the map - wardleymaps (Search for Figure 22. No one size fits all)

TOPIC 2: How to replicate the serendipity of a “walk-by team board” in a distributed setting?

  • Show and tells are quite broadcast-y; so we do Drop-Ins.  Gather up recent decs/whatever, set aside 90 minutes, invite anyone to come by and chat.  Tried different formats - breakout rooms, live stream, etc.

  • Async Design Sprints using MIRO and MURAL combined with a standing Google Hangout; plus - you can see other people interacting in real time. YAK and WHATSAPP give you quick voice messages as well

  • Standing/permanent virtual rooms to just jump into

  • More unstructured 1:1 catch-ups - or doing it via DONUT

  • Deliberate communication structures are needed - Slack announcements, town halls, etc

  • MIRO brainstorming sessions, with follow-ups a few weeks later.  Don’t discard the old maps.

  • A shoutout to MS Teams

  • we also did a daily product stand up for just 15 min and invited anyone in the company to join

  • Connect.club looks interesting for a potential networking type-events. Haven’t tried it yet though

  • BUT none of these replace ambient awareness

TOPIC 3: Helping your team transition to asynchronous working - tips?

TOPIC 4: Product team structure - PO, PM who cares? Or do we?

  • PO often means a JIRA/backlog monkey - but terminology is in the eye/ear of the beholder, and there’s nothing strict here

  • Melissa Perri - Product Manager vs. Product Owner

  • Marty Cagan - Product Manager vs. Product Owner Revisited

  • Does the terminology matter? (we seem to think so)

  • When the role is split between strategic and dev team management: there’s a real issue in imperfect communicaton

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 014

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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)?

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)

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 013

(Screenshot not available due to host error!)

(Screenshot not available due to host error!)

TOPIC 1:

Putting together the Quarterly Roadmap: who should you involve? How in depth should you go?

  • Depends - do you already have the longer roadmap in place?

  • Do a stakeholder mapping exercise - anyone who will be impacted or surprised by it.  Use a Stakeholder Onion or Interest & Influence 2x2 matrix.  

  • Effort vs Impact maps for each business area, then sythesize and review.

  • Anyone who will be doing the work

  • Stakeholders and/or their representatives

  • Never be afraid of overcommunicating

  • What stage are you at? Is it prioritisation & organisation, or in an earlier stage?

TOPIC 2:

Preferred learning style in lockdown - short classes, self-paced, half/day or full-day? Groups or on your own

  • Short article, short video, repeat, homework, then a 1-hour session (Imperial design thinking course)

  • Nano-degree, using a book club model - solo

  • Be conscious of time zones and time commitments - 5 hour lecture marathons suck

  • Practical beats theory

  • Include Q&A - interaction is key

  • Buddy system/study group - have someone to work with between sessions, also adds in accountability - force them into it.

  • Hard to cut out half-day or more of focused time right now. 90 minutes commitment is about the top

  • Short and Async is good.  Specific scheduled blocks OK.

  • Long classes, self-directed don’t work as well

  • 3 x 90 minutes sessions, some homework (one plan for internal), some feedback on suggested topics

  • To keep it interactive - use the chat function - eg ask people to quickly jot an answer to a question and you can read the responses - keeps people engaged.   

  • Re pairing - in zoom you can pre-pair people off and send them to breakout rooms to work together

  • Daily blocks with scheduled q&as as lean coffee style

  •  consider recording sessions for viewing later

TOPIC 3:

Marketing team - friend or foe? :) Or best ways to work together without the feeling of “us” and “them”. Long topic: marketing vs product lead company… -

  • Is there a Product Marketing function?

  • Ask Marketing to nominate one person per week to be the key contact, attend meetings, etc

  • Jeff Patton’s MTP Hamburg  talk - use this approach to align teams better (adding an extra column to the scrum board that means that the teams need to align on outcomes)

  • Consider a service design process

  • Get your vision and outcomes aligned to create better relationships

  • At roadmap/strategy stage, ask: What can I market? Use that as the basis for conversations, project management, etc

  • Have MKTG as user testing observers/note takers

TOPIC 4:

Tips for product discovery - 30/60/90 days in a new product domain + role

30/60/90 plans are doomed to fail - they will change

  • Talk to 3 types of people  customers, customer and customers

  • Don’t fall in love - or let others - with  a plan

  • Listen to your customers

  • Map customer problems, needs and what they use to solve the problem now

  • Map stakeholder’s bonusable measures/objectives

  • Set a timebox - then do a review, else it can just creep on forever

  • Start with a foundation: Are you finding new customers? New markets? New use cases?

