Product Team

“Just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make better decisions, a little bit less designed by committee. So We talk a lot about, you know, AI adjusting and improving productivity, and that's part of it, but I think ano…”

“You don't need to build hundreds of evals for them to be useful. Just building 10 great evals is important for helping the team quantify what the goal is and what their progress towards it is and what they're missing.”

“And instead of having like a ten-person product team, you have like a two or three-person product team and you have a bunch of agents to help Help you.”

“If you're just a product team, I think you're going to get leapfrogged by research. If you're just a research team, then, like, it doesn't have any real impact in the world.”

“The most, probably the most permanent design that we've had is really organizing the team by those different capabilities and then having them own those problems from, for individuals all the way through enterprise.”

“I think we are in a moment where it is really incumbent upon each product team and each member of each product team to be able to understand, articulate, and work towards The top line business impact of their own work.”

“I think the way I've come to think about it is that the product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO, if that makes sense. So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, I'm the mini CEO, I think about t…”

“Low impact work begets low impact work. The more low impact work you do, the harder it is to do high impact work, the more likely you are to do low impact work and so on and so forth. It goes and goes and goes until the next round of layoffs.”

“At the end of the day, money is how the impact of most teams is going to be measured. And if you don't have a point of view on why your team is a good investment, either in the money return it brings or in another return that is equally or more important to th…”

“The way that that third step manifests itself the most frequently tactically is, are we estimating and measuring impact in the same unit of measure as our goals? Because if we're doing that, then we're keeping ourselves honest and we're saying, does this actua…”

“The teams I've worked with when things are going well are sometimes just as anxious as the teams I've worked with when things are going poorly, because They have a hard time attributing success to what they're doing, right?”

“No, I don't think so. I think all the teams become smaller and more productive and more cross-functional.”

“And so actually in a lot of ways, your product team becomes almost like a revenue driving team in a way that in seat subscription, you kind of had enough buffer that you could kind of like be like, eh, okay, product's probably providing value in these usage ba…”

“Well, I think it's really important right now for every product team to think about how to prototype and play with new capabilities because it's, everything is so fast moving, so programs like Maker Week help, but I think it's a core capability that we all nee…”

“And so I think you're going to want sort of quasi researcher machine learning engineer types as part of pretty much every team because fine tuning a model is just going to be part of the core workflow for building most products.”

“The other thing I've seen is when the team is just continuously delivering meaningful things, it doesn't have to line up. Because from the executive level, if you are CPO or CTO, or I mean, in these bigger cases, it's more like, you know, VP in some area, but …”

“When there's a lot of solutioning all the way down to detail without engineering involved, usually that's a painful recipe, you know, and then it's kind of like, no, we can't do that.”

“I mean, doing a bit of everything, being a generalist is, I think, much more important than it used to be. And the, if I'm putting together a product team today, I would re-obsess about getting as much of, as many skill sets as possible for each person I hire.…”

“Writing these evaluations is going to become increasingly an important part of the job. Of product teams, especially when they're building AI features and working with them.”

“I can't tell you how many times I've been in conversations with companies where product doesn't have any go-to-market goals. There's no expectations of driving leads, driving activations, driving opportunities, converting, converting leads. Guys, everybody sho…”

“In our product team, there's one person who's basically a research coordinator. And she's responsible for reaching out, and she basically talks with the PMs, like, what's your target market, ICP, whatever you want to call that? Give me some, what do you want t…”

“I think the way I like it I like it to work is that the product team builds the end, build the variety engine, and growth operates it. So you build something that is that you can parameter, you know, with parameters, and then you let growth play with it, you k…”

“If you look at every individual PM, they all make sense as individual hires, but if you, Put them all together as a product team. Like, they're all junior, and they're all high horsepower, high potential, but there's no one there to actually train them and, yo…”

“I really believe that before you build something, you should have a theory of the world. You should, you know, understand who your user is, what they want to accomplish. You should understand your strengths and weaknesses in doing that and have a, you know, a …”

“Then the thing that people often do, one of the big mistakes I think people make, is they then give up too early. So, you know, your theory of the world might be 20% wrong, but that means that it's 80% right. And one of the hardest things to do in product, I t…”

“Well, I think there are two things that are very important. You need to give people a win. You know, so Page Insights that we talked about earlier is an example of a win like that. You know, well, we can be proud about a thing that we shipped. And then I think…”

“If you're not going to get significance, if there's no other techniques at your disposal, then sometimes you just gotta trust your intuition and ship it. And if that's where, if that's what you believe, then that's what you believe. And you shouldn't spend tim…”

“I think one of the worst things you can do to people building products is go from, hey, it's you and four people trying to decide what a well-run product is, a great experience could look like, ah, to go do a good job, and you say, great, now get 30 other peop…”

“The thing that you can learn and literally An hour is, hey, I have all these customers out there who've been wanting this very specific feature, and now, now I have an alpha version of it. I'm gonna go out to these people, these clients, these customers, and s…”

“When you're actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is, like, a single artifact that the team is creating together, so I think, like, a common occurrence is to kind of have, like, the research readout, followed by the desig…”

“Good companies by the time they message it, it's live. It's been coming out. We may have released some things dark as you know, but we've got it in production solid. We've proven each thing probably with an AB test.”

