Ok I’m gonna say something y’all don’t like.

Your postmortems need to get a little more blameful.

*ducks*

What do I mean? 🧵

https://twitter.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1722282942389690793

The blameless post mortem (which we embrace, fwiw!) has real drawbacks—the most significant of which is the tendency towards abstract, passive language (“code was insufficiently reviewed”, “production was deleted”) which obscures a bunch of the who/what necessary to root cause.

OK as someone who has (I think successfully) played the CPO role under product oriented founders/CEOs, I have some advice here.

And the first, most important bit of advice is this:

CPOs, get over yourself.

And then do what needs to be done to build a great product & a great… https://t.co/mfEoAzPZgqtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/gokulr/status/1686845695742050306

As a ex-founder I hate (hate!!!) the narrative of CPO vs CEO. Especially the “you bring in a head of product to ‘professionalize’ thr product org” and somehow a micromanagey founder gets in the way.

No.

You bring in a head of product because the product is important, and a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

One of the only ways for me to stay on top of what really matters is to be high throughput when it comes to the wave of questions/asks/decisions that come across my proverbial desk.

There is basically only 3 kinds of work for me: 1. Existential - will make or break a meaningful part of the business. Requires high quality decisions. Consumes most of my time/thought.

I can only manage a few of these.

I cancelled 80% of my reoccurring 1:1s and I don’t think I’m ever going back.

I’ve replaced them with these 5 things that are 10x more effective. First - why did I cancel them?

Aren’t 1:1s the lifeblood of management?

Between my directs and my skips and my peers I have ~20 people that I had standing mtgs with on a frequency from wkly-monthly.

I was booked 7-9 hours a day. It was completely untenable.

I’ve been a CPO under both models, currently running all of product, eng, design, data and (while I’m at it!) technical services & support. Either model can work, but there are a few reasons why the PED (prod/eng/design) leadership consolidation happens:

https://twitter.com/gokulr/status/1616545889677639680

The most basic reason is that these teams need to work in tight alignment to deliver, and the CEO wants a single trusted partner to manage the technical, strategic, organization, and leadership needs to ensure it happens well. A good PED exec gives a CEO leverage.

Hard disagree, from a CPO that product-founder/CEOs love in the growth->late stages (me!)

Why?

1. I think CPOs should have founder mindsets and get their hands dirty
2. PMF seeking is never done

https://twitter.com/gokulr/status/1604884642519126017

1. There is this huge misconception about what is/is not “the CPO’s job” esp at these growth stages. CPOs don’t seek PMF, CPOs don’t muddle in the details, CPOs should hire great and then get out of the way. “CPOs scale PMF.”

And I say “no no no.”

A lot of leaders are in the middle of sharing hard news with their teams, and in some instances, their customers.

People can take tough messages, if you give them three things:

Transparency, Access, and Authenticity 🫥 Transparency - what you know, they know. They know when you don’t know. They know early and they hear from you often. What you’ve said is written down, and what you say behind closed doors you’re willing to say face to face. What you can’t say, you’re clear about.

An engineer one lamented to me: “we’ll never fix things, because a PM won’t ever prioritize tech debt over a feature.

My response? “You’re right.” 🧵

https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1592214509783244804

PMs focus on prioritizing user/business needs, and there is basically no incentive to add something as nebulous as “tech debt” to the roadmap. The closest you might get is something like 15% time reserved for bugs and performance. So what is a eng team to do?

So much management time is sucked into managing low performers, cynics, and egos.

Been thinking a lot about optimizing for the “easy to run” team.

What’s that for me? For me, low overhead teams
- exercise pragmatic judgement
- are low ego & aren’t above “the work”
- believe in our mission
- roll w the punches
- coachable
- entrepreneurial (hungry & self-directed)

One of my favorite operating norms we’ve adopted is “silence is dissent.”

If someone isn’t commenting on your work, presume they 1) disagree 2) don’t think it matters or 3) don’t understand until proven otherwise.

