What have we chatted about?
We take notes at all PITA meetups, because our memory is shocking.
PITA 063
I'd love to know what y'all doing, if anything with AI
Dave Killeen’s episode of The Product Experience, he said that he wouldn’t hire anyone who doesn’t use AI regularly. His talk at ProductCon is ace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gL_Vw9TCxk
Drafting and summarizing text
One more techy PM generates some ad hoc python code to analyse data
Tried Cursor, WIndsurf, Loveable for coding - all good for prototyping, but stuff that’s designed to be thrown away. But you do need to be a bit techy to make it actually work.
Misty on Mac lets you do local LLMs and that’s been fun. Tried Claude, Gemini, Deepseek… but so far, generating text is the best thing for me. Generating something that I can argue against/tear apart is useful.
Been using it for storyboards & illustrations - I have issues with this - but it’s been useful to craft prompts and get people under the skin of things with illustrations.
Matt Webb - he’s done some fun things, as seen on his blog: https://interconnected.org
Generating user scenarios
Started building my custom AIs. Including an LLM that let me do 6 months of strategy work in a few weeks, including generating user needs from synthetic user research.
Generating JTBD
Another one: Generating graphs/maps from spreadsheets/CSVs is another one. (Node maps are easy enough.) I love drawing. I love spreadsheets. But hey come and take the fun from me AI (because you’re just _faster_.)
Every project you have should have it’s own LLM
LLM tools in Service Design, Ryan Haney
Email subject lines!
Anyone else think about when you have to use it? I always have a slight sense of guilt because, you know, the environment.
AND Digital _ The Convergence - Stuart Munton - AitC Bristol - Nov 2024.pdf
Moving beyond "we shipped the feature" culture to "we are creating a sustainable, end to end experience" culture
It’s a real issue/challenge. Moving teams towards customer segments has helped a bit. It’s a real issue when there’s no real company strategy in place.
Model the change by creating goals that span Digital and Business teams - a shared goal, endorsed by leadership
You need to earn your seat at the table to be seen as a partner sometimes. (You often need to earn the trust to get the time to create the stuff everyone needs to stay aligned)
Changing the perspective: it’s not just the sum of the parts, ticking the boxes, it’s the results that matter -
Jeff Patton: Owning Agile from Mind the Product Engage Hamburg 2018 - adding an extra column to a scrum board, after shipped/done to ensure that value has been measured
Matt LeMay and Dave Wascha have both done a lot on this topic lately
And – not everybody ‘values’ the time spent on those ‘activities’ - we already know what we want and we understand our ‘service/system’ - JFDI
How are (non-us passport holders) people feeling about US Conferences?
There are tons of interesting people and things, but I’m not sure I want to go right now
PITA 062
How to encourage the formal creation of a customer-service team to improve things?
Communities of Practice - use another guise instead of a ‘team’ - to solve the issue
Soft rules / guidance / principles for how we consistently operationalise this. Expand from TEch support to more general support?
WHY is this important? What’s the success criteria for doing it well?
Creating a better experience - getting the documentation clear - had massive benefits. We simplified things, and our deployments went from 3 months to 2 weeks.
If we’re doing this extra thing, either we're not doing it well, or we’re not doing something else. What’s the actual priority?
Job / Consulting / Coaching Work market - wtaf!
Seemed to shift last year - much tighter than in my previous experience. Some sporadic things, and better if you have a UK Gov security clearance already.
US and German markets both in recession, US leadership says that their L&D budgets are gone.
People think AI will fix everything.
Big orgs have put a lot of money into AI, but no payback - where will the money go now?
VC - people are shutting things down, not investing
Phyl Terry - never search alone
Being on the hiring side - it’s a mess of BS of AI spam
It’s all about relationships. Work your network.
Worries about ageism - some of us (most of us?) are hitting the age where this feels like an issue
Have you seen the friction between disciplines getting worse during the downturn?
Given that ‘AI WILL SAVE US’, generalists should be valued. But instead everyone seems to want to hire niche specialists, and everyone is digging in and defending their territory
Uncertainty in the economy breeds protectionism & conflict
Airbnb had a bad influence - tho they didn’t fire all their Product Managers, people THOUGHT that they had
Founder mode - lots of places moving back towards command & control. People are not feeling like they can make decisions; they’re being pressured for short-term things and are misinterpreting it as the fault of other disciplines.
More remote - less time in person makes it harder to empathise and build teams/cultures across silos
BAs in a 'Pizza sized Agile team' - How?
Worked in one team - Product person was business/market focused, in an environment that was highly regulated and changeable. So BA was the SME in the legal/regulatory frameworks. Both would get involved in writing stories, tho.
I don’t like having a junior person - BA or PO - writing all the stories and PM being less involved in day-to-day. Make the junior person the PM, and have the Lead/Group PM an official contact/connection to the team
BA is a generic title - they can do lots of different things.
BAs are needed when there’s a high level of detail. On the ground with operational detail.
PITA 061
If you're Neurodiverse, do you tell people? Do you explain your traits? How do people respond? How's it worked out?
It’s always been great when people let me know that they are and what their needs are - it’s established a great baseline for how we establish rapport
What is the difference between ‘I work in a different way’ and adjusting for disability?
Experienced people using the autistic or neurodiverse labels as an excuse for being asses. Not a blanket accusation - it’s about hiding behind the label as an excuse in certain specific cases. (Asses come in all shapes and sizes.)
Mixed success with a WORKING WITH ME user guide - everyone providing a guide. Seen it go well in some cases and poorly in places that couldn’t care less. Worked better where it’s run as an open sharing session, more of a group conversation. What’s worked best is when the team has agreed actions off the back of it.
Establishing product mindset when you don't have enough PMs to go around
Espouse it outside of the PM role - anyone can talk about WHY are we doing this, HOW will we measure it, WHY this over that, Experimentation, etc… UX, Dev, Delivery or Business people can fulfill this function. How do you encourage it across the organisation?
Try to push it down from leadership, or up and across with a Community of Practice
Creating spaces for people to share cultural best practices
Leverage the PMs you have to mentor other teams or act as a consultant. Avoid using product language wherever possible. Help them refine ideas - asking things like Who is going to use it? Makes a massive difference.
