What have we chatted about?

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

 
randy silver randy silver

PITA 032

ICEBREAKER: Poems in the Aether

  • TOPIC 2: Prioritisation when going from zero-to-one (low data, high competing demands)

    • Can you draw clear proposition lines around the different options?  Pick one to focus on

    • Don’t beat yourself up- we all have to go back to intuition sometimes. But get data as soon as you can

    • Rephrase it as a bet, and timebox the experiments

    • Advice on startup metrics: https://amplitude.com/startups

  • TOPIC 3: How do I convince stakeholders they need proper product teams set up? (merged into new org with our existing products, they are not used to digital teams)

    • Approach from the direction of the acknowledged problems that they have,  not the solution you want to implement

    • What user research do you have?  Talking to users and representing their pain/issues/needs is a good start

    • What stakeholders/influence do you have?

    • Get a timebox  on a consultancy to show results (quick wins)

    • Classic managing up techniques: make it their idea! (tactical framing)

    • Showing the issues from a support/devops perspective - the cost of NOT having a product team

    • Situational Leadership II

  • TOPIC 4: Hiring remote-only PMs during these absurd times  (perspectives from companies and candidates)

    • Companies are looking at this from a lot of angles 

    • Look for 

    • Hard skill profile - has that shifted for remote-frost. More of a corraller, documentation, etc

    • What’s going to make the company sticky? How do we create culture whe emote

    • New Microsoft Study of 60,000 Employees: Remote Work Threatens Long-Term Innovation

    • Expectations (and success) really depend on if only the PM is remote, or the whole team/organisation is at least remote-first

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 031

pita031.png

  • TOPIC 1 - Recruitment and retention: how are you doing it well right now?

    • They need to perceive progression

    • Recruit within the network

    • Look at the culture and people who are staying vs who is leaving - any root causes for staying or leaving

    • Flexibility options are a big winner

    • Is the tech stack appealing?

    • Take another look at the job ads - are they boring?

    • Best job advert: https://archive.is/aL7rt

  • TOPIC 2 - Ways to manage "strong" personalities - outspoken people in the team with really strong opinions that not everyone else appreciates

    • Try to get the challenging people to recognise the value of hearing more diverse voices- warn them in advance that you will call on the quieter people if loud people dominate

    • Restrict feedback for 24 hours

    • Run a ‘Thinking Round’ - no interruptions, everyone contributes, then move on

    • Model good behaviour - and reward it with your attention/approvals. 

    • Say ‘Thank you, PERSON, but i’d really like to hear from [other person]’

    • Get it Right / Get it Done/ Get Along / Get Credit /  -diagnose the personality type/motivtion

    • Capture and reward good behaviour

    • Liberating Structures - 1/2/4/All Liberating Structures Menu 

    • Thinking Time Slack app Introducing ThinkingTime. Introduction | by Josh Elman | Medium

  • TOPIC 3: Making the transition to Freelance PM - why did you do it, would you do it again, why did you stop?

    • By accident! Yes, if I didn’t find a job I liked, and because i found a job I liked

    • Hard to make a lasting impact/brave decisions and pick up context as a freelancer

    • You don’t get stuck somewhere you don’t want to be

    • No job is actually permanent - you can always leave if it doesn’t work out as expected

    • Working with startups, sometimes they can’t afford you fulltime

  • TOPIC 4: Tips for fostering an environment where there is greater engagement, collaboration, and discussion of the backlog within a software dev team / How to encourage collaboration within product teams in a remote setting?(Cameras off,etc)

    • Is this really a problem? Are we getting results even with this environment?

    • Put people in a situation where they are expected to contribute (ie, a User Story Mapping session)

    • Add in social interactions by design so people see each other as humans more - Donut, team intros, etc

    • Set expectations for contributions and participation; build it into meeting structures - but cater to introvert’s styles

    • How psychologically prepared are people for yet another call WTI Pulse Report Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks

  • TOPIC 5: How do I recover from programme prioritisation burnout?

    • Get more hands on - change what you’re doing - to recover & reset

    • Run a retro with senior product people & stakeholders -what did other people think worked and didn’t? How can they help to make it better next time?