  • Define at the outset: what does the business think success or failure looks like?

  • Challenge the definition of success and/or goals if they don’t seem right - you’re more allowed to do that since you’re new

  • Testing with Humans, by Giff Constable

  • Testing Business Ideas - Process to Reduce Innovation Risks, by David Bland (and podcast!)

  • Fail - or Learn! - Fast

  • People will tell you more, or give you permission to ask ‘dumb’ questions when you’re new. Take advantage.

  • Be generous in giving credit whenever possible.

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 012

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We tried to stick to a theme this week, of being the change you want to see in the world.

TOPIC 1:

What have you, your team or your company done to address inequality? Or others that have done it well?

  • Charity that employs people affected by the issue, who don’t get enough opportunities

  • Recruitment: prioritise diversity

  • University mentoring

  • Anonymising job applications - remove names, backgrounds so that everyone gets the same chance

  • Published pay bands - see HIRE WOMEN, by Debbie Madden

  • DIverse hiring panels

  • Understand how you’ve failed, and review how to get better

  • Scrutinise internal referral programmes - hide it from the interview process as a start

  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women

TOPIC 2:

You’ve joined a company for the “cause” of what it’s doing. But that starts to change. How do you manage this best?

  • Be open and transparent about concerns - the org is likely going to try to keep you

  • If you’re doing everything you can to improve things, give it 6 - 8 months and then leave (if you’re in a position to); advice adapted from Gibson Biddle

  • Push management for an open dialogue on the issue(s)

  • See if you have allies amongst your colleagues; take collective action

  • If you decide to leave, be honest about why in your exit interview

  • Change your role, or change your role

TOPIC 3:

Defining a code of ethics for product leaders. Should we? How would we?

TOPIC 4:

How do you evaluate/measure socially responsible products/companies?

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 011

TOPIC 1:Best activities and topics for teams who are zoomed out and need to bring themselves out of the weedsFailure Swap Shop, courtesy of Adrian HowardSkills development, on something that’s more of a long-term focus, or bringing hobbies into work…

TOPIC 1:

Best activities and topics for teams who are zoomed out and need to bring themselves out of the weeds

  • Failure Swap Shop, courtesy of Adrian Howard

  • Skills development, on something that’s more of a long-term focus, or bringing hobbies into work

  • Reset how people work together

  • Rework your diary - kill any meetings that don’t add value; change the format

  • Go round the room, thanking the next person for something and asking them to stop something as well

  • This Human Moment

  • Norn

  • Fake “walking between meeting rooms time’.

  • Do zoom meetings by phone instead, from outside

  • I want to try ‘party in a spreadsheet’ at some point to see if it’s fun at work.

  • Shave time off your meetings! Do not stretch to the end time and instead aim to finish 10 mins early

TOPIC 2:

How do you estimate a time of delivery on a consulting project when the details are unknown and you’re doing it remotely?

  • You can’t - so sell a discovery package, first (Phase 1: 3 days, 2 workshops, then an estimated plan with details, then add 20 - 50% to your estimate)

  • Pitch on value of outcome, not on time - tangible outcome, what are they willing to pay for that? If you are confident that you can achieve that with them, then the time dimension is less important. That works better when pitching to a sales-oriented person.

  • Same number of billable working hours may take longer due to scheduling difficulties 

  • Investigate calendar deadlines early

TOPIC 3:

Do you set regular professional development goals for yourselves, and if so what are they?

  • Try to boil it down to 2 words - both about career and life. How can my career support that? Which jobs will allow that?

  • Annual process to look at the bigger picture. Write your ideal role description - match that to an actual job.

  • Take a solo trip for a few days (a week ideal) to reflect

  • Get a good cross-section of mentoring/coaching. Pay for it if needed.

  • Get your anti-goals straight. Notice what you DON’T like doing. Try to prioritise your career for the things you do like doing.

  • Use someone else - coach or friend - who is going to make you really reflect, go deep, and be brutal 

  • Go to new events/places - learn new things to open up yourself to new perspectives and approaches

  • Ask people you trust their honest opinion - listen when they say I SEE YOU DOING THIS, or WHY ARE YOU STILL DOING THAT?