Training in basic things - Discovery techniques, Metrics, etc - can be really great for others across the business
Drop the discipline labels - start talking about activities & capabilities; work together about who has done this before or is interested in doing so
MD of Pixar kept a backlog of small problems that anyone might be able to solve - he gave these tasks to new joiners
Tips/resources for design stuff when you don't have any designers...?
There are some great design systems out there. Lloyds, NHS, UK Gov - that you can use as a starting point. They’ll get you from A - D, not all the way to Z - but it can be very useful and a great start.
Follow Vitaly Friedman’s LinkedIn
LukeW | Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks -a Web design & usability book by Luke Wroblewski this guy is the OG of forms in particular. If its forms
Using a design system, even if rubbish, to get everyone on the same page and have a common starting point
I'd also recommend something like: Home | Laws of UX , but only useful if you know what you're trying to design for
Tools that helped make something good enough - better than a Figma prototype:
Just because you have a design system doesn’t mean that the UX architecture underneath it is any good!
I will always advocate for prototyping whatever you are exploring, half because it’s a good thing to get people/teams invested and involved in designing. In browser prototypes are great. Usually quick enough to put together and even throw away. The harder bit is how you canvas feedback to iterate.
Tips for growing supply for a new product with low demand (2-sided marketplace)
Understanding the pain points - Discovery
Upping the incentive for suppliers
Go wide on the problem statements, then invalidate them 1 by 1
Write down some numbers on success/failure and when we might kill this idea - did you size the opportunity correctly? Are people ready for this?
PITA 060
How do you introduce new ways of working to a team you've just joined? They claim to use agile ways of working but it looks more like waterfall.
Christina Wodtke’s The Team that Managed Itself - the team contract
Retrospectives - identify the problems the team sees, and implement change around those things. But they have to be GOOD/USEFUL retros
Why are they doing things this way? (Chesterton’s fence )- Discover the underlying causes
Help them solve a problem that they can’t currently get over
Forget Agile vs Waterfall - no one really cares if they’re doing it ‘right’, they care if it works for them
DORA metrics for devs, SPACE framework (for delivery related topics)
Christoph’s Product Model Workshop
Have 1:1 coffees - run discovery on the team
What do you do when there's no actual strategy from management?
Teams often are missing situational awareness - how the organisation works (business model, understanding of customer needs, understanding of market, understanding of value chain).
Look at past decisions, and how the organisation makes decisions - there’s a difference between writing down an ambition and operationalising it
Do they think they have a strategy? Is the mis-alignment obvious?
Make one up - based one that the company is doing - and let people disagree with it
Where folk are spending money/people is often a useful clue to whether reality & fluffy statements are differing :-)
Can you measure if you’re making progress?
Don’t argue about whether it’s a strategy - work on making sure that people understand if progress is being made. And understand if the things being done line up towards supporting progress.
Strategy: As a recommended read (because everyone recommended this) Turn This Ship Around is pretty fun reading, even better audiobook
Is there really resistance to change? Or is it cliché?
Changing habits is hard
Motivation and Benefits are core to the topic - what’s in it for me (WIIFM)?
How the change is implemented is key.
“It was always like that, and that’s fine.”
A spectrum from Core Belief to easy to change.
Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns’ Fearless Change books are really nice — talking about patterns of change and where they do/don’t work.
Org Change vs. Individual Change
Muscle Memory/Inertia
What does the environment support/naturally lead to? / Way of least resistance.
Why is your way better than mine?
Should product managers design? How (if at all) have you seen team sizes change during this downturn?
Hard role splits are stupid. More fluid roles are coming up more often - like UX engineers, UX who also do visual design
Approaches to team design - Wardley map example, Team Topologies
In some cases, I’m seeing teams merged (bigger teams), which is causing different issues (coordination, alignment)
More of an internal agency for design
Hiring or acquiring specialist skill sets requires more justification/business case
The specialists were laid off or asked to take on more generalist roles, and the pipeline for hiring broke
Meta said they’ll use AI to replace junior/mid-level developers
PITA 059
Topic 1: What topics do you want to learn more about next year?
AI - using AI to improve my craft, to be more productive - make better decisions and have more impact
Understanding my industry (energy) better
Getting better at leadership.
Agentic AI, Design Agent talks to engineering AI, etc.
How PM shifts as AI enables change in the role
Security
How Boards can be so full of people that don’t understand digital
Topic 2: OKRs. Are there too much of them these days?
The intent of OKRs is great… and when done well can be clarifying and aligning
But good OKRs/processes to generate them often aren’t as strong.
What’s better?
Which are they - starting point or finishing point?
They’re great as a forcing function to focus on Outcomes, when used well
They can be a starting point for change
But if the culture is shit, your OKRs will also be shit
It’s just goal setting/strategic planning/management by objectives by any other name
It works well in firms that are already good at setting goals. It fails in places where the management is incapable of creating SMART goals
All tools suck. Some are useful. They’re useful when we use them to have better conversations so we can make better decisions, faster.
Topic 3: Meeting people where they are in a transformation
Explore the pain - understand the problem, for both teams and leadership. Try to address them with minimal baggage - both internal issues and customer problems.
How do you get under the skin of whether people CAN or WANT to change? Be clear about whether a change brief is achievable.
Inertia is a real thing
You can facilitate/enable change, but not force it. People have to have a reason to change.
Language is key
Drive the change from within after exposing the system - make the system see itself. Start with mapping things
Topic 4: What are you most satisfied using AI at work with recently?
ChatGPT - developing good metrics and the data to drive that
Developing leads from a LinkedIn post, ordered by revenue and current customer status
Working at a consultancy with an FMCG client: Claude got us 70% there in research for the research brief and a marketing brief
Google suite can now run Javascript. I use Claude/ChatGPT to write scripts to automate tasks from Sheets. Great for Productivity
Case workers write impenetrable, complex notes. We used it to lower the reading age to 7 and clarify - not 100% success, but a great first step.
PITA 058
TOPIC 1: How do you think about - "I honestly never saw a behavioral change that was executed and brought results within a quarter. Yet, putting quarterly goals on a product team will push them to have an even higher pressure on focusing on short-term wins and a lower inclination on dedicating a lot of time on discovering different solutions." Quote by Francesca Cortesi
What’s the motivation?