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 030

ICEBREAKER: Venn Comedy Challenge
TOPIC 1:  Prioritisation for portfolios - innovation vs BAU, and How to prioritise amongst a portfolio of potential projects

  • How do we decide on priorities and get people aligned?

  • Clear goals and objectives are key, at a company level

  • Clear understanding/transparency on what stages things are at

  • Stakeholders want procedural justice

  • Weigh up one bet against another bet

  • Metrics: impact on lack of attention on BAU, or lack of innovation

  • Dot voting with virtual money - helps people understand the scarcity of resources (or capacity)

  • 80/20 - 80 sustaining low-risk / 20 on higher risk innovation?

  • Value chain mapping

  • Don’t split Innovation and BAU into different teams

  • Pick the projects that align to long term plans

TOPIC 2:  Divvying up and/or collaborating on UX responsibilities (wireframing, research, etc.) between UX team and PMs. How much should a PM know/do to be most helpful while not stepping on the toes of others?

  • What’s the difference between for and with?

  • Doing something lo-fi to communicate in a shared language can be useful

  • Being mindful of A11y can be useful and come from anywhere

  • Expertise in research/UX can come from people in different seats

  • It’s a Venn diagram - it’s facilitating and learning as much as making the diagrams; polished design comes later

  • Set the person who is the expert as the expert

  • Expect varying degrees of competency - and train up by pairing w/ people who are better than you

  • https://productcoalition.com/the-10-best-and-worst-venn-diagrams-explaining-product-management-f6006c82476c

TOPIC 3:  What symptoms do you watch out for in an SME in order to avoid getting too corporate while the company is growing?

  • First symptom: people aren’t talking to each other. They form silos.

  • Ask the team what they don’t want - and why

  • Red flag: we do this because we have always done it like that because someone said so

  • Processes keep getting added - and none get killed. (Add expiration/review dates to any new meetings or processes)

  • Pick an experiment that will fail so you can kill it and everyone experiences making it go away, and gets permission to do so

  • Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking Reading Time | 8 minutes A core component of

  • Ask: what will be missing if we remove this? But pair with a retro

  • People regularly skipping a meeting is a key indicator

  • Meetings where people just don’t show up and this happens regularly

TOPIC 4:  How do you earn trust in/with a new team?

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 029

pita 029.png

ICEBREAKER: Word Wall spinny wheel
TOPIC 1:  What do you do when your leadership f**k up?

  • Pick your moments

  • And pick your battles

  • Support YOUR team and prepare them for change if you decide to leave

TOPIC 2: Onboarding a direct report to take over YOUR individual contributor PdM duties: tips to let go of your “baby”?

  • Rip the BandAid - make intros and initial handover, then step away COMPLETELY. Scheduled check-ins are OK, tho.

  • Give them permission to call you on your BS. They are explicitly allowed to say GO AWAY to you

  • Timebox your involvement and do the OTHER work on your plate

  • Esther Derby video: https://twitter.com/adrianh/status/1147107312244613121

  • Onboard them to the product vision, then hand it over  

TOPIC 3:  Tips or people/books to follow regarding  designing for developers/internal tooling

TOPIC 4:  Convincing people to care about customer’s success - not using themselves as proxies for the customer

  • Will change alienate customers?  What will the benefit be to customers? 

  • What metrics will be used to sign it off?  

  • Can you bring counter examples where people were able to flip “certain” assumptions 

  • Who are they building the product for? 

  • Are they really at the root cause of what is wrong with it?

  • Spend the development budget on what the market wants, and remind them what the market looks like

  • Classic User testing, A/B testing, user interviews in real world 

  • Get them to actually interview users, potentially via a different context (slightly subversive approach)

  • a/b testing in production

  • Can people be given 10% time to do their research/dev


Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 028

pita028.png

ICEBREAKER: Team treasure hunt!
TOPIC 1:  How do you organise your products and people? What works well and not well for grouping/ aligning products?

TOPIC 2:  How do I handle a Senior Managemet Team that ‘don’t believe in User Research’? 

