Tag: Product Management

Products Are Conversations

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We’ve lost our way in Product Management. When the biggest problem Product Managers face is setting roadmap priorities based on market feedback, it’s symptomatic of the underlying practices and tools.

Simply put, Products are Conversations. How you orchestrate conversations with customers and cross-functionally in your organization is what makes great products. To set the right strategy, align the team, and execute to the delight and fulfillment of customers.

Agile was supposed to bring product creation closer to the customer. But there is too much distance, data, organizational complexity.

Great products are made of conversations. With customers. With leadership and PM direct reports. And with stakeholders. The conversations that form the strategy. The conversations that align the strategy. The conversations drive and iterate execution.

Here’s 3 reasons we’ve lost our way in Product Management.

Reason #1: The Path to PM

  • Tech Product Managers who develop their skills as Engineering Leaders. This path to PM is all about the How, and many have good people skills to relate requests to the How.
  • A second path to PM is people who develop their skills as Project Managers. This is again about the How, but with less CS education and typically from marketing. And in marketing they found great success in the quantitative practices of lead generation and growth hacking.
  • There’s a third path to PM, rising in reflection of what has made great products in more competitive markets, which comes from Design. Less about the How, more about the Why, with deeply rooted user empathy.

Problem #2: Data-driven

Using data to drive product decisions is particularly great for finding things that don’t work. But usage data is just one factor for decision making, and because in PM meetings it’s something you can point to as evidence to support an argument, it’s often overweight (particularly when the presenter has good persuasion skills).

The Lean Startup movement put particular emphasis on throwing out hypothesis to test with data. Thank goodness Steve Blank evolved it with Customer Development. Which involved actually taking that hypothesis out in the world talking directly to customers about problems and solutions. And there’s wisdom in talking to customers as a non-scalable activity, and focusing on a few that can love you. So more startups are ramping up the sales learning curve. But too many tech founders prefer to cast out artifacts and measure reactions at a distance.

Reason #3: Alignment is Hard

Even in a well-oiled machine with clear strategic direction, awesome talent and culture, aligning PM stakeholders is hard.

The PM as the CEO of Product is dysfunctional myth. The PM may have the decision rights for product, but her stakeholders have decision rights for organizational functions, and their goals, objectives and resources may run counter. Some product leads like Matthew Mahoney have found greater success sharing control to create value. By sharing decision rights with your CTO you may find yourself making plans based on more realistic effort estimates and a collaborative vision set with both the Why and How.

This isn’t to say that the CPO shouldn’t be the Directly Responsible Individual for product decisions, but don’t mythologize Steve Jobs for either vision unbound from users (the first version of the iPhone was visionary, but sucked, and iteration with user and market feedback made it a success under his stewardship) or might that’s right.

Consider decoupling information rights from decision rights. Sharing access to information does not have to mean sharing control. The challenge is that information needs to be provided in-context so it is not misconstrued.

The PM function has more stakeholders than any other in today’s organization. Customers, Leadership, direct reports, design, development, QA, DevOps, Support, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, BizDev and Backoffice. And I’m probably missing some. Because stakeholders enable the product, and the product enables stakeholders. How you gain customer and market insight, plan your strategy and roadmap and execute all depends upon alignment.

Products are Conversations

The clueful will recall that Markets are Conversations. Customers are empowered and authentic voice cuts through all the noise in today’s marketplace. Your customers want to talk with you, the PM. They want to be heard and want you to understand their needs. It’s your job to enable these conversations, and figure out how to have them at scale.

The right customers for you will understand your tradeoffs, validate and support your decisions, and align. They will value the experience you are creating for them, and progress in a longer term relationship, not a transaction.

Rather than see the Head of Product as the CEO of Product, the PM is put as close to the customer as possible to make decisions on their behalf, and plays the role of Information Hub to align stakeholders through effective conversations. Your stakeholders want to have these conversations, and it’s your job to make sure they happen.

George Bernard Shaw

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. “

In today’s product companies, the team is more connected and engaged through Slack and other group messaging apps. Conversations are happening, but it takes additional practices and tools for them to be effective. Across the company you need practices for what should be read and replied to, how decisions are documented, knowledge is captured and tasks are tracked.

And for Product Management, how to:

  • Turn conversations into insight
  • Turn conversations into plans
  • Turn conversations into actions
  • Turn conversations into continuous improvement

Product Managers, if you takeaway one thing from this post — get out of your spreadsheet and make time for more customer conversations, and think through the cadence of conversations with your stakeholders.