TOPIC 4:

Career Development Plans for your team

  • Product manager - GOV.UK

  • Focus on their strengths, get them to go further on that

  • Focus on the person, not on the company’s needs - it often ends up aligned, but not always

  • Radical Candor - not everyone needs to develop, just stay where you are and being excellent at that is absolutely fine as well

  • Help people to assess themselves

  • Have a good, documented guide to roles at each level, to help people understand what’s expected for development

  • Help somebody whose goals do not align with what the org needs now or later, in order to help them move out before you have to manage their angry frustration or utter disengagement - basically sponsor their departure to avoid going down the disciplinary > firing path

TOPIC 5:

When do you know it’s time to move on to a new role?

  • Take a pulse check every day - is this making me happy?

  • Assess: Are you able to make an impact? 

  • If you find yourself saying: I would rather be doing anything else, it’s time

  • Always keep an eye out, regardless - there may be something that makes you happier

  • I’ve never left a job too early, I’ve left plenty way too late.

  • Shields Down

  • Take a holiday, reassess how you feel

  • Flip a coin if you can’t make decision - it’ll evoke a reaction/emotion

  • Set a date: if it doesn’t change by then, then take the next step

  • If you’re bored, that’s a sign that you’re not challenged enough

  • Is the problem intrinsic or extrinsic?

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 010

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Some tips for No-Code App development:

  • https://www.glideapps.com/

  • Webflow

  • Landbot

  • Zapier

  • Bubble

(Ode to an) Anonymous Kangaroo

TOPIC 1:

When you already have a product but growth is slow, how do you decide if you should continue with that product vs. if you should change the market, problem or solution?

  • Validate market - have you hit all addressable?

  • Cross-sell something new to your existing customers

  • Look at adjacent markets

  • Validate acquisition model - sales team vs self-acquisition/freemium

  • Review pricing structure - simplify the hell out of it

  • Go back to discovery with existing customers

  • Figure out which experiments to run - for Market, Problem or Solution, etc

TOPIC 2:

Have you used the services of a product coach? If so, what were the key factors that led you to choose one over the other?

Yes and yes

TOPIC 3:

Best ways for mentoring/training someone who’s been made a PM without necessarily wanting to be one

  • Focus on what they want out of their career, philosophy (empathy, etc) of product thinking rather than specific skills

  • Link their drivers/motivations to the position’s product objectives

  • Break down the tasks to something that slightly exceeds their current capabilities to provide a challenge/learning

  • The dimensions I use to evaluate PMs:

    • - Controlling fear of missing out

    • - Communication (in all its details encompassing listening & empathy) 

    • - Leadership

    • - technical knowledge (meaning craft details of PM-ing)

    • - Balancing Ops with Strategy (i.e. daily operational stuff with product vision/planning/strategy/roadmap etc.)

TOPIC 4:

Experiences of asynchronous user research (e.g. interviewing folk on Slack)

TOPIC 5:

Customer/User research: what is NOT working for you?

  • Recruitment hard - people are dealing with shit

  • Less experienced researchers, more bias, poor quality

  • Too much pitch to be interviewed - blunt recruiting

  • Finding enough people to participate

  • Hard to understand expectations vs reality

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 009

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TOPIC 1:

Ideas on how to introduce topics that are challenging to talk about and you know that people won’t be happy about!

  • Just joined - you have the benefit of asking (stupid) questions as the new person

  • Also ask, what are you unsatisfied about?

  • What outcomes are you going for? How does this tie in? Suggest alternatives

  • Deliver short term to build trust, then change minds

  • Use the Start Stop Continue framework

  • Find a channel to try and post articles, etc about alternate approaches - seed the ideas

  • Ask, have you ever tried a different way?

  • Introduce and start working on alternative ways, not yet replacing the “bad” practice in place

TOPIC 2:

Tips for being inclusive when working remotely with introverts

  • Start with a doc, ask for feedback

  • Set some empty/alone times for people

  • Check-ins with people at the start & end of day, but leave space in between

  • Split into smaller groups with breakout rooms, nominate speakers to represent in larger settings

  • Validate that people *are* introverts, not just cultural differences

  • Have a retro about meeting and conversational styles

  • Accommodate for allowing “thinking” time, give questions/food for thought in advance

  • Give the introvert a backchannel to let others speak up if needed

TOPIC 3:

Did your formal education help you succeed as a Product Person?