Bad manifestation: when you need to report quarterly profits, and drive short-term goals
Better: breaking down quick wins into achievable chunks
Behavioural goals for internal - is all about building habits
Behavioural changes for customers are different - they take longer. Setting goals this way may imply an assumption of HOW to change the behaviour, not solving the customer problem, leading to a focus on output instead of outcome and locking a team into a feature factory approach.
Changing companies to work from quarters to 4-month chunks worked a treat for us
Topic 2: What is the most difficult/painful/challenging type of presentations as a product person and why and how did you make it work?
Where the CEO asked us to jump straight to the last slide
When you’re trying to align people across multiple silos
When you have bad news to share
Time-poor stakeholder who doesn’t care about the narrative / Sceptical senior stakeholder
Someone with a lot of influence but low interest
Ex-Amazon people. No slides! Prep for a discussion, not a presentation.
Anytime I didn’t understand the preferred format of the people I need to communicate to/get decisions from
Not knowing who the audience was
Topic 3: Thoughts on founder mode?
As both a founder and a product person in a separate hyper-growth company… it comes across that Chesky has a hate for senior managers. This may come from hiring the wrong senior managers.
Startups need to move fast, no time for lots of discussion. So it may work for them. Or have worked for them at a point.
Different stages of companies need different types of leaders.
It’s an excuse for bad hiring
Bad communication and bad vision setting by the founders themselves
I hate it… but if you’re an artist enamoured with your own vision, it’s what it takes.
As things scale, founder mode is just poor management
It’s dangerous
Topic 4: Has anyone led a team of volunteers - if so, how do you make that work? Does it change the dynamic?
Put their benefit in the centre
People not meeting standards
People not understanding or aligning with the mission
People volunteer sustainably out of intrinsic motivations. If their interest does not align, terminate the relationship.
Use open source model - lead can accept or reject changes/proposals. Delegate leadership for tasks or meetups to individuals to manage as they see fit
PITA 057
(Actual participants may vary from those depicted)
Topic 1: Creating a great environment for Product people to succeed - what do YOU need?
Autonomy - but with accountability
Trust
An environment that’s safe to ask for help when you need it
A clear direction - and the freedom to pursue it
Education of the people around product about how we’re working - communication from both leadership with peers, and by the product team. Sponsorship from the CEO.
It’s OK to ask WHY and not be perceived as a troublemaker
Being empowered to be an owner - how I work, and what I can try. Ownership of their domain, comes with the responsibility to never say ‘this isn’t my job’
Tension between autonomy & ownership. But the org needs to be set up for this. Be explicit about the principles around this.
Trust in each other to do our jobs
X-functional teams with the right people (including SMEs)
If I’m not defining the WHAT or the WHY, then the person who is doing so must be very clear and open about it
Working patterns & boundaries being clear
Topic 2: How to figure out if the management track is right for you (vs senior IC)
Design your ideal day/week - what does it look like? Which type of problems are you solving? What type of activities are you doing?
Senior IC roles are less common in smaller firms
What is the role that comes after that role? Is that something you aspire to?
It’s not always a clear decision - sometimes you have to try to figure it out. Especially if you can make it a two-way door decision.
One way to try before taking on a role is via mentoring
I second that try both approach - exactly what I did and through that decided to move towards the principal route.
If taking a management role, is the support structure in place?
Can you get support from internal or external coaching? Management development is something that is in the best interest of the firm. HR Partners can be very helpful on this.
Topic 3: What's your number one characteristic you look for in a Product/Design leadership hire?
Balance the need for change with how to approach it. Empathy for the approach of others.
Situation-specific - what is needed to succeed in THIS role, at THIS company, at THIS time?
Curiosity
Really cares for the people
Self-starter on the vision of the work
You’re stepping away from your craft - being able to balance the practice with the management responsibilities
Humility - knowing what you’re NOT strong at
Topic 4: Any helpful strategies for balancing product autonomy with strategic alignment?
Bucketing - what % of capacity/effort do we want to spend on company strategy vs bottom-up efforts?
Understanding the dependencies of different teams’ strategies
Explore the tension between the two with the teams that are experiencing it
Motivation mapping - understanding what their motivations are, especially around perceived success or reward
Opportunity Solution Trees and diagrams - use them to facilitate better conversations
Also go as ‘outcome’ based as possible in your ask - leave as much flexibility in the solutions (implementation choices) to the teams so they still feel ‘empowered’ / challenged.
Topic 5: What kind of "information & learning" formats (Newsletters, LinkedIn, Workshops, Books, …) do you enjoy/use most?
Miro/diagrams
There are TOO many newsletters - and I don’t read them!
Books
Reforge/training
Threads is becoming interesting
Podcasts
Communities / interacting with actual people
PITA 056
How to teach the rest of the org what Product does?
Align to goals from the org, then work as a facilitator/enabling function
Make sure you have a clear remit and a senior champion
Be honest with the team that you’re hiring in to do this work - they need to be both Product and Change Agents
Double-check with the people who are allies - what do they think Product is? Or for?
Create open/group forums for prioritisation discussions - bring everyone in to the discussions
Be clear that this isn’t about being in charge, but about fostering better outcomes (and outputs/outcomes)
Share videos (from mindtheproduct.com or similar) - but not ones that make product feel like a magic cult
Use their language, not the product buzzwords - what we do is just good management practice, same as what everyone else does
Run an anti-problem session: what does the worst version of Product Management look like?
How to get people comfortable with story telling
Practice, practice, practice
Motivation mapping - understand what the audience needs. WIIFM? (what’s in it for me?)
Documentary storytelling approach can work, too
Perspective - what are they not seeing? Do they know how their thing fits into the bigger picture?
Use the examples from users/customers as an enabler - bring people into the synthesis
Front Doors and change request processes: dealing with stakeholders
Alignment on risk can be difficult - create a mechanism to have good discussions on this
Be clear about responsibility for Triage - who’s responsible, and how quickly
Be able to articulate how things align (or don’t!) to organisational priorities - and get people to self-sort into those buckets. (But police it, so no one cheats to get their pet project approved!)
Get them to commit as well - money, time, support. If it’s so important, you need to commit as much as we do to make it happen.
PITA 055
ICEBREAKER:
Favourite Summer Olympics sport
Topic 1: How do you manage the tension between wanting all teams to be "standard" vs wanting each team to be different?