“I think the ones that I've seen move the fastest are, one, they're clear on why they exist and what they're trying to get done. Two, they're clear on what they're trying to build. You know, there might be some nips and tucks on, you know, where's the button pl…”

“There's a lot of teams that are like, we don't want new PMs. We don't need product managers. They just get in the way. And I find that that's only the case when the product manager is not great and not really good at their job because most great PMs just make …”

“I actually ask my teams to write three press releases, alternative and divergent. Like what if we, so suppose you're launching a membership program. So instead of two tiers, let's do three tiers. Or for example, let's seek another one which says instead of, ah…”

“You actually should be like a bit more professional services oriented as a product team earlier on.”

“If you just imagine this grid where you have shipping fast and slow and you have impact high and low as the other you can really think about mapping where your product teams are relative to those two dimensions. And so over time, there are really only four sta…”

“But you really need to unlock this state, you really need to think about how can you get them into shipping mode? Have them ship something really small and then celebrate the heck out of it to really encourage that feedback loop to get into the mode of deliver…”

“I would say there are two general mistakes that teams will make. The first is going to be jumping too quickly to solutions, right? So they have a great idea. And they're sort of working backwards from the solution. That's one, and then the other is tying back …”

“But you just, in order to get, get an impact, if you know you're not gonna roll it back, then, okay, you should just roll it out and try to reduce the need for the validation.”

“These are the maximum four key results and the one or two objectives you guys need to work on teams cannot deliver on more than that.”

“I remember at first the very early days of Sprig, there was some wording around your automated user researcher, you know, or it does all the text analysis for you. And that was actually very off putting for both user researchers and product teams.”

“What that leads to is a lot of me too products. It leads to us kind of just meeting table stakes. It leads to kind of picking the safe things. Because the safe things are you know, easy to quantify and they're safe because they're easy to quantify. And look, I…”

“Our support reports into me, and the first principle there was saying, well, every support ticket is a failure of our product. We literally have that as, you know, a quote just posted on, on, on all those channels. It's a failure. And our, if the product works…”

“So I think that there may be less people on a product team. I think maybe it'll be delegated to someone of a higher level position, maybe like a chief product officer, maybe a product director. Maybe you won't have several people because you can use software t…”

“I think so, especially in early to mid-stage businesses, because the reality is that there is one engineering team that is delivering all changes to the product. And it's important that the quality bar is as high for growth as it is anywhere else in the org. S…”

“Well, most customer success systems They don't deliver information that's valuable for product teams, right? They deliver information that's valuable for customer success teams, like how long does it take people to solve an issue?”

“It's fascinating to me that most teams spend the final mile of their time building the product considering the first mile of the customer's experience using the product.”

“If you have a huge amount of conviction, you're willing to take a lot of pain. If you don't have that much conviction, You need to be a little bit more thoughtful with the way you roll things out and the feedback you get around it, and you got to let that info…”

“Now, when it comes to PLS, you don't own revenue target in my opinion, but what you do own is the pipeline that was created by product. That you have a handshake with sales team over.”

“The other is just that data scientists, as with most humans, like we get better, the more focused we are and the more in depth we are in understanding the product itself. Right. So If you have someone that's dedicated to a zone or an area of the product, then …”

“The biggest problem and mistake founders, founders make is they go for the credential of the person who succeeded at big company XYZ, which is a very different mindset than succeeding in a highly ambiguous pre-success mode of a startup.”

“One relatively minor thing that I thought had a lot of impact with execution is being very clear that whoever is accountable for the result should also be the design, the decider. I found that a lot of literature out there says that product teams should be thi…”

“When you have a competitive intelligence program or you have competitive Intel, I try never to share that with product ever because products should just focus on the customer. They should not give two craps what's going on with, you know, competitor A or compe…”

“CPOs went from, okay, deliver, deliver, deliver to, Really increase business metrics or, you know, just help drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product and you really have to figure out what that means for the product team at large.”

“When you're on the product team, especially if you're in a consumer-facing business, it may not be as pronounced for SaaS businesses, but if you're in a consumer-facing business, working on a consumer-facing product, you would better have at least a general un…”

“Like, I think you kind of end up planning towards the sort of the team that you have, not the team that you should have.”

“Typically what happens is goals are almost the start of a strategic process rather than the end of it. A company will say, we need to increase our revenue by X. We need to increase our retention by Y. What's our strategy to be able to do that? And what I found…”

“Some teams are in the quadrant where they hit their goals, but they don't know why, which is good for now, but it's eventually going to catch up with you. And then an important thing to be in is if you didn't hit your goals to make sure that you're at least un…”

“People trying to put tools in play out of context sometimes had worse effects than them just not doing it all to do that.”

“I've never seen a product come from a product manager. I've only seen great products come from product teams.”