1-Minute Product Management Summaries (vol. 2)
Summaries of 3 great product management reads for the week
Hello! Welcome to the second edition of ‘1-Minute Product Management Summaries’.
Last week, I talked about why I started this newsletter — quick recap:
The Goal of this newsletter:
To help fast-track 🚀 your PM learning journey, without the hassle 😫 of reading through truckloads of content 📚
Weekly digest of product management learning nuggets💡, curated from the best PM-content across the internet 🔥
Summarized for 1-min reading time ⌛
No BS. No fancy jargon. Just crisp summaries in plain english 👌
Who is this newsletter for?
Anyone who likes to stay on top of new learnings in the product world, but have limited time to read content — readers range from aspiring/ novice/ experienced PMs to people who're generally curious about products/ business.
If you would like to receive 1-min learning nuggets curated from the best PM-content weekly, consider subscribing👇
Onto the 1-Minute Product Management Summaries for the week:
(1) How to be Strategic
Julie Zhuo (ex-Product Design VP at Facebook) . 6 min read
1-Min Summary:
As you progress in your career, you’re expected to be “more strategic”. But many people don’t quite understand what “strategy” is, and hence there are misconceptions around being strategic.
A good strategy is a set of actions that is credible, coherent and focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s) in achieving a particular objective
‘achieving a particular objective’: Clarity around what success looks like.
‘set of actions’: Concrete plan to achieve that objective.
‘credible and coherent’: The plan should believably accomplish the objective.
‘focused on overcoming the biggest hurdle(s)’: Narrow focus towards solving the biggest problem(s).
Good strategies chart a simple clear path to get from Point A to Point B.
How is strategy different from frameworks?
Frameworks help explain the underlying concepts of the strategy.In other words:
-> Frameworks help establish a clear map of the problem space
-> Strategy helps chart the path to solve the problem (within that framework)So, what should you actually do to be “more strategic”?
(1) Create alignment around what wild success looks like:
Ensure people in your team are fully aligned on what wild success looks like, with a shared understanding of the underlying assumptions/constraints.
(2) Understand which problem you’re looking to solve for which group of people:
Prioritize the problems/segments: What is the relative importance & opportunity size of each problem? For whom do these problems matter?
Understand the ecosystem around the problem: How are competitors solving it? What’s being done well Vs. poorly? Which user segments are underserved? Where are the opportunities for a better approach?
Understand which problems suit your unique strengths/ weaknesses: What problems can your team solve better than others? What are your team’s weaknesses?
Based on this analysis, choose to solve specific problem(s) for a specific user segment with clear rationale.
(3) Prioritize aggressively:
Be deliberate about picking a few prioritized goals — Focus is a strategic advantage that lets you move faster on what matters most. So instead of asking “What more can we do?”, the right question to ask is “What are the most important goals, and how can we ensure those go spectacularly?”
(2) How to ensure high-level alignment and crisp execution across the product/design org
Gibson Biddle (ex-VP Product at Netflix, ex-CPO at Chegg) . 8 min read
1-Min Summary:
Caveat: Management is context-sensitive — everyone has a different style and different stage/size of companies have different needs.
Management is defined as ‘systems and processes to deliver results’.
This management system is from the perspective of a ‘Head of Product of a large org’. Outlining the series of meetings with their respective purposes:
(1) One-One meetings: 30-60 mins long weekly meetings with direct PM reports and select XFNs
Help folks focus on the right projects, and re-prioritize if necessary.
Provide/receive ongoing feedback.
Discuss learning/career opportunities.
Problem-solve together and provide thought partnership. Important to be future-oriented, and not micromanagey around project updates.
Understand personal/work challenges to build trust.
(2) Skip-level One-One meetings: To ensure that skip-level reportees are happy and signal to them that their work is important. Also helps identify bright upcomers.