Go one step further: what are their expectations? What do they need? Is it about reporting? Are they really expecting that every team is measured on the same result and working in the same mode (innovation vs. scaling vs. …)
We had some basic guidelines at one place, but tried to leave teams to decide locally what they could. Roadmap & Strategy needed to be aligned
What’s the minimal bureaucracy? Town-Planners vs. Explorers. Different rules and approaches for teams in different maturity phases.
Perspective is key here - get the articulation from each side of what’s working and not, and what they need to succeed - then define the minimum needed to make it work, bolstered by good intentions & understanding.
Autonomy does not mean that you don’t communicate well. In fact, autonomy comes with a huge responsibility to be a great communicator.
Standardising on multiple tools that do more or less the same thing can be a real problem, though.
Topic 2: Properties of Great Training Days - what made it great?
Hands on & practical really make a difference
Get someone doing SOMETHING in the first 5 minutes. Something relevant. That keeps energy levels high.
STORYMAPPING - what are all the things you did this morning before getting to this session?
INTERVIEWING - groups of 3 with a prompt, straight away, talking to a stranger and observing
Better than a deck or icebreaker
The Workshop Survival Guide by Rob Fitzpatrick & Devin Hunt
Have a GREAT end of the workshop that relates to what you’re doing next
What’s one thing you’re going to do tomorrow?
Oh I like the idea of nudging folk after the workshop — what did you do… nice!
Write a postcard to yourself & the facilitator sent them 3 months later
Or accountability partners - what do you want to be different in 1 month?
Get great feedback
Close the feedback loops - what worked and didn’t work?
Difference between was the workshop good, and did they learn the thing? Are they applying it?
https://lwlies.com/ Rating: Anticipation, Enjoyment, in Retrospect
Topic 3: what is your number 1 problem with making decisions as a product person?
A lack of strategy or vision to prioritise against
Lack of metrics/targets for success - there’s a massive difference between making something 5% better and 70% better.
Lack of context for decisions.
Paralysis - people afraid to make decisions
Be aware of too many cooks. Who is accountable for the decision?
Faith Forster’s Decision Matrix:
Topic 4: Is there a community for product people with "strong passions/sidelines" and how do these influence their product practice? (I’m biased)
Just ask people in other fields about what they do and how they approach it, and the problems that they solve, and the challenges they have to overcome
PITA 054
ICEBREAKER: Summer Jams
English Teacher, Sophie Lloyd’s ‘imposter syndrome’, Hong Kong Ping Pong, People Disco Machine’s ‘Hypontize’, My Baby, Liza Minelli in Cabaret, A Star, The Interrupters, Culture Shock, Shellac’s final album
Topic 1: So much that already exists and needs to be supported, and yet, new stuff required. What’s the best way to organise teams to deal with this?
Lisa Long’s talk on Killing Zombies/Tending your garden
Separating teams to BAU and New Development is a solution. But it’s not a good solution for lots of reasons - mostly because no one ever wants to be on the BAU team.
There’s a fallacy about it being easy to kill products and spin something new up
Focus on your ICP. Anything outside it, kill it or put it into maintenance mode (if B2B contracts require it being kept alive). Or spin in out into a separate corp/P&L
Topic 2: How do you combat boredom? Saying the same thing again, and again...
People falling into the same habits over and over, after committing to change… but not sticking with it
Can anyone impose/force/tell them to work a different way?
In this case, the system usually rewards the behaviours that people default back to
Solve the problems that they believe exist/care about - you can’t get people to do anything without that as a prerequisite
Track objectives - and show them where they’re failing
Use Retros for this
If all else fails - and if you’re in a financial position to do so - move on
Topic 3: How to not get sucked into delivery detail when colocated with a delivery team (or should we?)
Give them a vision of the big picture
How do you -a sa group - want to work together? Emily Webber’s Capability Comb & Christina Wodtke’s Team Charter (from The Team That Managed Itself) exercises are good for this
How can you communicate this challenge in their language?
Whose village are y’all in? Yours, theirs, or someone else’s? Meet them where they are.
Topic 4: Component teams, not Feature teams. Any ways (financial or otherwise) to show that Feature teams work better?
Components are not aligned with the customer
Don’t focus on components or features - focus on outcomes/results, and give teams missions around that. The component or feature may be a means to that end - but what you’re working on achieving is not the thing, but the customer & business effect.
Map out the end to end experience - User Story Maps/Journey Maps/Service blueprints are all amazing for this - to show where the effort is needed.
Understand WHY it’s structured that way - and if it’s working as intended
PITA 053
Icebreaker: Summer movie (or event) that you’re looking forward to.
Topic 1: What approaches have you seen work for scaling product transformation for large teams?
Can you divide the problem space into areas that are self-contained and mapped to the org structure, so that you can work in those bundles?
Ensure you have the org ownership of the squads and initiatives
Deliberate public check-ins - not show & tells, not ‘look how green our RAG status is’, but focus on the problems currently being faced, feedback and ad-hoc governance - using the squad ceremonies as governance
Start small is best, then scale up; Big bang never seems to work well
Let teams opt-in if they want - if they feel they’re ready and don’t need that much support, they should be able to adopt some of the principles and practices
And more coaches means you can ‘adopt’/support more teams from the day one. It’ll still take time to see success, but you can cover more of the org with a bugger force.
It’s all about principles - spread these wide, early. Not a book of rules.
Is there a middle ground between few teams and many teams at the same time? Focus teams + some teams engaging in a community of practice where they can learn from each other. And already get “a taste”
Topic 2: New Delivery Manager likes Gantt charts & flowcharts. Team is scared. What do YOU do?
Use scenario planning - options instead of a master Gantt, with pivot points
Use the waterfall if we’re in damage control mode, but not if the goal is culture change
What else can we use to help communicate certainty and uncertainty? In the UK Gov space - Service Manual, Service Standard, etc might be helpful
False certainty, confusion and excess work being created
Milestones in Gantt Chart, then work backwards in steps
Topic 3: Product Leader doesn’t manage to define problem statements and product strategy for the portfolio - how do I derive goals for my product?
Be bold - make up your own and present it to your Product leader or key stakeholders. If they don’t agree, fine - use it as a prompt to have a decent conversation or get a decision.
Or do the above, but with a humble approach - ‘i think this is wrong, can you help me fix this?’
Is there a strategy that exists, but has not been effectively communicated?