  • Just do it anyway (guerilla research) and use the result to leverage more

  • Why do we need this when we have Google Analytics?

  • Get people on the team to consistently disagree to get to the point where frustration drives research

  • “If we have data, let’s look at adata. If all we have are opinions, lets; go with mine “ - Jim Barksdale

  • Find allies in other stakeholders

  • Plant seeds - sharing resources and examples where user research has worked and given unexpected and/or useful insights

TOPIC 3:  How dio I spot when an interesting role is actually in a secretly toxic org?

  • Look at the backgrounds of people on the product team - do they get what the job actually is?

  • Look for well-formed role descriptions

  • Avoid Ninjas, Rockstars, etc

  • Ask friends and friends of friends who do - or have - worked there. Reach out to the MTP slack to ask.

  • Ask how stuff actually gets done in the org during the interview

  • Open conversations during the hiring process

  • Ask about and see what has happened to previous people in the same role, or if the role is new - why it was created beyond the functional needs/scaling

  • Glassdoor can be useful or manipulated - treat it like an Amazon user review

  • LinkedIn snooping to get a feel for the org chart

  • if the company has any history of big changes such as changing an outsourcing/similar partner or big management changes, try to get in touch with “the other side” to learn what’s happened in the past

TOPIC 4:  Can product managers coexist with program managers? Asking cos my company might be hiring both for a team and I’m not sure what the difference is between the roles.

  • Delivery managers are great

  • Definition of roles & relationship is hard and needs to be open, honest and handled well

  • Definition of Product (for Product Manager) and How to Deliver it (for Programme) can work well

  • So:very much depends on the relationship 


Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 027

PITA 027.png

TOPIC 1: How do you keep user research work & product management work aligned?

  • Shared artefacts & conversations

  • Join each other’s ceremonies

  • Avoid terminology - shape the language deliberately

  • Focus on the why

  • Teresa Torres - weekly interviews & share interview snapshots

  • Force x-functional teams to ensure shared context

  • Review the tests/hypotheses/experiments and learnings openly

  • Delivery teams should observe research so they might have insights into what is actually actionable, and UR should help story writing in something like gherkin format to get them to start being more actionable

TOPIC 2: Scaling up a product team from 1 onwards, any experiences or tips?

  • Domain-driven design - one PM per domain/team

  • Make sure there’s an OKR (or similar) for each

  • Figure out how to manage dependencies/not get in each other’s way

  • Don’t just hire another ‘Mary’ - don’t get more of the same, figure out who should do what, and what the org actually needs

  • 3/6/12 months from now - what’s working better with this person? What is the problem that needs to be solved by this hire?

  • Make sure they own a whole problem

  • You’re going to start making decisions as a team - what are your product principles? Who owns what? How do you work together? What tools do you use?

  • Hire for culture/experience ADD

  • Make sure they can do at least one thing better than you can

TOPIC 3: Any ideas on how to kindly coach people who have been used to working in certain ways, that there are benefits in exploring new ways of working? - collaboration being considered a new way of working

  • Success breeds success- get a small win

  • Solve the problem that they perceive - why will they want to change otherwise?

  • SHOW the benefits, not just talk about them

  • https://www.productboard.com/blog/change-management-5-principles

  • Be able to articulate WHY the change is good

  • There’s also a change canvas I built in Miro that you can use with a team in a workshop: https://miro.com/miroverse/change-canvas/

  • Canvas support in the problem people’s teams

  • Exec support can be key - positional power

  • For there to be meaningful change there needs to be first trust and rapport

  • Think about how to break inertia

  • Look for reward incentives that are at cross purposes - or that you can change

  • Sometimes people that act as blockers have to go

  • Put a boundary on how long you’re willing to invest in this

  • How can you change the rules so that the way they are currently working will inevitably make them fail or break the rules?

TOPIC 4: What killer thing do you do in the first two weeks of a new gig/project/stakeholder?

  • Talk to a lot of people, Ask a lot of questions

  • Taking Your First Steps as a Director of UX

  • Do ALL the 1:1s

  • https://www.annashipman.co.uk/jfdi/meeting-everyone.html

  • Ask: what’s the 1 thing we should be discussing now?

