Empowered

Highlights

• Leadership is about recognizing that there’s a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.
• while moving to truly empowered teams does require moving away from the old command‐and‐control model of management, it does not mean you need fewer leaders and managers. It means you need better leaders and managers.
• In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build, and most important, they are empowered to solve those problems in the best way they see fit. And they are then held accountable to the results.
• In the empowered product team model, the product manager has a clear responsibility, which is to ensure that the solutions are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks (value, viability, usability, and feasibility).
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• Overall, we look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.
  • Tags: [[management]] [[leadership]]
• The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers. It is usually between 3 and 10 years out. The product vision serves as the shared goal for the product organization.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go. The strategy derives from focus, then leverages insights, converts these insights into action, and finally manages the work through to completion.
  • Tags: [[strategy]] [[product-management]]
• If we want teams of missionaries, it’s essential that every person in the organization understands and is convinced—they need to be true believers.
  • Tags: [[leadership]] [[product-management]]
• Whereas mentors dole out words of wisdom, coaches roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
  • Tags: [[coaching]]
• As a coach, you are always looking for opportunities that encourage your people to stretch beyond their comfort zone.
  • Tags: [[coaching]]
• I typically recommend at least 15 customer visits as part of new PM onboarding.
• I like to ask the PM to evaluate the top three to five players in the space and to write up a narrative comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of each player—highlighting opportunities.
• the new PM must understand the four different types of product risk (value, usability, feasibility, and viability), the different forms of prototypes to tackle these risks, and how to test those risks qualitatively and quantitatively.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• Great product marketing requires understanding the market first. It pressure‐tests assumptions based on what the market tells you so you can adapt, position, and market into customers’ true reality. It makes clear why your product matters and should be loved using customers’ language, experience, and needs.
  • Tags: [[product-marketing]] [[product-management]]
• Normally, the product vision is somewhere between 3 years and 10 years out and describes the future we are trying to create, and why that future will improve the lives of our customers.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• The product principles complement the product vision by stating the values and beliefs that are intended to inform the many product decisions that will need to be made.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• “There will always be many good reasons not to ship, and it’s your responsibility to figure out a way over, around, or through each obstacle.”
• We need to find a solution that works. By that we mean that it is valuable (valuable enough that target customers will actually buy it or choose to use it), it is usable (so users can actually experience that value), it is feasible (so we can actually deliver that value), and it is viable for our business (so the rest of our company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• our job in product is to solve the problems we are asked to solve, in ways that our customers love, yet that work for our business.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• It is my mind warning me of the consequences if I don’t do my homework and truly prepare. The fear of looking clueless is what keeps me up late preparing, studying, thinking, writing, rehearsing, and iterating.
  • Tags: [[learning]] [[impostor-syndrome]]
• Whenever I see some product person deliver an underwhelming presentation to an executive team or a conference, my frustration is centered not on the product person, but rather on that person’s manager.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• I also recommend a minimum of three, one‐hour customer interactions each week, ongoing,
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• Finally, while I need to make certain the product person genuinely likes and respects her customers, I don’t want her to think her job is to ask her customers what to build.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• “If a product team succeeds, it’s because everyone on the team did what they needed to do, but if a product team fails, it’s the product manager.”
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• in feature teams most of the meaningful decisions have been made upstream by executives and stakeholders. In contrast, an empowered product team is all about pushing decisions down to the product team level.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• good decisions rest on a foundation of integrity—you are perceived as being dependable in your commitments, you are believed to be acting in the best interests of the company, and you’re willing to be accountable to the results.
• I (Marty) will admit I have always wanted the people who work for me to like me. But I want them to like me for very specific reasons.
• Ask yourself, what are the behaviors that may have served you well earlier in your career, but now are no longer advantages?
  • Tags: [[learning]] [[management]]
• A good product vision leverages relevant industry trends and technologies that we believe can help us solve problems for our customers in ways that are just now possible.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• More generally, the topology helps answer the question of how a company should organize its product people into teams to best enable them to do great work.
• Autonomy does mean that when we give teams problems to solve, they have enough control so that they can solve the problem in the best possible way that they see fit. A topology that results in too many dependencies can make this difficult.
• Platform teams provide leverage because they allow for common services to be implemented once but used in many places.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• if a product team is working on the experience for anyone who is part of the company’s customers—including consumers—this is called a customer‐facing experience team.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• If a product team is working on a product experience for these types of internal employees, this is called a customer‐enabling experience team.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• The bottom line is that there is no reason that reporting relationships should dictate team topology.
• In terms of empowered product teams, product strategy helps us decide what problems to solve, product discovery helps us figure out the tactics that can actually solve the problems, and product delivery builds that solution so we can bring it to market.
  • Tags: [[product-management]]
• The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.
  • Tags: [[productivity]] [[strategy]]
• Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.
  • Tags: [[leadership]] [[product-management]]
• Good strategy … does not pop out of some “strategic management” tool, matrix, chart, triangle, or fill‐in‐the‐blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader identifies the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates action and resources on them.
  • Tags: [[product-management]] [[favorite]]