How do you get clarity of the business goals? Can those be articulated from the leadership level?
When outcome & strategy thinking hasn’t been embraced at the divisional level, do what you can
KPI Trees might also be an interesting approach, if you have big Business Goals and on the other side Ideas. Connect them by the ‘middle layer’ - KPI Trees / Impact Map Combination
Perform internal discovery about people who consume your dashboards - use it to tell business impact stories
PITA 052
Topic 1: Tips for interviewing/ recruiting PMs?
Look for PMs that have done things on the side - they understand how business actually works. Getting clients through the door, money flow, etc. (Though that has issues for people who don’t have the time for that.)
Use scenarios in the interview. Pick something that they’d have to do in the job that’s a bit tough; turn up the volume on it, and ask them to walk you through their approach. IMPORTANT: send it to them in advance. You’re not just testing their ability to bullshit/vamp. Also ask them to give concrete examples of what they’ve done in this space.
Really define the needs of the role in advance - know what you’re looking for. Do this with the hiring team and the people they’ll be working with.
Two questions I like to ask:
How do you make your team(s) better?
And how do you get better at your job/practice? (regardless of what the answer is, just to show that this is something they actively consider)
Look at using AI for some scripts - to get ideas for questions. Use it to analyse your ad. To review CVs, potentially. To identify gaps.
On AI: Raises a good point about any of the questions/case studies you share ahead of time, people could get a good answer from GPT, but you could ask your GPT to come up with in-person follow up questions that would allow to you uncover if it’s their actual answer or from an LLM.
See Hiring Product Managers - Kate Leto
Seconded - and this podcast with Kate.
Be very clear about what you want - PROJECT or PRODUCT manager, and what the organisation expects, and why the org needs a(another) PM.
And be clear (and consistently clear throughout) where the org is at with candidates.
Topic 2: Product slicing / teams definition, tips tricks, what to avoid
There’s no RIGHT way to set the team topology for every org. Define the issues that the org has, and create a model that addresses the ones that are holding you back. Know that you’ll reorg again some day.
Know that the teams will need to coordinate so that there are common elements/components/experiences across a user’s experience.
Avoid a model where you have multiple teams going to the same users, asking about different problems. You could end up looking disjointed or unfocused - or contradict yourselves.
Read Team Topologies.
Avoid a model that’s overly specialised - I was in an org where there were 10 PMs, but none of us had a real understanding of the product from end-to-end. I had to interview all my peers to understand how it worked.
I often come back to this article from Roman Pichler Feature Teams vs Component Teams
Do some customer journey mapping
Topic 3: Product consulting dealbreakers / red flags
As a consultant, you only see part of the picture. What’s stopping them from following through on your work may be external factors.
Examine: Is now the right time to be doing this for the org?
Sometimes this sort of stuff is done as a punt, to see if they’re “ready”. Or to be contradictory for the sake of self validation.
When consulting, your sample size is small. When something doesn’t work, you may need to iterate… but you also need to understand when something is an outlier.
Topic 4: getting hired in this job market / transitioning from product consulting back to pure product management
Work your network. Explain why you’re looking for non-consulting role.
Focus on the 2 or 3 things that you’re really good at and make you special, that will make you stand out.
Cast a wide net - be open to things.
Review your CV and really be critical of it: justify every word and the value it brings.
Make sure that you’re focused on the role, when you land an interview. You’re not selling YOU, you’re selling YOU in that role.
Practise your story, especially when it’s a bit tangled.
PITA 051
Topic 1: Who is experiencing Workshop/Innovation Theater? (Doing the motions and then going back to 'regular' work)
We did workshops, presented action items back to leadership… and then nothing happened
For open workshops, call out to pick one thing and take this to action
Follow-up workshops with coaching
Lack of time is an impediment - make sure they have the time to put new things into action
Especially design sprints might be the wrong format, it works best to get established teams unstuck
Workshops are just part of a bigger thing, it is not the main work
Structure the pre-work, to have a clear intent (User Needs, Business Value). Set up a clear structure around it
Use the GROW model - ask, what are the obstacles you see to putting this into practice? (Disaster perspectives, what would stop you reflection as part of the workshop)
Team-building activities really support this / Be clear if the goal is more a social activity
Topic 2: My new employer is using Shape Up across all teams. This is new to me, but it's pretty refreshing not to write all the PRDs anymore. Any other experiences with Shape Up?
https://basecamp.com/shapeup - free book and podcast with Ryan Singer about the approach
Breadboarding- creating a schematic/model for how this is intended to work without going into the weeds
Itamar Gilad’s roadmap template that makes use of some of this approach
Topic 3: 'Transformed' - anyone read it yet?
First chunk is all about DevOps. Second is the Product Operating model - Product-led, but a less-controversial term. And there’s a lot on how to do assessments and deal with objections from stakeholders. A good source for a lot of inspiration and experience. It’s a toolkit, not meant as a fun read.
Like every Cagan book, it’s helpful. It’s not anything really new if you follow his blog. A lot of things are - like in every book - over-simplified. I’m curious if it’ll really land at a CEO/CFO level.
In the interviews with him, it’s interesting to see how frustrated he gets when talking about it.
John Cutler’s article “bring fun back” has a view from the trenches on workplace culture
He refers back to Empowered and Inspired back a lot. It’s supposed to be for the C-level audience, but unclear if they’ll read it
Remember, not everyone is a board whisperer. Not everyone can lead or have major influence on a transformation. Marty & his peers only engage when they want to - when the C-suite has shown the commitment to change, using an approach that SVPG believes in.
PITA 050
Topic 1: How do you help teams see areas they need to improve without undermining / demoralising them? (bonus points - when they keep retrenching to old habits)
Test with the intended audience and show results. Now it’s not opinion, but fact.
‘Catch them doing something right’ (from The One-Minute Manager) to also reinforce good things, and compare to goo behaviours observed in the past - creates psychological safety
Show vulnerability about the things you needed to learn along the way
Using OKRs, clear targets (etc) to make expectations explicit
If not a team you have direct interaction with - Manage their managers (in private). People (largely) do what *their* bosses tell them, after all.
Create a culture of raising the bar. Heard a stat today that if sat with a high performer - your performance increases by c30% on average.
Help them to recognise the problem - in a good way.