  • Get a list of key people from your manager

  • ASK: what can I do to make your life easier? And Who else should I talk to? And what can they teach me?

  • Don’t give any opinions at this stage

  • Another good read on this topic is the First 90 Days

  • I also asked each person on my team 1:1 to score themselves 1-5 (5 high) “Do you feel Respected | Engaged | Challenged | Inspired”  and why. This was very eye opening to the culture and to the individuals.

  • +1 remote onboarding has been a very different experience and so much longer than being able to walk round the office and see who’s who… but also has meant richer conversations

  • Make a stakeholder map - and review it with your boss (etc)

  • Try to have the 1:1s in a different environment (where possible)

  • Listen in on other people’s meetings

  • My favourite question: If you could change one thing, what would it be

  • Prioritisation of questions - figure out the most important things you need to learn

  • Ask if your understanding is shared

  • Digest the research

  • Map the user journeys

  • Make an investment in the emotional bank account of everyone you meet

  • Variants of “Walk me through what you did last week?” Is a question I’ve found super revealing when onboarding to understand folks' context.

TOPIC 4: Any tips on working with remote engineering teams in multiple time zones?

  • Can you split team priorities by time zone?

  • Go async wherever possible - minimise meetings

  • Find the golden hour of overlap where people can talk, and use it well

  • Don’t overdo JIRA or similar to try and impose control

  • Board of borards is bad

  • If they don’t have rules/agreements around asynchronous communication, I’d set up a document around that with agreements. Basecamp has some good resources around that.

  • +1 on a team agreement around comms. Other tips & advice in here

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 026

Experimenting with an Asia-friendly time slot

Experimenting with an Asia-friendly time slot

TOPIC 1: How do you work with your team members sitting in different timezones. Share challenges, best practices, etc

  • Take turns to feel the pain - rotate who has to get up early/stay up late

  • As much transparency as possible around who’s doing what

  • Slackbot handles async standup (what you did,. What you’re doing, any blockers)

  • 37 Signals approach (Shape Up / Ryan Singer)

  • More release planning up front, with recording of demo sessions

  • Extra time and effort on relationship development and onboarding for new team members

TOPIC 2: Roadmapping - now, next, future vs Project timelines

  • Clash and debate priorities with delivery/release planning.  Limit work in progress. Repeat and refine and repeat and refine.

  •  Communicate prioritisation and justification again and again

  • Road maps AND release plans (one quarter). No long term Gantt charts.

  • 6 week iterations, Shape Up approach (2 mentions so far…)

  • 6 Weeks: Why It's The Goldilocks Of Product Timeframes

  • 6 weeks - 1 P1 (high confidence in results), some P2s (less confidence), P0s are complete unknowns/JFDIs

  • Trifecta: PM, Design and Tech lead joint ownership of roadmap

TOPIC 3: Product strategy - What are the best practices while building product strategy?

  • Start with definition - what place are we getting to, then what steps are we taking to get there?

  • Defining success amongst stakeholders

  • Competitor Analysis - gap analysis, & Customer segment analysis

  • User research - Qualitative data on user behaviours is invaluable, defining the JTBD 

  • Wardley maps

  • Dragon Mapping — Out of Owls

TOPIC 4: Trade offs with Tech debt and moving functionality forward

  • Dedicate a set % in every sprint to paying down debt

  • Enforce a ‘Leave it better than you found it’ mentality with the code base

  • Dev team prioritise it, reserve space for it

  • Tech debt is not immediately tangible - when people care about it, it’s already too late. Tech lead(s) needs to stay on top of this early. Consistent focus on the ongoing change.

  • Definition of DONE includes cleaning up the (inevitable?) mess

  • Red line: not allowed to compromise on quality for speed

  • Link product health check to strategic risks, make that visible to leadership

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 025

pita 025.png

ICEBREAKER: Pair up. Draw a picture of your partner without looking, and without picking the pen up from the paper. Share!


TOPIC 1:  Any tips for encouraging a PM to think of research to generate learning rather than as validation?

