What have we chatted about?

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

 
randy silver randy silver

PITA 006

PITA 006

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

TOPIC 1:

How is your team measured?

  • Measuring the team or measuring the outcomes?

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

  • Shape Up book

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

  • ProdPad - good for idea realisation

  • Somehow, no one mentioned OKRs

TOPIC 2:

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

  • An open-source alternative to Zoom that works

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

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

  • Non-technical solutions for social welfare

  • Education 

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

  • Hiring solutions - good candidates vs bad, onboarding

  • Better use of printers

TOPIC 3:

Sensible ways to do competitor research

TOPIC 4:

What does leadership mean in product management?

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

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

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

  • People, Processes & Prioritisation

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

  • The Product of You by Melissa Perri

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

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 005

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

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

TOPIC 1:

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

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

  • Some hiring more aggressively while they can get quality candidates

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

  • Fintech starting to slow

  • Short-term contracts not really happening

  • Contract-to-perm roles in healthcare

  • Net, fewer opportunities

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

  • Recruiter view: really mixed

  • Greenfield innovation is dead at the moment

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

TOPIC 2:

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

TOPIC 3:

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

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

  • North star + closer to home metrics for teams

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

  • Assign sales goals to features w/ quantified revenue

  • Ask customers for success stories + metrics

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

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

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

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

TOPIC 4:

Pitch Product Discovery for tech teams who see value = release

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 004

pita004.jpg

TOPIC 1: Remote Discovery & Framing

  • Resources popping up everywhere

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

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

  • Liberating structures, in smaller groups in breakout rooms

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

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

  • Schedule in time to review

  • How to create serendipity

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

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

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

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

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

  • Show the value of disrupting yourself

  • Show the value of the product mindset

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

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

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

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

TOPIC 3: Frantically Changing Priorities vs strategy

  • Lots of commiseration

  • Teresa Torres, Opportunity Solution Tree

  • Impact Mapping

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

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

TOPIC 4: What does your Product Strategy look like

  • Tech focus vs behaviour focus

  • Start with vision, mission, etc

  • Factor in assumptions, opinions etc from stakeholders

  • Make it deliverable

  • Communicate it

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

  • Separate strategy from roadmap

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

    • Quote regarding bad strategy:

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

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

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

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

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

TOPIC 5: Onboarding a New Direct Report, Remotely

  • Default orientation on a monday and friday

  • Weekly retro

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

  • Shadowing opportunities - attending, running

  • Remote lunch for the practice (social)

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

  • Screen sharing for collaboration/alignment

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

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

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 003

April Fool’s Day means HATS!

April Fool’s Day means HATS!

TOPIC 1:

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

  • Not an intervention

  • Arrange sessions discussing alternative ideas

  • Accelerate book

  • The Westrum Model: Measuring organizational culture

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

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

  • Radical Candor book

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

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

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

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

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

  • Strategy vs tactics 

  • Remove emotion from it where possible

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

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

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

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

TOPIC 2:

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

  • Good job! Now move from tactical to strategic

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

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

  • Move to more research

  • Ask harder questions

  • Have more fun / mess with your team

  • It gives you room to innovate

  • Is everyone happy?

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

TOPIC 3:

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

TOPIC 4:

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

  • Encourage mentorship from outside the team/organisation

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

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

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

  • Not coming with an agenda / being non-judgemental

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

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

  • Knowledge Officer

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 002

PITA 002

TOPIC 1: 

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

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

  • http://jigsawpuzzles.io

  • freebingocards.com

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

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

  • https://zombiesrungame.com/

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

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

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

TOPIC 2:

Selling Product Management  as freelance/consultant for startups

Context:

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

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

Challenge: 

  • defining scope and measurable deliverables

  • Pricing: fixed vs. Time-material

Discussion: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOPIC 3:

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

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

 TOPIC 4:

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

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

  • Stockpile stories / case studies

  • Look into the data

  • Retest assumptions / re-validate personas

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

  • Be careful to stay true to your vision

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

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randy silver randy silver

Pita 001

PITA 001.jpg

 

We all want to work from THIS home office:

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

 

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

 

TOPIC 1: 

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

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

  • Miro & Mural

  • Sli.do

  • Zoom

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

  • funretro.io or parabol.co for retros

 

Workshops remotely

  • stick to tech people are comfortable with

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

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

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

  • rules of engagement 

 

 

TOPIC 2:

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

 

TOPIC 3:

Job hunting in a pandemic

 

 



 

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