  • Yes, Psychology & innovation, project management methodologies

  • Running events, innovation & entrepreneurship, getting the chance to learn on the job

  • Politics degree, not so much - but epistemology to challenge facts & assumptions, asking good questions, got over a fear of science 

  • Storytelling, from a journalism minor

  • Comp Sci helps create a better basis for talks with tech teams

  • UX master’s also gave a good psych background

  • Workshops & courses can give you great education outside of formal degrees

  • Fine arts degrees - how to give and take critique

TOPIC 4:

Suggestions for leveling up / upskilling Product teams without a training budget (thanks to Covid-19)

TOPIC 5:

Best ways to deal with and improve communication with founders/stakeholders who tend to be very overcommunicative and can get distracting and impact everyone’s work

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 008

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Gaming keeps us sane:

Azul | Board Game

Escape the Dark Castle

Quarantine Resources - quarantine

TOPIC 1:

How do you handle product interviews/questions with people in the product space who already know all of the tricks?

  • It can be a positive - you can get more relevant info and skip some of the preliminaries

  • Get rid of structure - just get them to talk, and their human side will come through, their real thoughts

  • Getting the value prop can be especially hard in this case

  • Get them to tell you stories about what they have gone through, not what they want

  • Ask the same question different ways

  • Ask the colleagues of the product person as well

  • We know they know but they don’t know that we know they know - reminded me of FRIENDS

TOPIC 2:

Developing or maintaining my Personal brand (speaking, writing) when employed

  • Negotiate as a group if the structure is too rigid. But read your contract carefully if it has intellectual property clauses

  • Check internal processes and sign-off requirements

  • Find events that aren’t related to your company

  • Start speaking internally on the topic

TOPIC 3:

What does radical Product work look like? (influence on society, not just individual users)

  • Try working for charity, gov’t, s-corp or b-corp with social elements to the mission

  • Focus on the service design

  • Focus on using product thinking to the org structure and senior management approaches

  • Review the company mission, value, etc - does this have the right focus? Use that to flow through

  • Coaching and mentoring others 

  • Ghandi: "be the change you want to see in the world"

  • What data do you have and how can you use it? Invisible Women book

  • Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

TOPIC 4:

Any ideas on user acquisition strategies for Voice products (Alexa skill, Google Home apps, etc.)

  • Does voice enhance the experience? For Whisky, can you add a prompt to the bottle to start a tasting?

  • Make sure it has a real use case

  • We’d love to see Google’s statistics on how many people say ‘Stop, Google!’ or ‘Stupid Google!’ (or Siri, or Alexa…)

  • Your insight-driven guide to designing for voice

  • It has to replace another habit

TOPIC 5:

Super lean product Discovery tips and best practices to do by yourself (without an UX etc experts)

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PITA 007

pita007.png

TOPIC 1:

As an interviewer, what are best questions (and (un)expected answers) for product management candidates?

  • What do you do, how did you make those decisions?

  • What can I (as a hiring manager) learn from you?

  • If you can add one feature to our product portfolio, what would you? (See if it connects to the company’s mission)

  • How do you know that you’re successful? (Outcomes and Impact on the team)

  • What’s your ideal culture? What does a toxic one look like?

  • Tell me about a typical day in your current role - activities, what teams, etc Looking for structure in thinking, x-functional

  • Tell me about an assumption that was proved wrong

  • Evaluate yourself - better on discovery or delivery?

  • How do you define…. What makes a good pm and why?

  • Ask for concrete examples

  • Give them homework if they did good in the interview 

  • What was the most formative experience you had as a PM? Tells you about them, what doesn’t matter

  • Tell me something you hate about being a PM

TOPIC 2:

Teaching an organisation how Product adds value when they’ve never had Product before

  • Throw away the word product. Figure out prioritisation and fix a problem. Install product thinking, get them on the right track.

  • Get the backing of the leadership team

  • Just do the thing needed to solve the problem. Use their language - if finance people, focus on value prop

  • Communicate ROI and show improvements, blockers, problems

  • John Cutler on Twitter - creating high value, high velocity decisions

  • Support scale-up of the business

  • Turning opinions into insights

  • Try and understand ‘who’ is responsible for ‘what’ and re-distribute responsibilities where needed - although be careful that people don’t completely give up accountability!