  • Work to disprove your own theories

  • Averages tell you nothing (example of having your hand in the freezer while your head is on fire)

  • Make sure there’s shared understanding of objectives, timelines & process

  • Focus on improving UX and Customer Experience instead designing/validating screens

  • 2 phases - open-ended questions, then validation. Validation comes second

  • Learning early gives massive value - get everyone in that mindset

  • Deep conversations to make sure the intention/requirements are clear

  • Share case studies of various approaches

  • I find the ‘four big risks’ framing useful: The Four Big Risks  — what’s the biggest risk for the product/idea? That should then help frame the conversation around the best method

  • I like using analogies to our non-work life as reference points for work.  There are some people who just want to vent and don't want someone to solve their problems. The best listeners are the ones who are interested in listening and not solving the problem.
    Give the generative research question to the person who doesn't want to solve it immediately. And/or go biblical: if you have two PMs who have two ideas, have them evaluate each other's ideas rather than their own. Then the incentive is to vet and not to validate.


TOPIC 2:   Pardons are on my mind - if you wanted to be pardoned for one product/agile crime, what would it be?

  • Doing stuff by myself

  • Bias - making up my mind in advance

  • Making it perfect before shipping/showing

  • Cutting corners on process

  • Waiting too long to call stuff out

  • Not keeping my mouth shut

  • Not meeting people where they are

  • Not talking about/evangelising my product enough

  • Underestimating the effort of engaging people

  • Shiny object syndrome

  • Using the words JUST, QUICK, LITTLE and ONLY

  • Not counting on the impact of internal stakeholders

  • Saying Should and Could too much

  • Putting a pop-up on the website

 
TOPIC 3:  Product sense doesn’t f@!king exist, does it?

  • Definition - Product sense = intuition - and how one improves intuition would be engaging with new apps. One person noted he plays with up to 200 apps per year to improve his product sense.

  • No. Just no.

  • Sounds like bias. Or a cult.

  • Is that any worse than the know-it-all founder, that knows what their users want?

  • Awareness of trends -vs- what customers actually need

  • Is product sense the same as experience?

  • Product sense, product mindset, product thinking..Anything else? :)

  • sometimes even mindset as well tbh, as I’ve been asked for advice using “your product sense” when they mean to ask about processes and how to get learnings

  • Difference between awareness and domain experience

  • It’s all about learning - if you can do that, you have good product sense

  • Predictably Irrational & The Decisive Moment books

  • How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett is a great read on a new perspective to understand how the brain works. A major point is around the brain working from a prediction perspective. 
    Surprise is when our prediction isn't accurate, which can be frustrating or pleasant (such as in music, according to Daniel Levitin,  where a song that is too predictable is boring but a song that is too unpredictable is unpleasant. The sweet spot is the mid-spot.) 
    The trendy portion of analyzing a new app is important because it assesses how most people interact/what they expect to experience since their reference point is other apps they used previously.

TOPIC 4:  Measuring impact once shipped - how’s that going?

  • Have a hypothesis before you start, then revisit that

  • Understand WHY you’re building whatever you’re doing - TESTS and ASSUMPTIONS work well with Engineers, categorised as leading & lagging indicators

  • Validate Your Ideas with the Test Card

  •  using OKRs is an obvious one (and measuring the results)

  • Assumptions and then riskiest assumptions is good to prioritise

  • Dragon Mapping

  • Pirate metrics for inspo is always useful 

  • The Four Big Risks

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 024

PITA 024.png

ICEBREAKER: Recommend a movie/TV show for the holidays!


TOPIC 1: Tips/gotchas from the field for setting OKRs when it’s the first time your org is trying out OKRs

  • Q1 will be wrong. Don’t worry about it.

TOPIC 2: New Year’s Resolution: what are you going to START (or STOP) doing in 2021?

  • Eat more veggies

  • Thinking of my career as a product

  • Find a way to go into conversations assuming best intentions, understand motivations better - so i can be less defensive

  • Stop trying to change people who aren’t going to change - pick other battles, ones with a chance of success

  • Keep count of meetings where i’m NOT interrupting people, to make sure I listen to people

  • Introduce silent meetings to one of my clients

  • Put more things on paper

  • Do more things asynchronously 

  • Invest more time in challenging ‘This isn’t measurable’ statements

TOPIC 3: Tips on how to influence without ‘telling’ a young team, with lots of opinions and no real metrics!  