Topic 2: how do you get a team to believe in move fast and fix and learn and fix and learn etc -- and not overthinking everything
What’s the value of the problem being solved? Is it worth all this faff? (You can also compare this to team burn rate)
Cynefin approach - figure out how to scale the insight
Risk vs Opportunity matrix - what’s the harm? Build a habit by getting them to consider the risk and just do some stuff - especially if it’s low risk and the opportunity is well understood, even more so if it’s a 2-way door.
Frame things as experiments - even delivery. Build the habit of building slice-by-slice.
There can be a fear you won’t be able to go back if it’s “delivered”.
Even if they feel they have ‘only one chance to get it right’, start to deliver ‘hidden’ slice-by-slice and build trust upstream that this is a more sustainable way to approach things. → 20% are better than nothing (because we canceled midway)
Are they chasing something perfect - perhaps talk about the opportunity cost of doing other things.
Deliberately test small things against each other, so that disposable learning is the norm. (Spikes work like this)
“Think in years - deliver in weeks”
Topic 3: How to sneak in Product methods without people (devs) realising?
Connect to what they are complaining about — bugs, “re-work,” nobody using it, etc.
Find something that actively helps them in their role and apply a technique - get some trust
Do some discovery: why are they so resistant?
How do you establish trust?
Look into the principles of transformation & change management
Stop using the language of product. Use their language and terms. (Due diligence instead of Discovery, for instance. Or Daily Check-ins instead of Stand-Ups.)
Topic 4: How long does it take to develop good 'product instincts'? How can you encourage that development in junior PMs?
Petre Wille’s Product Manager wheel - show the difference between the score they give themselves and others’ perspective on their competency
Setting expectations explicitly - make sure they know what’s being expected of them, and what good looks like
Do you do 360 feedback from a few people? a round of ‘keep doing / ( + do more of) / stop doing’. This approach has its flaws but wider canvassing has some pluses
Focus on the fact that they are showing progress (if they are) as well as how quickly they’re progressing.
Reference them against a development framework
If there are multiple people at that level, create peer relationships or communities.
PITA 049
Topic 1: How do you make change STICK in your organisation?
Trial & Error - when you push hard enough, brute force sometimes works
Frame what they are stopping - remind people of what they are NOT going to do, to make space for new things
ANTIPATTERNS:
reverting when things aren’t going well, so remove fear and pressure where possible
Look at what hasn’t worked - throwing money/people/resource may not do it
Leaders can destroy years of progress in a couple of months (from Marty Cagan’s Transformed workshop)
People trying to find alternate paths outside around obstacles
My guiding principle is following R. Buckminster Fuller’s quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Switch book - 3 angles - Motivating the elephant, Direct the rider, Shape (clear?) the path
It takes time - it may not happen now, but sowing the seeds has value
In my experience the context means various elements of the Kotter's change model still apply - created sometime ago but all the points it makes still relevant
Remember - people may take different time frames to buy in
Celebrate success - remind people of WHY you’re doing this, give them a story (of the bad, the reasons, and what good looks like)
Repetition, continual reminders of what we’re trying to do. Breaking the habit of doing it the old way - to help them notice “when this happened before we used to this, and now we do this”. “I’m noticing that I want to go and micromanage, but…”
Be brave enough to be the dissenting voice
Put the finger on the wound again and again
Topic 2: Where to start with getting teams to truly learn and build credibility with "The Business" - getting aligned on goals and permission to pursue them?
Build and communicate effective business cases
Acknowledging the issues with loss of/taking control and the psychological safety impact
Talk the language of the organisation
Build the partnership - find somewhere to build a win
Understand partner motivations (Motivation mapping)
Wonder if there is a systemic org design question here as well, blended teams with commercial/traditional folk embedded in the teams
A team - Product, or Value - can Ask a question, get an answer, understand the answer, and take action/make decisions based on that understanding. Else you have a team that just gets code into production and hopefully makes it look nice.
Accountability without autonomy is a stressful place to be - you have to find ways to work together
If you’ve got to solve the business or the product problem - start with the business problem.
Look for the reporting rituals and artefacts - shift each one a bit at a time, to talk about why
Are operations and reporting a barrier to better decision making
Topic 3: How do you figure out which bit of your system/org/service to think of as your "product"?? (It feels like I should know this but I still don't!!)
In UK Gov, the Product is what people use (or multiple things different groups of users use), and a Service covers the Product and the infrastructure/ops/supporting services that enable it. It might be that you need to make that divide clear. (A Lead Product Manager or Head of Product can also provide this coherence)
Focus on the problems that are jumping out, rather than an abstract definition of what the product is. A useful Q I have found with folk asking this sort of question is “If I could wave a magic wand and I had a crystal clear definition — what problems would be solved?”
Build a service blueprint/map, and use that to show what’s affected/involved. Start with a Journey Map, then add in layers as needed. Facilitate the creation of this if you don’t own it. It also allows for questions about HOW to solve the problems - automate or ignore? Or do it manually? Also about WHO is working on each bit
A potential useful language to talk about this is unfix, it is like Lego for org design and can help figure out what which who etc
As someone restated Kennedy, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy”.
PITA 048
Topic 1: Tips to coach a coachee on not micromanaging
The goal is to successfully delegate decision-making - creating an environment of both understanding and trust
Understand what’s scaring them and try to address that
How vulnerable is the coachee to their report? Can they say ‘I don’t know’? Can they collaborate instead of micro-managing?
What should they be doing instead of micro-managing? Cause if they’re in the weeds, they’re not doing the other important thing
Manage your decision budget - there’s only so many you can make in a day. Do you want to make the decisions that others can make?
Claire Lew - Don’t be someone else’s worst manager. What was your worst manager experience?
Setting up what good looks like for the report, use the energy towards that instead
What would be a bad manager? Tap into their experience with bad managers, are they acting now like that?
How can you ever be promoted if no one else can do that role?
Tom Dolan - NotCon - Shit, I'm A Manager - Back in 2004 this was me. Sadly the CSS on the blogposts has long since died, so the powerpoint is the best approach.
Asking their direct reports what they need? How they can support them. Not assuming that what they are currently doing is the best way to support.
Topic 2: Finding the right level for leadership between being too prescriptive and clear enough
Repeat: The goal is to successfully delegate decision-making - creating an environment of both understanding and trust
Make sure you have generated a clear understanding of the problem and the north star, the WHY narrative
A mix of top-down and bottom-up goals helps. A standardised template that everyone can contribute to in an async way can be a useful approach.