TOPIC 3:

Recommendations for books to read while in lockdown that are relevant but don’t feel too much like work

TOPIC 4:

In B2B Product management, how do you manage customer and cross-functional expectations when sales sells more than what is available in the product? Measuring the team or measuring the outcomes?

  • Follow Rich Mironov - and fix the sales team’s bonus structure

  • What’s your sales cycle? Are they selling what you’ve told them should be delivered?

  • Do sales actually understand the product? Or are they just throwing buzzwords at the customer to close a sale?

  • Join the pre-sales calls

  • Give Sales a configurator

  • Get involved in the sales-closing process

  • Build/repair the Sales relationship

  • Sell services alongside the product?

  • Tie Churn objectives into Sales

  • Make sure you have a clearly-defined product vision that shows who your target customer is and how you’ll solve their problems; qualify sales into on-target and off

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PITA 006

PITA 006

The Technology failed us edition, where the Icebreaker was replaced with frantically shifting platforms mid-call.

TOPIC 1:

How is your team measured?

  • Measuring the team or measuring the outcomes?

  • Process based - cycle times, return rates, deployment rates - how well is the machine working? A separate use case than Outcome focus

  • Shape Up book

  • Are you achieving what you set out to for each period?

  • ProdPad - good for idea realisation

  • Somehow, no one mentioned OKRs

TOPIC 2:

What "new" disrupting products shall we start developing now?

  • An open-source alternative to Zoom that works

  • What problems do people have that will stay after this?

  • Media brand that isn’t optimized for clicks, is non-partial

  • Non-technical solutions for social welfare

  • Education 

  • Voice tech, nothing to do with Covid-19, Alexa integration (and similar), improving existing products

  • Hiring solutions - good candidates vs bad, onboarding

  • Better use of printers

TOPIC 3:

Sensible ways to do competitor research

TOPIC 4:

What does leadership mean in product management?

  • You’re not technically a leader, but need to be able to lead

  • You have to be able to step away and trust the team to do what needs to be done

  • Leadership Without Authority By Aeneas McDonnell   Authority isn’t always given. It’s what you build

  • People, Processes & Prioritisation

  • Hard to identify which decisions are made by product people - and specific ones which are made better by people with more experience - maybe Stakeholder management, understanding what the goals are, communication

  • The Product of You by Melissa Perri

  • Do you solutionize or take the time to really understand the situation first?

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 005

What a bunch of Muppets. (The ‘I forgot the screenshot’ edition.)

What a bunch of Muppets. (The ‘I forgot the screenshot’ edition.)

TOPIC 1:

Consulting vs Perm - what’s the market like now?

  • Very competitive - 3x/4x the number of applicants

  • Some hiring more aggressively while they can get quality candidates

  • Sectors - supply chain & logistics, groceries, some fashion, online education, fintech & proptech

  • Fintech starting to slow

  • Short-term contracts not really happening

  • Contract-to-perm roles in healthcare

  • Net, fewer opportunities

  • In Switzerland: fewer roles, but starting to open up again for perm and interim roles

  • Recruiter view: really mixed

  • Greenfield innovation is dead at the moment

  • Enterprise - a lot of re-planning, investment in automation

TOPIC 2:

Examples of getting the wrong metric, how you noticed, and changed it?

TOPIC 3:

Quantitatively measuring impact for B2B enterprise &/or pre-product-market-fit phase - how to do it?

  • Proxy metrics - what is a good predictor for revenue, especially early. Use as a stand-in for quality data

  • North star + closer to home metrics for teams

  • Train sales to think in terms of business + customer value and check back in on value post-feature delivery

  • Assign sales goals to features w/ quantified revenue

  • Ask customers for success stories + metrics

  • PMF survey ‘how disappointed would you be if we didn’t exist’ — Product/Market fit survey by Sean Ellis and GoPractice

  • Lost Deals survey/retro - PMs speak to lost prospects

  •  I previously took the RICE framework and replaced Reach with Revenue, to help prioritise features with sales (might help)

  • I’ve used RICE as well but used Impact for deal size ($) and Reach for how many clients want that and how many users do they have

TOPIC 4:

Pitch Product Discovery for tech teams who see value = release

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 004

pita004.jpg

TOPIC 1: Remote Discovery & Framing

  • Resources popping up everywhere

  • There’s a lot more prep needed when doing these sessions remotely, and not enough time between meetings to do it properly

  • Pre-prep - worksheets or send things in before the call, set up the Miro/Mural board ahead of time - allow for more anonymised ideas as well and a more open discussion

  • Liberating structures, in smaller groups in breakout rooms

  • Two facilitators - one lead, one helping, then flip

  • More tiring than a normal session - split it amongst 2 days

  • Schedule in time to review

  • How to create serendipity

  • Create happy hour, social coffee, other non-work calls

  • Donut and Shuffle. Dungeons&Dragons. Board games.