  • Workshops & discussions with the team

  • Prioritise - avoid ‘change whiplash’

  • Play (good) mind games - ask questions so that they figure it out, rather than telling them what to do directly

  • Coaching towards a process 

  • Help them figure out where to have processes; co-create a checklist for making decisions

  • Reframe opinions as hypotheses, then test

  • 15% solutions from Liberating Structures also helps  people to identify what they can control/change themselves

  • A great activity to get people to come up with solutions is From Obstacles to Outcomes / Resources: 15-minute FOTO

  • Hofstede is the daddy of cultural power distance work / Hofstede Insights Organisational Culture

TOPIC 4: Biggest Product Management Failure/learning in 2020

  • Get a good sponsor/stakeholder

  • Generic terminology (like wireframe, prototype, etc) WILL be misinterpreted/interpreted differently across the org

    • MVP

    • DevOps

    • Product Management

    • MVP+, whatever the heck that is

  • Summarising meetings is amazing - but I can’t be the designated scribe for other people’s meetings

  • Be intentional and active when training people - don’t assume

  • Missed out on someone getting to a burn out stage - be more careful, do more 1:1s, take care of your people

  • Don’t make assumptions about what someone’s dealing with - ask, support

  • Invite your stakeholders to your user research sessions




Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 023

pita 023.png

ICEBREAKER: what team do you want to be a part of and why? (Ocean’s 11, Sailor Moon, Autobots, Buffy’s Scooby Gang, etc.)


TOPIC 1: How do you approach changing the mindset of new folk who have been very used to more command-and-control work to autonomous cross-functional work?

  • Pitch the change as an experiment, a step change 

  • Meet them halfway - or at least accommodate a bit

  • Lunchtime brown-bag product talks

  • Turn the Ship Around - although better for leaders than general staff sometimes. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJL8zX3EVk

  • Demonstrate the cost of decisions

  • As a recent newbie to my own org, it might be they are seeking reassurance and will get more independent with feedback

  • Ask them, what do you think we should do? 

  • It’s quite weird that they aren’t adapting to the team culture if the culture is quite well established. Maybe a problem of joining a team remotely

TOPIC 2: What methods of research do you use to learn and understand where your stakeholders are when it comes to digital and data competencies when it comes to transformation? At scale?

  • Establish what DIGITAL means

  • Try a quiz/game to see where they are - how often do you look at a KPI dashboard, etc?

  • Champions and Ambassadors network

  • Understand the current state of roles and processes. Partner with HR on this?

  • Run talks, see who shows up, and pitch them!

  • Focus on the problem that this is intended to solve - make sure people agree that this is a priority and that this is the right way to solve it

TOPIC 3: What makes someone ready/not ready for a more senior product role? (e.g. Product lead/Head of Product)

  • Christina Wodtke, The Team that Managed Itself

  • Make sure you want that role - less direct control, more working through people

  • A Better Shipyard - Joff Redfern on The Product Experience

  • I’m in a similar position and what’s on my mind is ‘am I good enough, what will be expected of me, will my experience be considered deep enough’ - really hard to tell if you’re at the right level without going through the interview process I guess

  • A good sign - being able to push decision making down to people closer to the problem

TOPIC 4: How do you get product managers to talk to each other and align visions?

  • The Head  of Product (or equivalent) must block out time to make sure that this happens

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 022

pita 022.png

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?

  • 6 Thinking Hats

  • 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)

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 021

Screenshot+2020-10-07+at+14.07.37.jpg

TOPIC 1: Facilitation tips/tools for virtual stakeholder workshops?(especially for in depth product discovery, with lots of senior clients in the same meeting )

TOPIC 2: A product manager keeps asking me: how do we define the roadmap for the next year?

TOPIC 3: Misalignment between product direction and your personal/ethical views - how do we handle this best?

