product team

“Some of the most impactful projects that product teams can work on at scale, you know, not early stage startups per se, but at scale are the hardest to measure. And because of that, they just get chronically underfunded.”

“I think one question that I love is how does the company define a product team? Because it answers so much, right? It says so much about culture, collaboration, decision-making, The role of product management. It's sort of like, if there's one question and you…”

“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…”

“It's critical that the team who is taking over from the R&D shop feels like they have control over their own future. you can't Really delegate roadmap to an R&D team. The team who's responsible for maintaining the product, for building the product, who has th…”

“The best way to kill any appetite for discovery is to say, let's stop making bets until we discover. No, don't do that. Keep making bets in parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually those bets get better. And I think the reason why people make th…”

“And I think that's a really big mistake that teams make. Is they, both in their prototype tests and in their interviews, they focus on what people would do, on what people think, on why they think they do something, and it's all really unreliable. It's a garba…”

“What I think is really nice about continuous discovery. You can do it in as little as an interview a week and on the interviewing side, on the discovering opportunities side.”

“I think the best way to guard against what you think is the obvious solution is to work with multiple solutions for the same opportunity.”

“We're in the business of changing behavior, not seeking new knowledge, and we have really good feedback loops. And so we can make decisions based on small experiments. Because we're going to continue to get bigger feedback loops and more reliable data over tim…”

“A focus on discovery. So this ability to spend time in discovery and asking questions of customers and constantly being able to iterate based on that and psychological safety. So teams who are able to question each other, speak up when they see that things are…”

“There's a laziness that can creep in where you're just finding a lot of little things because they're easier to come up with and they're easier to design and think about. It's easier to build. It's easier to talk to your boss and see, we move the number by poi…”

“The teams aren't oriented around product surfaces. Like we don't have a team that's like the app team or a team that's like the dashboard team or the podcasting team. We have teams that are oriented around customers and. Solving a bit of a timeless customer pr…”

“I've actually learned to my surprise that inclusion of growth marketers in the product teams is not all that common. And I personally think there's just a lot of opportunity being missed there. And I expect that to start to become the norm rather than the exce…”

“Product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 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.…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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?”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”