TOPIC 2: Selling the value of Product in an organization that’s never had Product before (and might not understand it)

  • Cost of delay/cost of team doing the wrong things

  • Find the zombie features - call out the waste, quantify the cost

  • Show the value of disrupting yourself

  • Show the value of the product mindset

  • This can be painful and take a long time - use a failure to pivot them

  • If it’s too hard and frustrating, are you even in the right company? Maybe if you’re not invested in it, it could be time to leave

  • Does everyone need a product mindset? Figure out the problem that they have and work from that. Continuous improvement from an iterative project perspective

  • Are there any direct comparisons with competitors? Make it personal. Find case studies where product companies are winning.

TOPIC 3: Frantically Changing Priorities vs strategy

  • Lots of commiseration

  • Teresa Torres, Opportunity Solution Tree

  • Impact Mapping

  • Focus on business continuity plans - how can we hep shape these for the future?

  • https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-pandemic/

TOPIC 4: What does your Product Strategy look like

  • Tech focus vs behaviour focus

  • Start with vision, mission, etc

  • Factor in assumptions, opinions etc from stakeholders

  • Make it deliverable

  • Communicate it

  • Understand the org’s history - why are they organised the way they are? What are the stakeholder’s motivations/rewards?

  • Separate strategy from roadmap

  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy book, https://amzn.to/2XkPPvi

    • Quote regarding bad strategy:

    • Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking.

    • Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. 

    • Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.

    • Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.

    • Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (pp. 31-32). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

TOPIC 5: Onboarding a New Direct Report, Remotely

  • Default orientation on a monday and friday

  • Weekly retro

  • 1:1s with lots of different people/functions set up for them, 30 mins

  • Shadowing opportunities - attending, running

  • Remote lunch for the practice (social)

  • Daily 30 min Q&A between boss & report for the first period

  • Screen sharing for collaboration/alignment

  • Try and get them physical kit ahead of start date, if possible - and flowers for the first day!

  • Get them to start a wiki/dictionary of terminology - and get other new starters to extend it

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PITA 003

April Fool’s Day means HATS!

April Fool’s Day means HATS!

TOPIC 1:

Creating psychological safety - when everyone disagrees with the boss, but still likes them

  • Not an intervention

  • Arrange sessions discussing alternative ideas

  • Accelerate book

  • The Westrum Model: Measuring organizational culture

  • Motivation mapping for the boss - what are they trying to achieve?

  • Open anonymous forum, if the boss is strong enough, or externally facilitated

  • Radical Candor book

  • Aesop’s fable of Who Will Bell the Cat? - do it together

  • ‘If we only have opinion, we’ll go with mine” Steven Elop, ie challenge with data.

  • Also: go to a segmented roadmap, so you break down the strategy into segments owned by others as SMEs.

  • Externalise it - make it the team’s strategy as a whole, not his/her personal strategy decision

  • Also - just coz most of the team think they’re wrong doesn’t mean that _are_ wrong :-) Finding safe ways to [in]validate it helps everybody.

  • Strategy vs tactics 

  • Remove emotion from it where possible

  • Radical Acceptance talk from MTP (Making Smarter Decisions with Mental Models by Andy Ayim)

  •  perhaps find a person with "no stake" in the strategy and who has the bosses trust and have them communicate to the boss how shitty their strategy is

  • Translate strategy into OKRS… to highlight deployment ‘issues’

  • People under “the boss” should also try and encourage a more creative and autonomous environment, hopefully showing “the boss” the power of experience and knowledge coming from the specialists in each team. Try and encourage/suggest design thinking as well.

TOPIC 2:

When your design and engineering team work really well together - are you still useful?

  • Good job! Now move from tactical to strategic

  • Maybe it’s a change from looking in (within the team) to looking out?