Update: I’m humbled…

Screen Shot 2018-09-19 at 2.35.06 PM
See also: The Product Manager Problem and Product Managers — Here is how to leverage Slack to automate your workflow, get closer to your customer and build breakthrough products. And Pingpad for Slack is modern collaboration for Product Management.

What If God Were An App?

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A playful way to look at what apps/startups need to do to thrive in the next business cycle. Based on a talk I gave this April at Industry: The Product Conference in Dublin. (Note: this is not religious, but meant to be a fun, perhaps useful, thought exercise.)


Last fall I was remembering my college days as a Badger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, I was remembering my Philosophy 101 class. In this class we were studying enlightenment philosophers such a David Hume, George Berkeley, and John Locke. They were attempting to solve a big problem of the day: proving or disproving the existence of the Judeo-Christian God through logic. As I recall (and it’s a bit hazy, it was college after all), they converged on four distinct qualities of God.

At the time I was enjoying this memory, I was going through a product roadmap process and helping put together Varo’s Series B fundraising pitch. The college memory and the work situation intertwined in my mind. This led to a little epiphany, namely–those same qualities that God must have (according to those philosophers) are the same qualities that a startup must possess in this coming business cycle. Behold, a new product management framework!

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The Product Hierarchy of Needs

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Using Maslow’s famous framework for product planning


Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is one of the most well known frameworks of all time. Famously, Maslow draws the pyramid of human needs where lower layers of the pyramid represent the more basic needs (for example, physiological and safety needs) while each level above moves towards transcendence and self actualization. As the theory goes, one can only satisfy the needs at a certain level after satisfying the needs of the levels beneath it. If the lower need has not been met the person will not have the motivation, focus or capability to work on a higher need. For example, you won’t be bothered to worry about your social standing if you are starving, naked, and sick.

Appropriating Maslow’s model and applying it to something I am working on has been an interesting exercise over the years. Most recently, we did this at Varo Money to help us think differently about our product roadmap and 2018 strategy. Here’s how we thought about it in regards to our business. I think it can be applied broadly as a simple, useful framework for startups.

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The Intersection of Marketing & Product Management

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Are your product & marketing teams creating resonance or dissonance?

Divergence or Convergence? Photo by Aditya Chinchure

When building products, one of our main goals is to make new users successful as quickly as possible. We build in-depth, contextual onboarding campaigns, complete with great first-run experiences, lifecycle emails, contextual tooltips, and the kitchen sink. We try to remove friction everywhere we can to ensure users see the value of our product right away, with hopes that it turns them into a highly engaged user.

But what if the user thought they were buying a motorcycle, but your product is actually a bicycle? Or even worse, your product is actually a bulldozer?

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It’s Hard to Change Overnight When You Roll 60,000 Trucks A Day

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NewCo Shift Forum Dialogs, in Partnership with Work Market

The Chief Product Officer of Comcast Is Very, Very Focused on Business Experience

Comcast CPO Chris Satchell


While a major pillar of the first annual Shift Forum was policy and it’s interplay with business and society, we also spent a lot of time wrapping our heads around the experience that a business creates for its customers, its employees, and the communities it impacts.*

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The Manifesto of Ruthless Prioritization

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Get Shift Done: Management

Every company needs to be smart when setting their priorities. Startups need to be ruthless.


Tick. Tock. That’s the clock counting down to the moment when your startup runs out of money. Whether your goal is profitability or hitting some proof point in order to raise the next round of fundraising, make no doubt about it, each moment is precious. Every feature you build, every a/b test you start, every customer acquisition strategy you implement, and every single question you ask your users is important. You are making a choice at the expense of something else you could be doing. It’s a zero-sum game.

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The Organizational Lag: Leading Your Team Through Change

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I remember how that nagging feeling just underneath the surface of my thoughts turned into a full blown problem. At first it was just some white noise in the back of my head that followed me from meeting to meeting. Then the issue graduated into conscious thought. “I really need to figure that out,” I would think but then do nothing about it. Finally, it began keeping me up at night, invading my thoughts during family time, and generally occupying every available space in my mind. It was now a problem I could no longer ignore.

I spent some time in the problem space, exploring options and tinkering with possible solutions. I talked to a few of my peers on the management team. It turns out they had been seeing the same issues and feeling the same way. We got together and compared notes, riffed on ideas, and came up with an action plan. It was going to be a big change for our company, but it was a good plan and we were actually getting kind of excited about it. My anxiety had turned to optimism. I might have even felt a little bit of, ahem, pride.

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