(3) Weekly Team Meeting: Execution-focused meeting with key XFNs weekly, to help remove blockers, problem-solve together and build trust between XFNs.
Discuss key weekly learnings - results from research, impressive AB test results, debugging any surprising metric movements
Prioritization of critical projects across the XFN teams
Highlight decisions that need help from the leadership team
Answer questions the team has for the leadership
(4) Monthly Strategy Meetings (for each Swimlane): Strategy meetings monthly where each team reiterates their swimlane’s high-level strategic plan & key results to the leadership team — Critical for maintaining a team’s strategic focus.
(5) Quarterly Overall Product Strategy Meetings: Strategy meetings quarterly where highlights from all swim-lanes are presented to the CXO/Exec team. Tends to have hardball questions, rich debate, and learning.
Discuss overall product strategy, and the strategy for each swimlane
Highlight key projects, results and learnings for each swimlane
Resourcing
(6) Quarterly All-Hands Meeting: Enables cross-functional alignment across the broader teams. Presentation topics include high-level product strategy, goal metrics, four-quarter rolling roadmap of key projects, exec summary of learnings and next steps.
(7) Quarterly Business Review: Strategy meetings for cross-functional alignment between Directors & Execs — enables tight alignment with loose coupling at the exec level for increased velocity.
(8) Qualitative Offsite: Team offsite every 3-6 months to spend time with customers via focus groups, typically for 2 days — helps the team develop consumer insight, and drives a customer-first team culture.
(9) Topic de Semaine: Optional monthly meeting where anyone can pick a topic to present on — helps develop teaching and presentation skills.
(3) Your Manager in the Product team
Rohan Rajiv (Group PM at LinkedIn) . 5 min read
1-Min Summary:
‘PM-managers’ play a vital role in enabling IC PMs be effective. Good PM-Managers:
(1) Provide organizational context and feedback to enable you to be successful:
Clear guidance on overall strategic direction which helps with alignment.
Feedback on your plans based on their experience.
(2) Provide air cover when needed:
The IC PM’s job often times results in rubbing folks the wrong way — hence, providing requisite air cover is key. The PM-manager should:
Be the voice of reason to balance your role on the team
Provide the space to try and fail, to enable growth of the product/ person
The PM-manager is deeply vested in the IC PM’s success and hence, its important to invest in this relationship — which is critical for a functional product team.
As an IC PM, how to build a great working relationship with your PM-Manager:
(1) Invest heavily in understanding each other upfront:
Spend time in your onboarding period to understand your manager — this enables building trust. Request one hour — Introduce yourselves, share what matters to you, ask questions to understand what drives them, understand how best to communicate, and what they'd love to see in a direct report.
(2) Share/involve them as much as possible - allow them to choose how much they'd like to be involved:
Share early thinking on product direction, invite them to key meetings — ask for feedback and act on it.
Don’t just share the ‘curated good stuff’, but also topics like the pressure you’re feeling, the challenges you’re facing.
Keeping managers in the loop helps them provide specific guidance to you and trust you. The more they trust you, the more context, scope, and air cover they will provide to steepen your learning curve and be successful.
(3) For your part, help make their life easier:
Aim to become an incredibly valuable direct report and be the sort of person who removes more problems than you create.But, if you don't trust that your manager is invested in making you successful, it is likely time to leave. Managers make/break our experience: It is hard to be successful with a poor manager relationship — then, its best to leave and find a new home.
If you're considering a new role, prioritize a connection with your prospective manager as a key criteria. When you choose well, you work with managers who appreciate your strengths and ensure your weaknesses don't get in the way.
Hope these 1-min summaries were helpful and a good use of your precious time.
If you found these 1-min learning nuggets valuable, consider sharing it with friends/colleagues, and subscribing👇
Going forward, I plan to experiment a bit with the content and cadence of these newsletters to broaden the impact — To help with that, I’d love your feedback/ideas👇
Until next week…
Sincerely,
Karthik 👋