A quiet place – getting a response from unresponsive colleagues
There’s nothing more frustrating than doing a good piece of work, sharing it, and… no reply. You’ve done all the hard work, and you need other people to read it and give a 👍, or even just tell you that they won’t read it, but to go ahead.
(more…)Don’t fix bugs just because they’re bugs
A common mistakes product teams make is around prioritising bugs, tech improvements, and tech debt. The mistake is to treat them as separate entities from features, and prioritise them through a different process.
(more…)The problem-solving PM and the non-coding engineer
The product management role can be hard to understand and articulate. I think I can make it clear, but it requires changing your mindset about engineers (and everyone in a tech team).
(more…)NPS isn’t the metric you want it to be
Or: Why I’m a detractor of NPS itself.
Net Promoter Score is a de-facto metric for tech companies to measure how much people love their product. If you’re reading this you probably know what NPS is, or can easily find out so I won’t explain how to calculate it. Just remember that it asks users:
(more…)“On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”
The big question
How to create a quarterly roadmap in sixty minutes
Deciding what to work on is probably the most high-leverage task that product people can do. Spending 10 hours working on an important problem is far, far more impactful than 20 hours working on a non-important problem.
The trouble is, prioritising a list of work feels hard. There aren’t many how-to guides, and it’s a weird skill that you don’t truly learn through school or university. Unlike many product-building skills, you can’t passively learn it from playing with other products. You can see and Facebook’s design decisions, and be impressed by Snapchat’s speed, but that doesn’t give much visibility into how they make prioritisation decisions.
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