This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Recently, there has been another surge of discussions around the “right” approach to work/life balance in tech companies. Personally, I think these discussions are moot: I don’t think there is one right approach for how to achieve work/life balance.…
I've written in the past about hiring the team as a product leader. In this short article, I want to share some practices I've recently adopted and liked in my hiring processes…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills. I started this series in 2021, and then it... fell asleep. This is the first new article after a two-year hiatus of the series…
This article was making the rounds on Twitter today…
I joined RevenueCat as Head of Product mid-2021, so 2023 was my third year in the job. The story so far was as follows…
Managing up is one of the most underrated skills as a product manager. Product managers spend a lot of time managing laterally: designers, engineers, and stakeholders across the organization. Therefore, it can be appealing to treat your manager as…
In this article, I will share some tips for remaining organized, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks, and prioritizing the most important work…
I have been asked quite a few times for examples for product manager take home assignment / homework assignment questions, so I decided to put together a list of some that I have given candidates or been given as a candidate. Some of these have been…
Since I joined RevenueCat a year and a half ago, I have without fail sent a weekly email summary to my manager and my team, and I am asking all product managers in my team to do the same. It's not something I invented, and it's deceptively simple.…
It's been a while since I wrote a year-in-review post – five years, after my first full year as a product manager at Yammer. 2022 was not my first full year as Head of Product, but it was momentous for me in my role at RevenueCat. I went from…
I've interviewed a lot of product manager candidates, and one of the regular interview formats (which is pretty standard in a PM interview loop) is the product sense interview. Inspired by the recent launch of ChatGPT and the following tweet by…
Product managers are continuously inundated with requests and ideas from all sides. Even when being very careful with prioritization, it can happen that the team ends up with too many projects being worked on in parallel – a large amount of work in…
I am currently Head of Product at RevenueCat. Our team of roughly 60 people is globally distributed, fully remote and async-first. This is my first fully remote position, and in this article, I want to share a few lessons I have learned to be…
Human brains are pretty amazing. We take in millions of pieces of information every second, process them, make connections with what we already know, and make decisions based on that. The way we manage that is by taking lots of shortcuts—we could not…
Before the advent of SaaS and ubiquitous internet access, software companies had very little information about how end users actually used their products. They had to painstakingly conduct research trying to understand their customers’ behavior, and…
I’ve been involved in interview panels for a lot of PMs, and have set up hiring processes for product managers in two different startups. One of the critical components of the interview loop should be what I call the “Product Sense” interview, in…
I've recently gone through the process of designing a product management interview process for RevenueCat. This is not the first interview process I've set up from scratch, but one of the questions that comes up every single time is whether a written…
Recently I've been again thinking a lot about setting up product development teams, since we are working on growing the product and engineering orgs at RevenueCat…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Many companies require candidates for product-related positions, such as product managers, product designers, UX researchers, analysts, content strategists, or data scientists to complete a written take-home assignment…
When I am not working in product management or reading, thinking, and writing about it, I read quite a bit of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. As I was reflecting on what makes a good science fiction story, I realized that some of the…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
Before my product management career, I spent five years working in strategy consulting. There are many things you can say about strategy consulting—some good, and some not so good. Without assessing the net benefits of having worked in consulting for…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills…
As a product leader, I believe that helping your team grow and develop is one of my most critical responsibilities. The first step to growing as a product manager is understanding the skills that are required and what “great” looks like for each of…
One of the trickiest concepts to grasp in product development is that of a product vision. I have written about the topic before. My conclusions in that article was that a product vision should describe the customer benefits and the world you are…
One interesting and underreported aspect of product development and product management is that there are two fundamentally different types of product work. Both are required to build a successful product, and the best product teams and product…
After my previous post on great reads for aspiring product managers, here is a list for people already in the product management job who are looking to deepen their skills. In this article, I am focusing exclusively on books that allow a deeper dive…
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I share a few best practices to better collaborate with engineers…
Product management is a broad and varied discipline. Among the less obvious aspects of that discipline is the fact that product management is, at its heart, risk management…
Over the years, I've given advice to quite a few people who were interested in breaking into product management. Amongst other things, I've always left them with a list of books and articles to read—there is a lot of great content that can shed more…
