Hand on your heart, are you doing as much product discovery as you should? If there's a gap, you're not alone. I've worked with teams skipping product discovery because they "don't need it" or "don't have time for it" since their backlog is already full of things the business asked for, the users, or tech debt. I've worked with PMs who want to do discovery "right" and therefor never get started, and I've seen seasoned PMs using the same tools and methods who could use a little inspo to...
17 days ago • 3 min read
You know you need to improve product discovery in your teams. You know what good looks like, some of your leaders as well, but somehow teams are not spending enough time doing proper product discovery. Instead they work off requests from customers, from stakeholders, from the one year kind of promised roadmap. And all that work is important and keeps them busy, so you struggle to push for different ways of working on top of everything else and keep deferring it to 'soon, after xyzzy is...
24 days ago • 4 min read
Yesterday I had a conversation with an R&D leader at a sales-led company making the shift to product-led. They were a profitable retail software company who had grown through the efforts of their sales department. The sales reps built strong relationships with potential clients and closed the deals by promising the new features the clients asked for. As a result their product org was operating from the backseat, mainly project managing the agreed tasks. Only a handful of people in the R&D org...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
If you work with platforms and infrastructure, you know the struggle to get long-term investment approved. People outside your domain don’t understand the benefit of the work, or they do understand but somehow other investments take priority, and you can only motivate short-term optimization when things start going wrong. The issue isn’t that what you propose is bad, it’s that infrastructure investment gets treated like an expense instead of what it actually is, an investment with measurable...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
The practice of creating Objectives and Key Results links what you do to why you do it, a simple idea that Google popularized. When implemented correctly, it works brilliantly. The implementation, though, is another story. I’ve worked at companies that introduced OKRs, removed them, switched to initiatives, then back to goals. At enterprise-sized companies, different formats will come and go. Your goal should be to make the best use of whatever structure you have. Platform and infrastructure...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
I've been running remote all-hands meetings for distributed teams spanning multiple time zones, cultures, and disciplines (tech and product, data and design), and I've also helped a string of leaders set up their remote all-hands. If you're not familiar, an all-hands is when all the teams in your unit (or company) get together to hear about what's happening at the bigger picture level, company updates, strategy shifts, and how the work everyone's doing connects. It's one of the few moments...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader! I’ve scaled three different platform teams, most recently a 100-person org serving 5,000 engineers in a 45k-person company. Lots of legacy, lots of consolidation work, lots of learning what actually works (and what doesn’t). So if you’re trying to figure out how to structure platform teams at scale, or you’re wondering how much of the conventional wisdom actually holds up, this one’s for you. Let’s go. Structure by problem space, not by tool. My team covered Observability, Delivery...
3 months ago • 2 min read