The Ledger, every show

“The reality is with remote employees, Both velocity and innovation have taken a real hit.”

“The truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team. They don't because it's a project management role and he, and they already have plenty of people who can cover that. And furthermore, a lot of times the engineers or the designers say, you know, we'd rather d…”

“A product owner is at one extreme. And honestly, That is a role in a delivery process that has no business being a dedicated person really doesn't. And most teams I know the senior engineer could do it better anyway.”

“So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know.”

“My evidence for that is just look across our industry, across time, that all the innovative products, almost all of them, came from people and teams that had no real domain experience.”

“You know, I hate the idea of those companies that have separate product owners because product owner is just an administrative role. Product owners almost never have the skills to be a product manager.”

“Look across our industry, across time, at all the innovative products, almost all of them came from people and teams that had no real domain experience.”

“When I find a founder that thinks that engineers are somebody you can just do a contract with Accenture or somebody. I'm like, you're not serious about this. Come back. If you decide to get serious.”

“I really do believe at this point in time that, that feature teams and real product teams should not use the same string product manager. The job is so radically different that it just is, it's misleading to call them both product manager.”

“The product manager is responsible for making sure that the solution is valuable and viable. And that is hard. That is hard. That takes real work. And that's part of the how that's a pretty damn integral part of the how as well. Now you don't tell the engineer…”

“I hate the idea of those companies that have separate product owners because product owner is just an administrative role. Product owners almost never have the skills to be a product manager.”

“And those product owners are taught by agile coaches, most of which have never done product for a day in their life. All they know is process.”

“And that's why you see, like you might look at something like safe and say, are these people fricking crazy? Are they nuts? There is no good there. It is just all, it's just repackaged waterfall.”

“Well, my first answer is this is not an accident. Why most B to B software is such crap. It is horrible. And of course the ones that really stand out, they usually are not this way.”

“Look, I I'm not the biggest fan of Meta, but Zuck is very good at product. Very good. That's sort of the problem in the world. He's so good at it.”

“If you are fundamentally a backlog administrator, good luck protecting that because already people are doing that. You know, it's only a matter of time before that becomes pretty well supported. So that is not a good job prospect. Now then we can talk about a …”

“I personally never invest in a startup unless at least one of the founders is a proven product leader.”

“That is the single biggest area empowered teams fall down. The product manager is ill-equipped or a nice way of saying incompetent.”

“The issue is rarely demand. The issue normally is the solution that you've come up with is not significantly better than the alternatives that are out there. And if it's not significantly better than the alternatives, people won't switch to your product.”

“You will probably need to do between 50 and a hundred attempts before you get to product market fit.”

“Most of the time we can figure out in hours that this is not right. Hours, sometimes minutes. In fact, it's not unusual to do a dozen iterations in a day.”

“With qualitative feedback, your goal is to find all the things that are wrong with the product. So that's the difference. You're not looking for affirmation, which is what these, you know, naive founders are doing. They're not, you're not doing that. You're ac…”

“I personally never invest in a startup unless at least one of the founders is a proven product leader.”

“If you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value.”

“The problematic behaviors that you're describing, which by the way, you are spot on. And I hate to say this cause I absolutely love Europe, but it's a bigger problem in Europe than it is in the U S. And the re the reason is because so many of those people are …”

“In an empowered team, you are literally giving ownership responsibility to the team. And so that they build those skills. They build that confidence. They build those muscles in a feature team. They're literally just mercenaries doing what they're told.”

“His argument was because as a company gets bigger, product historically became less important. The people in a company that would be That would be celebrated were marketing people, sales people, finance people. These are people that cause at, you know, if a co…”

“In fact, we know at this point, only about 20% of those things will generate any kind of positive return.”

“If you use, say, two weeks of just verifying the same thing the founder already knew, That founder is probably very frustrated at this point because you haven't even got to work on the solution and people don't buy the problem. They buy your solution. Obviousl…”

“If the product manager and the designer are not available to be there during your product, their products test, cancel the test. They need to be there.”

“That is the single biggest area empowered teams fall down. The product manager is ill-equipped or a nice way of saying incompetent.”

“And fundamentally there's two ways to scale. You can scale with process or you can scale with leaders. The only way I know that leads to good outcomes is scaling with leaders, but the easier, more appealing one to so many companies is scaling with process.”

“A lot of startups are dominated by the founder and the early people. And it almost doesn't matter what techniques they use. If they're good, it's amazing what they do.”

“In a lot of companies. Especially outside of Silicon Valley, team size has just gotten out of hand. It's just gotten, I go into some companies and honestly, I can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have.”

“I don't think we're ever going to go back to the days of big companies having almost all co-located teams”

“It's only when you sign up for an outcome that you have the needs for a product manager in the sense that I would say in the Silicon Valley sense, that's when you need a product manager, because if you've been asked to solve these problems, that means you have…”

“On a real empowered product team. Product manager is a creator, not a facilitator.”

“You look online, probably what? 90% of the content out there is from the feature team world or worst.”

“Empowerment does not mean you set up this product team and they go decide what to work on. No, that would just be anarchy, right? You'd have 50 teams doing 50 things. Instead, empowerment means the leaders do their job, come up with the bets, and then the team…”

“All they're doing is these low risk, simple experiments. They live behind the AB test of just doing like, we're going to change the call to action here and more, maybe more people will register that kind of test. Should they do that? Absolutely. Is that produc…”

“I don't think it's tied to interest rates. I don't think it's tied to that. I think it's more tied to the quality of the leadership and the need of the business to do more than optimization.”

“Some people use the term product led company or product driven company, but those two, we just don't like because It gives all the wrong message and the rest of the company thinks it's a power grab.”

“They focus on the whole phrase of process and governance. That's like a huge red flag. And I try to tell people if that's what you see run, don't walk away from that.”

“If they're a real product manager and they're working about value and viability, that is the founder's job. So the founder should be doing that and needs to be doing that. And it usually causes conflict if they bring in a real product manager too soon. It's to…”

“While it's small, you know, it usually is most useful just to look at the number of engineers at a certain number of engineers, usually like 20 to 25, it's a lot Better if the found co-founder is the product person for that.”

“I'm not a fan, by the way, of tests in terms of people will have these assignments. In my experience, they're not very indicative of what you're really looking for. And let me put it this way. I still haven't found that test that I think is any good.”

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

“Realistically, once you get past about 25, 30 engineers, a founder is saying like, I, or the teams are saying, I can't get enough time with the founder.”