  • Matt Stratford’s ProductTank talk - “Are We the Baddies?” (ProductTank London: Product in the Enterprise - March 2020): Some things are worth walking away, others are more nuanced and you can work to change them.  Dont underestimate your own influence.  Be bold where you can.  

  • Behavioural science - people sometimes dont realise they are “going with the flow”, highlighting activities could help

  • “Consequence scanning” - new agile concept, looking at unintended consequences of choices - https://www.doteveryone.org.uk/project/consequence-scanning/

  • How to connect with the core of the company, does it align? What are you fundamentally there to achieve.   Can you reframe the issue to showcase the dissonance between stated values and actual actions?

  • You cannot get from one state to another immediately - how to make the path?  

TOPIC 4: How to handle simultaneous Individual Contributor and People Mgmt duties?

  • Try blocking windows of time to work on your IC work, with help from the people who depend on you 

  • If its hard to block calendar, use flexible working to find periods of time where you can focus 

  • Speak to managers to be clear what you are expected to deliver in both roles - and be clear what can be delivered, ensure you are creating the environment for success 

  • Speak to your reports about what their growth areas are, and can they take items from your todo list to theirs to support their development 

  • IC rewarded for doing work, doing it well and doing it more.  Managers have to have a different mindset - manager sometimes has to give work to people who will do it worse than you, but the work still gets done

TOPIC 5: Burned out by working from home (or rather, how to avoid it!)

  • Schedule - liberating as you can take moments when you mean to and not just drift through work

  • Meditation - have 10 mins to let go (apps - headspace, calm)

  • Mini breaks throughout day 

  • Exercise - physical exercise helps tire you

  • Food - plan your breaks 

  • Put desk away at the end of the day for clear delineation

  • Check last week’s notes for more 

  • Having designated work/non-work time 

  • Designated turn off time for devices at end of day

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 020

pita 020.png

TOPIC 1: Silos and difficult stakeholders - how to deal with them

TOPIC 2: Data literacy - where to start in an organisation of mixed skills and competencies and some are afraid of the word data

  • Don’t assume anything

  • People who are Subject Matter Experts in other areas may speak different ‘languages’ ut have simpler philosophies and wants - just different frameworks

  • Engage them in things that solve their problems (and yours)

  • Ask them what they want to know/measure?

  • Ask them: what does data mean to them? Don’t engage from your specific domain. Break it down for a mutual understanding

  • Tricia Wang: The human insights missing from big data | TED Talk  and her course with Matt LeMay, Integrated Data Thinking.

  • Don’t teach someone to fish if they don’t have a pole/hook/net. Make sure they have the tools and the knowledge as needed.

TOPIC 3: How do you “switch off” for small intervals during the workday, i.e. lunchbreak, especially from home?

  • Get out of the house 

  • Run

  • Shop

  • Read

  • Cook (prep lunch). Bake sourdough

  • 5-minute workouts where you don’t need workout clothes or equipment: Playlist 

  • Do an online workout (especially if live with other people)

  • Look up at the sky. Actually look!

  • Move around the house. Sit in different places

  • YinYoga.com - The Home Page of Yin Yoga

  • Turn video off for meetings when just listening and change position

  • Do NOT start online gaming

  • eat/snack in your garden/on a walk

TOPIC 4: Onboarding to a new team / part of the product - tips?

  • Start with a specific project  of fixed duration - but also create a space of demoing everything we have, delay the actual objective for a while

  • Get a view of the data

  • Customer service - incoming calls/queries

  • Test the product

  • Stakeholder formal interviews (Post a sample)

  • Talk to customers (alone or with others, ideally not with people too senior to you)

  • Go through any research/discovery on the product genesis: Why did we make this in the first place?

  • Innovation games (like Business Origami: A Method For Service Design | by Chenghan (Hank) Ke) 

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 019

pita 19.png

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?

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 018

pita+18.jpg

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

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 017

pita 17.png

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

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 016

pita16.png

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?

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 015

PITA015.jpg

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

Read More
randy silver randy silver

PITA 014

pita+014.jpg

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)

Read More
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.

Read More