Watering Down SaaS ARR
I see some software companies classifying multi-year development contracts as SaaS ARR. Here’s why I don’t think investors should be excited about that…
October 26, 2021
Exiting Gracefully
Most of us don’t get much practice resigning from corporate leadership positions, but it’s important to do this gracefully. Plan it the way you’d plan your next product: clear communication, succession plan, helpful transition. And be a mensch: you’ll be working with many of these people again.
September 30, 2021
The Risks of Replatforming
Many companies have replatforming efforts underway. This is an essential part of the software product business, but fraught with poor assumptions and lack of experience/understanding. I’ve seen the majority of these replatforming and reimplementation efforts fail…
September 19, 2021
Selling Problems (and Then Solutions) Instead of Philosophy
We know that external customers must recognize a problem before they consider buying our solution. But I often see product managers / product leaders forget this when dealing with internal stakeholders and executives. We push for product-side practices and processes without clearly framing the underlying problems. I think of this as ‘selling philosophy.’
September 8, 2021
Merchandizing Product Management
Product management work is much easier when the product team is well-respected: when stakeholders believe that we’re smart and hard-working and good at product stuff. So an under-appreciated skill of product leaders is merchandizing good product work and good outcomes from our teams.
What does that look like?
August 17, 2021
How Weak Analogies About Software Can Lead Us Astray
Company leaders who aren’t steeped in how software is designed and built can apply less-than-useful analogies for how software products are built. These analogies tend to highlight predictability, scheduling and cost management… but may not be that useful. This post unpacks a few of them.
July 31, 2021
Difficult Product Discussions with CEOs
CEOs may not see their role in systematic product/development problems, and product leaders may not know how to frame their concerns so CEOs can hear them. Can we get past buzzwords to difficult organizational discussions?
June 24, 2021
Coaching With Heart
When coaching our product teams (and others), it’s important to remember our objective: to build up skills and talent so that we can delegate as much ‘line’ product work as possible. Plenty of leader-level work left for us…
June 1, 2021
We Can’t Schedule Innovation, But We Can Schedule Discovery
Everyone wants innovation, especially if we can plan and schedule into each sprint.
But innovation is uncertain. Can we shift the discussion to planning and scheduling and funding of discovery that can (often) lead to innovation?
May 22, 2021
Prioritization Beyond Algorithms
Prioritization is an essential part of product management. We want it to be a mechanical process: pick a metric, estimate ROI for the entire backlog, then do whatever scores highest. But that very rarely works in practice.
April 6, 2021
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