Silence rarely means alignment. As a leader I don’t “leave alone things that are going well.” I dig in and lean in, because I can help you have more impact and think it matters.

As much as I love being the 🌟star🌟there is a glorification of product management as the “strategic” position inside companies that I think oversimplifies how teams win (together!) and leads to bad behavior in PM teams. Some thoughts:

https://twitter.com/DanRose999/status/1576589689280024576

First, I believe a lot in this thread is true. What we sell in software/technology companies *is* the product, and the product roadmap and the company strategy should be symbiotically intertwined.

Let me tell another story:

A sales group kept going to engineering and PM to ask for stuff to be built that customers would pay for. Nobody built any of it, because they used frameworks & theory to determine what would be “higher impact”

So the sales team sold what they had 1/X

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1575144295186812928

(Some) customers would buy, and (some) customers would renew. The new “higher impact” products were slow to ramp, but that’s to be expected, we iterate and learn, right? We have an experimental mindset.

Eng/PM says if things aren’t selling, hire better sales people.

2/X

I’ve worked with many people who have great ideas, terribly communicated.

They ask—how are you so good at communication? (I am.)

My secret: it’s the v. little things.

Here’s a list of 9 comms tactics I use often (aka cheat codes to get my point across & influence others) 👇 1️⃣ The Five Point Paragraph
(yeah the one from middle school)

Use to: strengthen a basic argument

How to:
- thesis (argument)
- evidence
- evidence
- draw contrast or state opinion
- conclude/reinforce thesis

I’m really fascinated by tech hiring right now and am seeing a lot of candidates coming in and comparing not 1-2 offers but 5-6 at the same time.

In a competitive market, closing matters. So how do you button up the last mile of closing a candidate? 🧵 👯‍♀️ Closing is a Team Sport

Recruiters, hiring managers, and skip leaders should all get in a channel about late stage candidates. Everyone has a role to play:
- recruiting: manage the process
- HM: offer & role
- Skip: sell & managing escalations

Someone asked me this week how I stay 🌸 so chill 🌻 in the face of high stakes, intense deadlines, and lots of context switching.

First: LOL

Then I realized I do have a few tactics for managing stress in demanding environments that I’ve been relying on lately, a 🧘‍♀️🧵 😎 Keep Cool

When things get intense, it can actually feel good to lean in to the cortisol rush.

I try to meet every challenge with a “sure, that’s solvable” attitude (even if it’s maybe not 😱) because the stress hormones don’t actually make me a better problem solver.

We just wrapped our regular product planning, and I'm SO IMPRESSED w the team's work. Planning is a key part of our product ops + gets the team aligned and excited.

Are you a PM leader looking to plan? To help, I'm sharing our process and 25 slide template. Mega 🧵👇 PM PLANNING: GOALS

Our goal for product planning is to align on company/product strategy & articulate how teams will drive that strategy forward through product investment.

It's our forum to reflect, discuss, debate, and refine our execution outside the day to day.

One of the first things I did @color is bring on the 🔥💪👸🏼 @Bexcitement to run product ops. Why? Because at lastco, @keithadam spoiled me rotten with the leverage we got out of an amazing ops function in product.

What does product ops do? A 🧵

https://twitter.com/nurijanian/status/1398525053642309634

👯 Helps PMs scale
Everything below is a means to ☝️. I brought in product ops because I was concurrently tripling our product & design orgs and needed to ensure the team hit the ground running without every new person having to start from scratch.

Friday was my last day at @Optimizely, a bittersweet ending to a 7 (!) year journey founding @expengine, joining Opti, and leading our 💯 product team. I shared what I've learned in a last lecture, and thought I'd share it here too 👇 (warning: mega thread + startup realness) As a product leader, I had to start there. What have I learned about building great software and the craft of product management?
1. Say "no" more
2. Focus on users
3. Fast beats right