What have we chatted about?

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

 
randy silver randy silver

PITA 008

PITA 008.png

Gaming keeps us sane:

Azul | Board Game

Escape the Dark Castle

Quarantine Resources - quarantine

TOPIC 1:

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

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

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

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

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

  • Ask the same question different ways

  • Ask the colleagues of the product person as well

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

TOPIC 2:

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

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

  • Check internal processes and sign-off requirements

  • Find events that aren’t related to your company

  • Start speaking internally on the topic

TOPIC 3:

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

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

  • Focus on the service design

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

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

  • Coaching and mentoring others 

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

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

  • Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

TOPIC 4:

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

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

  • Make sure it has a real use case

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

  • Your insight-driven guide to designing for voice

  • It has to replace another habit

TOPIC 5:

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

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randy silver randy silver

PITA 007

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TOPIC 1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Tell me about an assumption that was proved wrong

  • Evaluate yourself - better on discovery or delivery?

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

  • Ask for concrete examples

  • Give them homework if they did good in the interview 

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

  • Tell me something you hate about being a PM

TOPIC 2:

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

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

  • Get the backing of the leadership team

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

  • Communicate ROI and show improvements, blockers, problems

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

  • Support scale-up of the business

  • Turning opinions into insights

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

TOPIC 3:

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

TOPIC 4:

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

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

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

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

  • Join the pre-sales calls

  • Give Sales a configurator

  • Get involved in the sales-closing process

  • Build/repair the Sales relationship

  • Sell services alongside the product?

  • Tie Churn objectives into Sales

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

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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

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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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