If the team can’t act on things - they have autonomy - then you can be general. If they don’t, you might need to be prescriptive. Useful as a way to generate a better environment.
Are the “levels” understanding each other probably? Is the way things are communicated clear for the other side. Are the teams ready for this kind of direction? What is stopping them to act on them?
OKRs always fail at first - you need to build on them, iterate your way to success over a few quarters. Introduce them in a small space first, then grow.
Empowered leadership with broad goal-setting techniques does not work on waterfall projects - for example, infrastructure re-platofrming.
Give the context. Lead with context. Does the team get all the context. What would bad look like to establish guardrails.
Did the team go rogue? Or were they not provided with appropriate context?
We are learning this process together.
Autonomy with Accountability
Topic 3: What's your biggest learning from 2023?
Values vs Priorities -people demonstrate their approach by what they spend their time on, and I’m paying a lot more attention on it
Empathy for people I’ve been critical of in the past
Life happens fast, and the unexpected things will come and screw you up. Don’t worry too much about the expected things, as other things will come up!
Engage more with communities - be open, be present, network in a genuine way, and find the way that works for you
When you suspect that you’ve taken the wrong gig, you probably have done so
You can’t get all of your self-value from work. Your life is important. Build the habits to make sure you can survive beyond the next job hunt.
Make concrete proposals. Write things down, get out of only talking about them.
Work collaboratively - especially on research and building understanding
Feel free to define yourself - and tell everyone what it is you do, and what you want/need. IAnd feel free to redefine yourself.
People who care about you and will support you when you experiment, People who won’t do that may not be the ones you want around you.
PITA 047
Topic 1: How do you tell, from the outside, whether a company has good product process/discipline/philosophy?
I ask about a hard decision they made, and how they made it - looking for courage. Did they make the harder decision, or the short, quick wins?
Tell me about a time when an external customer request disrupted your strategy… When you had to pause your team’s plan to accommodate something external… Diagnoses what tradeoff decisions they make and how they make them
How do you define success for this role? What’s better? - helps me diagnose expectations and any mis-alignment
How does your roadmap get developed? Drill into detail.
Do they ship relevant, useful things?
Topic 2: Kanban Boards for Product Management work, pros & cons?
Trying to make measurable how I spend my time - and ensure that I’m making progress, especially when I feel blocked
Alternatives to using my calendar
Depends on what you’re good at
Weekly, track the top 3 things you spent time on and sense-check - are you on track?
Now/Next/Later can be useful
Topic 3: What's stopping you/your team from being more successful?
Stakeholder management - communication so that they get the info they need in a way that works for them, while still having the time to ship
Alignment around how we work - vision for the product set, so teams go off in their own directions, no coherent long-term vision
Culture - top-down, autocratic. Leads to empowerment issues
Lack of clear strategy
Over-delegated to people who needed a lot more guidance
Optimising my sales funnel
Changing the environment is key
Mark Dalgarno ‘s blogs are great on this topic
Topic 4: Making the transition from 'doing' product to a more strategic/Head of role, when a company doesn't know how to do that…
Melissa Perri’s chart on how to spend your time at different levels:
Move from counting in weeks to counting in quarters
High Output Management by Andy Grove
What problem am I solving? Who is my main stakeholder and what am I solving for them?
Multipliers, by Liz Wiseman - making sure you’re supporting the people on your team, so that they can succeed
Develop your coaching skills - and knowing when to coach & when to mentor
You’re only as strong as the weakest person on your team -
PITA 046
Topic 1: How might you help product people plan long-term without sending them on a SAFe course?
Lack of confidence that anything in LATER (Now/Next/Later) will ever happen - and lack of confidence that anything in Now & Next will happen in a reasonable time
Team lacks maturity in terms of planning
We put programme milestones on top of a Now/Next/Later roadmap to show our commitments
SAFe is not fit for purpose - it’s Waterfall in Agile’s clothing. And it’s been a disaster where we are
What do you actually mean by planning? And how honest do you want to be about it?
We had to take the stakeholder on a journey - so did a case study with them to get them there
Topic 2: When is a product initiative really an IT system change project, and does the difference matter?
Break it into pieces - they can be incremental and agile
Try Wardley Mapping - where are you reliant on user behaviour? Those need to be more agile/are more uncertain.
Differentiate between Lean and agile
If there isn’t a value story for PMs to realise over and above tech being de-risked - they may be getting in the way
Agile isn’t for everything - some things are infrastructure and thrive as waterfall, with some derisking of assumptions
Topic 3: I'm interviewing with a company that has both POs and TPMs dedicated roles. Looks overly complex IMHO. Curious if folks saw this type of org before and how exactly do they collaborate with PMs
Every org does this differently (POs and PMs) - we do it to try and stop PMs from burning out too quickly
This is “Product Owner = Backlog Administrator” - like the BBC use BAs. To fill in the detail for the devs because PMs are spread too thin.
Lots of orgs turn BAs into POs, because ‘agile is cool’
BAs get ahead by creating certainty. PMs by pointing out doubt.
Lazily PO (as a role) tends to own backlog, PM (as a job) owns roadmap. Just usually PM jobs expect both covered.
Depending on the size of the org - or the age of it! - this isn’t necessarily a worry. But in a smaller or newer company, it seems way too complicated.
PITA 045
TOPIC 1 Discuss the "Death" of Product Managers (AirBnB, etc) - based on Brian Chesky ast FigmaCon
Probably good for Product management to move away from proJect management
Seems to happen at places with poor management culture, lack of strategy, vision, etc
Many of them were moved rather than removed - to areas like product marketing, etc
Good conversation to have - there is huge overlap between product, UX, Design, etc - so good to have a chat about who actually does what, give the right people the right accountability
Public sector perspective (UK): they’re strengthening product, bringing in contract people to do service design, etc
Might heal the issue where there are both Product Managers (in the Tech org) and a Business Owner
TOPIC 2 Pricing - any favourite strategies for figuring out how to approach it for a new product?
