Product Anonymous Melbourne hosted Rich’s talk on building and scaling product management teams. We focused on initial product hires, division of labor as teams grow, and owning end-to-end bits of value.
Your different audiences have different (often opposing) goals and incentives, which means they probably want different product decisions and therefore different roadmaps. You need to understand and anticipate their agendas.
What are the questions that various groups really want to ask, and how does that shape our roadmap conversations?
There are some fundamental laws of tech product economics (especially software) that should drive executive-level decisions about business and product strategies. It’s easy to forget them, or decide they don’t apply to our special situation. We’ll unpack a few while we share some war stories.
Many product managers operate in an environment where there is an absence of a product leader or chief product officer. Others work remotely and operate without a solid management anchor. This podcast discusses the challenges and opportunities for product managers without a product leader.
Karthik assembles comments about product management challenges/mistakes from 5 of his earlier podcasts: Roman Pichler, Steven Haines, Chad McAllister, Cindy Alvarez and Rich Mironov.
This Product Camp discussion focused on career ladders for product managers, what directors do that’s different from their individual contributors, and how to signal your interest if you want that next job up. Several participants raised real-world issues, and product veterans sharing their hard-won points of view.
Individual product managers are focused on their individual products/services, but product leaders need to think about their organizational context: how do we get things done? What motivates each functional group and how do we align incentives? Can we get out ahead of inevitable resource conflicts?
Motivating development teams can be tricky: we can’t make developers work harder, we can only make them *want* to work harder. How do we set context, add meaning and connect teams to real users?
A podcast with SC Moatti, founder of Products That Count. We discussed technology product management roles, career ladders, the critical need for cross-functional communication, how incentives shape what our peers do, and when a startup hires its first full-time product manager.
Lean Product/UX Meetup: Enterprise software products often have long sales cycles, lumpy revenue streams, and organizational gaps between buyers and users. How does this shape enterprise product management?