Many product management job descriptions list an engineering or computer science degree as a prerequisite. While technical skills and experience can certainly be an asset for product managers, it is an interesting question how much of it is needed…
Prioritization is one of the top challenges product managers are facing. Every product team has vastly more ideas than time to build them, necessitating prioritization. What makes this challenge even harder than the scarcity of resources is the…
Product management is a relatively new discipline that keeps evolving rapidly. Every week, there are new articles about product development best practices that industry leaders are following. This deluge of information can make it difficult to…
I've been in product management and product leadership roles for half a decade now, and I've picked up a thing or two along the way. In this post, I am sharing 25 bite-sized lessons that I have learned over time—I hope they can help make you a better…
I usually don't write much about breaking into product management—I believe that there are others who have more valuable insights to share than I do, and I therefore focus my writing on what I have learned while working as a product manager and…
The product development world is enamored with best practices and frameworks. Hardly a week goes by in which there isn't another set of processes and practices being discussed and at times even hyped: from the Spotify model to Basecamp's Shape Up,…
One of the central best practices of modern product development is the empowered product team. An empowered team is a cross-functional team, composed of product, design, and engineering, that is tasked with solving specific customer problems in ways…
In many product organizations, quarterly goal setting exercises and roadmaps discussions amount to a negotiation between product leadership and/or product management and the rest of the team, how many features can get built in a given time frame. The…
One of the most counterintuitive aspects about great product teams is that being a part of them isn't always comfortable. It's not all smooth sailing: there are frictions and disagreements between team members, differences in working styles, and…
“Outcomes over Outputs” is a mantra that has swept the product management and product development community over the last couple of years, even leading to a major book outlining the concept. At the core of the paradigm is the insight that just…
“Build it, and they will come” is an old product development adage. It basically says that if you build a great product addressing a need that people have which currently goes unmet, then you will have no problems finding customers. They will simply…
Developing digital products is inherently risky. Big software projects face delays, explode in cost, or get canceled all the time. Not just the effort involved in building the product is uncertain, though. More fundamentally, even the value itself is…
Product management requires a broad set of skills. A lot of people, including myself, have written extensively about how these skills can be categorized. However, none of these categorizations can ever be complete or fully accurate, simply because…
Familiar product management scenes: a salesperson raises a feature request, gets the response: “good idea, we'll put that on our backlog”. A hackathon happens, lots of good ideas duct-taped together in a couple of days; the product team dutifully…
It is an often-repeated piece of management advice to demand that team members “bring solutions, not problems”. The reason for this advice is to empower employees to solve problems they encounter, reduce management bottlenecks, and thereby to improve…
One of the essential areas of responsibility for product leaders is setting up the processes of the product development department. For an overview, read my high-level article on product leadership responsibilities, or continue reading for a deep…
Back when people first started building complex software, the natural approach was to do this in a planned methodical way that resembles physical engineering. You make a detailed plan, validate the plan in theory, build it, test it in practice, and…
Holding two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time is generally a valuable skill. It allows evaluating trade-offs, empathizing with the other side in a negotiation, and brokering compromises and agreements…
One of the essential areas of responsibility for product leaders is setting up the organizational structure of the product development department. For an overview, read my high-level article on product leadership responsibilities, or continue reading…
First things first: I love A/B testing. For those unfamiliar with the method, A/B testing involves changing a product (or packaging, messaging, pricing...) and then measuring how that changed version performs (in terms of some measurable KPIs) in…
One of the crucial areas of responsibility for product leaders is building the team, and one crucial part of that is developing your team members. For an overview, read my high-level article on product leadership responsibilities, or continue reading…
Product management roles vary across companies as a function of many different aspects, for example company size, culture, or historical context. One important factor driving differences in the role of product managers is whether the product is B2B (…
Silicon Valley is enamored with First Principles Thinking. First Principles Thinking means disregarding all assumptions that are not foundational in nature and then reasoning bottom up from basic propositions or assumptions that cannot be deduced…
One of the crucial areas of responsibility for product leaders is hiring to build up the team. For an overview, read my high-level article on product leadership responsibilities, or continue reading for a deep dive on team building…
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I talk about what the overused term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) means…
One of the crucial areas of responsibility for product leaders is owning the product direction. For an overview, read my high-level article on product leadership responsibilities, or continue reading for a deep dive on product direction…