  • Intercom has a good framing of 6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years - move away from the immediate

  • Move to more research

  • Ask harder questions

  • Have more fun / mess with your team

  • It gives you room to innovate

  • Is everyone happy?

  • When you take your next role, who will take over, and do they have the skills?

TOPIC 3:

How to win business folks over and help them understand /prioritise data (notably folks that cannot conceptualise it without seeing it in a UI or Visualisation tool)

TOPIC 4:

Mentoring: sounds relevant in tough times to >> how to get started

  • Encourage mentorship from outside the team/organisation

  • Let the mentee lead the conversion, be open to non-work subjects (esp. now)

  • Try becoming a mentor in external environments/programmes as well

  • People don’t want to talk so much about work right now!

  • Not coming with an agenda / being non-judgemental

  • Not giving direct advice but leading them in a direction / to a conclusion

  • Be “friends” with your mentor - takes the pressure off and mentees should volunteer to help

  • Knowledge Officer

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PITA 002

PITA 002

TOPIC 1: 

Remote games that you can play with your team or your friends?

  • https://kahoot.it/  (second appearance!)

  • http://jigsawpuzzles.io

  • freebingocards.com

  • Strava for indoors? Someone may need to invent this!

  • https://www.kidscreateabsurdity.com/ - but haven't found an online version yet

  • https://zombiesrungame.com/

  • Taskmaster daily challenge, follow https://twitter.com/AlexHorne https://twitter.com/AlexHorne/status/1242729749144915968?s=20

  • https://freehand.invisionapp.com/freehand/new

  • One camera on a board game, everybody joins in, one person acts as controller

TOPIC 2:

Selling Product Management  as freelance/consultant for startups

Context:

  • Offering PM freelance work to startups (have product-market-fit, 10-20ppl, pre-series-A)

  • Hiring 1st product person, often don’t know what kind of PM they want

Challenge: 

  • defining scope and measurable deliverables

  • Pricing: fixed vs. Time-material

Discussion: 

  • Discovery into problems (e.g. biz talking with engineering)

  • What’s the problem trying to solve, and what’s in 3-6 months. Target their perceived problem.

  • Focusing on priorities, relied on freelances at the beginning of setting up the product.

  • For UI work, was single jobs with fixed-price.

  • For UX and user research, was 1d of work a week, with a daily rate

  • Try the opposite: define better ways to filter out what they don’t think the problem is.

  • Create the job that you want to do and pick your clients based on that. 

  • Easier to sell UX research to a firm that knows what UX research is.

TOPIC 3:

How to start a new role - making initial connections and sizing up the dynamics remotely

  • https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/tools/

 TOPIC 4:

Shock doctrine: how can we use the crisis to push for changes we have been struggling with due to the “old guard” resisting and pushing back on it

  • https://www.amazon.com/Naomi-Klein-Doctrine-Capitalism-12-2-2006/dp/B00HTK37WC

  • Stockpile stories / case studies

  • Look into the data

  • Retest assumptions / re-validate personas

  • People changing because the are forced / vs because they like it

  • Be careful to stay true to your vision

And for product people who want to pitch in on the COVID-19 effort

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Pita 001

PITA 001.jpg

 

We all want to work from THIS home office:

https://a.cl.ly/7KuRW6RD

 

And to complete the 30 day LEGO challenge: https://www.dropbox.com/s/516nnsrq9145bek/IMG_0528.png?dl=0

 

TOPIC 1: 

Digital workshops with clients - how? (I haven’t done it before and want to teach our business) 

  • https://kahoot.it/   For quizzes & icebreakers

  • Miro & Mural

  • Sli.do

  • Zoom

  • Whichever tool people use for the primary comms, try and have a backup in case of issues (e.g. if you’re using zoom, try also having a slack channel on the go where you can type to each other in case of problems)

  • funretro.io or parabol.co for retros

 

Workshops remotely

  • stick to tech people are comfortable with

  • get someone for tech facilitation while you're facilitating (or vice-versa)

  • prepare meetings as much as possible (pre-read = must?)

  • cut scope to what's really essential with everyone 'in the room'

  • rules of engagement 

 

 

TOPIC 2:

What business will look like when the epidemic settles - planning for “after” 

 

TOPIC 3:

Job hunting in a pandemic

 

 



 

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