Start with benchmarking - competitor analysis, establish the value prop of components, and work from there
We’ve done loads of work to see if we have Pricing PMF - what we’ve learned is that you have to try a few things to get at the nuance, don’t just do one thing. Including surveys, user testing of new flows with different pricing options, qualitative Van Westendorp analysis. The last one increased the leadership team’s confidence the most, due to the CEO’s familiarity of the approach - though it was also a bit all over the place, based on different age ranges, markets, etc.
People focusing on solving pricing/billing problems - OpenMeter, Stigg.io, Hyperline, SaaS Pricing Explorer, Prisync, Jade | Reach your monetisation potential
Need to also look at it from the business requirements side - what does the company need from this? - forms the Feasibility side of a strategic analysis
Also you need to look at subscriptions vs in-app purchases
TOPIC 3 Experimentation - communicating the less exciting stuff
We kept a spreadsheet of all the tests & hypotheses that we ran, with PASS/FAIL notes on all. If we got anything significant, we’d put it in a deck and present it more formally
Do you need to present the boring stuff? You may not need to communicate it all
Worth presenting all learnings as valuable - even if they tell you what not to do.
Share the connective tissue between the lower level experiment with the problem/opportunity and ultimate business outcome (e.g. through an Opportunity Solution Tree)
Communicate in advance what hypotheses you will be testing
The value of experimentation is not always about validation - changing the org’s understanding of users is just as valuable. Make sure you update personas, etc, when you have new information, and communicate that as well
TOPIC 4 Designing interfaces for LLM's and beyond. How are you measuring success?
Loom has introduced a feature that will summarise your thoughts into a summary - and then asks you for feedback as to value. That’s a good signal for the development team.
People understand that this is a new tech, and seem happy to give confidence score feedback.
Define why you’re using AI, what the problem that you’re solving is, and design your metrics around that
Predictive analytics - looking for risk patterns - is important to us, so we’re exploring the potential of it when the data we collect is largely free text
Speed is of the essence right now - try lots of things. We don’t yet know what good experiences and interfaces are when using this tech. Avoid one-way doors, and just try to innovate at pace.
Do you want to expose when AI is used? In Notion, most people likely don’t want others to know that AI was used
TOPIC 5 The joys (or not) of experiencing products as a product person
I understand the value of good (useful) feedback and find myself taking that responsibility seriously - I work hard to ensure that I do this, and take joy in it
I remind myself: I am an edge case, most of the time
Bad UX annoys me - especially when I have to ask my kids to help me with deciphering it
Bad use of fields - phone fields that accept text, for example
Knowing the logic behind the scenes can sometimes mean we’re not experiencing products the way they’re designed to be experienced
PITA 044
TOPIC 1 How do you balance folk [dis]liking practices with those practices being [in]effective?
Change is all about the learning curve - it gets worse before it gets better.
So... can I embed with the team for a sprint or two to empathise and then move on with the change?
Need to see and believe the problem first and then look at the right way to solve it
You can only solve for things people agree is a problem - so outcomes must matter before you work on outputs
Frame things as experiments, so you can back out of it if needed, be clear about your first time-frame and also make sure to revisit and reflect if the expected outcome was reached
Get aligned on where you are NOW (“point A”) and where you want to BE (“point B”) as a starting point (inspired by Janice Fraser - see this post)
Situational leadership - determine what type of leadership does each person need for a given issue. Determine if things are a WILL or a SKILL issue
There’s some great stuff on team contracts in Christina Wodtke’s The Team that Managed Itself
TOPIC 2: How are UX, UCD, Customer Success and Product Design taking away from vs augmenting the product job family?
It’s all been positive for me - there’s so much to do in a PM role, and it’s just getting more complex (customer journeys, etc) - so more collaboration is very welcome.
I see PMs with no training in these areas trying to do these roles - and it’s not great.
+1 It really pisses off user researchers when PMs tell them how to conduct research. Excuse my French.
We have designers in the same job family - so the challenge has come from Acct Management or Customer Success - they look at one customer at a time, not the big picture. So we bring them into a customer council to give them a wider perspective.
+1 to challenge of GTM or success teams having a myopic view of a single or few customers instead of the entire customer base - “Squeaky wheel syndrome” 😂
It works really well in some B2B teams, where the personalities jell - but it can be a mess when a new role is introduced. People already on the team may feel like they’re losing a part of their responsibilities. We had to redefine the team’s RACI to get it sorted, and had to sell them on why the new role is a good thing.
Every time a new person joins a team, it’s a new team
How people are compensated also comes into this mix
Where Product is the new kid on the block, it can generate a perception of screwing up existing practices. I like to get everyone in the room and talk about competencies and outcomes without job titles - then mapping them on.
People who had bad prior experiences can come with biases based on that.
Some people care deeply about craft and doing it ‘right’.
When people try to do things in a new way, some cling to the old processes - and try to hack around them instead of working with them
+1 to picking folk who have migrated from another discipline to be the comms person to that discipline.
TOPIC 3 Operationalising Customer Insights
We used ProductBoard to create bite-sized insights, linked to user stories…. But no one used it
We started including Insights & Experiments it in the Sprint reviews, which brought other parts of the org into it
Ensure the research is topical and useful, relevant & timely
Before we do any new research, look into what we’ve done - when did we last look at this question? How can we build on that? Avoid discovery fatigue amongst the customers
Qual and quant info, owned by & generated by different parts of the org - bringing the big picture together is really hard.
We put ProductBoard & ZenDesk together to do path analysis, etc - but the important thing is that PB was just for the Product team to own and use
+1 - we had a similar problem with ProdPad (non-product folks considered it to be the “PM tool”)
Can be a recruiting issue - we have the wrong kind of user researcher. All theory, not effecting change in the org
Give the researcher the challenge of documenting ‘ How are decisions made in this organisation?’ - if the answer is that the PM makes some crap up and puts it on the board, that’s not a problem that research can solve. But if the decisions are made at a big strategy meeting, it’s critical to get the info to the right people before or in that session.
If you value evidence-based decision making, it should be folded into the reason WHY decisions are made.
Prioritisation is not about value, it’s about confidence (Ant Murphy)
Data can go to information… but it needs to go to Insight to be useful
“Insight” in itself is an emergent thing, you can’t simply “give” someone else an insight. They need to emotionally invest to the extent they come to the same conclusion themselves.
The key thing is the ability to find answers quickly
Set experiments within the teams to operationalise insights - decisions made based on things we learned