In the past years, a lot has been written about product management: about the role definition and how it varies between industries and companies, the skills required, best practices and so on. Product leadership is much less well covered, and even…
A few months ago, I re-built this website using the static site generator Eleventy. While migrating over all of my blog posts, I realized that for some posts, I wanted to be able include rich link previews like the one below…
Good communication is perhaps the most critical skill for product managers. I sometimes jokingly say that us product managers don't really “do” anything, we just talk. After all, designers create flows, visual designs and assets, and engineers write…
Over the past few months, I've been either hiring manager or the one executing the hiring process for a number of product roles—product managers, product designers, product analysts. In this process, I've reviewed a ton of CVs, and many of them I had…
The most frequently used visualization of product management is this Venn diagram by Mind the Product founder Martin Eriksson which shows the product manager sitting at the intersection between business, technology, and user experience (UX…
First principles are a philosophical / logical concept originally stemming from Aristotle. A first principle is “a basic, foundational, self-evident proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption…
Product managers often complain that prioritization is one of the most challenging aspects of the job: there is always so much to do and so little time. It is therefore not a surprise that there are a ton of frameworks out there that are meant to…
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I talk about a few best practices to better collaborate with product / UX / UI designers…
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I am discussing some of the challenges of correctly running A/B tests…
“We A/B test everything” is a trap that product teams fall into—it means you have stopped innovating and are only optimizing. Innovation is hard to A/B test: You often need to start with foundational research of the problem instead of validating…
In the “PM 101” series I am sharing some PM basics that I wish I had known when I first started as a product manager. In this article, I will explain why it is crucial to separate the problem definition from the solution design…
Google and Apple are two of the most successful and admired technology companies, yet their approach to product development differs in some fundamental aspects. Google's is based heavily on data and experimentation and might be called the engineering…
Product “north star” metrics provide benefits in team alignment and product improvement. However, boiling down all stages of the user lifecycle to a single number also has the risks of lack of ownership, disempowerment, and metric “hacking…
I was recently asked, “How do you create a product roadmap?” In a world where we want to prioritize outcomes over outputs, run a continuous discovery process, and iteratively deliver while constantly learning, the answer to the question is not…
Focusing on outcomes over outputs is a product management mantra that has been getting a lot of attention recently. At its core, the idea is extremely powerful. Instead of focusing on product development “velocity” (how fast product and engineering…
One of the most fascinating and least discussed facts about product development is that most attempts to improve the product fail to deliver value. Notably, depending on the source, between 2/3 and 3/4 of A/B tests do not lead to an improvement in…
Product organizations often discuss needing a (new) product vision or strategy, or will talk about what is on their roadmap. However, what is sometimes lost in these discussions is the unfortunate fact that none of these terms have clear definitions…
I was recently at a panel discussion with a large group of very data-informed product managers. One of the participants asked the following question (I am somewhat exaggerating…
In the first part of this series, I talked about the classical PM domain trifecta of business, technology, and UX. I encourage you to read that article before this one…
I was a consultant at BCG for five years before I moved into product management at Yammer just over a year ago. In this two-part series, I will share what useful knowledge and skills from my time in consulting I was able to reuse, and how I closed…
It is hard to believe, but it has been more than a year since I joined Yammer as a Product Manager. Looking back over this year, I realize that I have learned a ton. I knew when I joined that the Yammer way of doing product management is very…
2016 was the first full year I spent working as a Product Manager at Yammer. I try to take in and read as much as I can about product management (I share an article I read every day on my Twitter, @MrJefago). Product management is still a new and…
In the past couple of weeks, I found two diametrically opposed pieces of advice on writing product specs: this podcast with Samuel Clemens, who states that he has a “kill on sight” rule for specs, and this article by Gaurav Oberoi with some great…
German is known for having a lot of long, unique words that describe things that simply have no description in other languages. In this article I want to talk about a word that I heard recently and its broader context in the different approach that…
As a product manager, you constantly have to find, prioritize, design and measure product improvements. Often, the first instinct when doing this is to think about features: “Users should be able to do X or Y”. A more sophisticated version is to…
If the rumors that have been spreading for a few months are correct, Apple will remove the 3.5mm headphone jack on the next iPhone. Over the past few days, an intense debate has unfolded in the tech community about whether this is the right decision…
At Yammer, we believe that product curiosity and product sense are two of the most important traits of a good PM, and that these skills must be continuously exercised. That’s why every Friday afternoon, the product management team and other…