Costello: Rigid quarterly deadlines lead to strange product scoping decisions
Paige Costello · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana) · Jul 9, 2023 · at 10:46
Paige Costello, Head of Core Product at Asana, discusses whether product teams should maintain granular quarterly roadmaps and sprint dates.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If you ask too much for a particular quarter or a particular week or date, people make strange choices about scope, and so really we align on what success looks like, and the teams do their best job to ship as quickly as possibly, as iteratively as possibly”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Paige Costello
Costello: Heavy dog-fooding cultures blind teams to actual customer needs
“Especially in organizations where there are heavy dog-fooding cultures. It's really risky to become less sensitive to the needs and behaviors of customers because people think they are their customer. And it also becomes very navel-gazy.”
Costello: Returning to office benefits mental health and spontaneous collaboration
“I think it's a real thing for mental health. I do think that having social casual relationships as well as more opportunities to talk strategy with people you're not forced into a meeting room with has been super beneficial.”
Costello: PMs do not need to ask for promotions
“You don't need to ask for a promotion. Your outcomes should speak for themselves, and yes, you should have sponsors and people who advocate for you, But a lot of that just comes from that, like, raw connection to the work and to your team.”
Costello: Measuring feature usage instead of customer outcomes is teaching to the test
“Because if you pick your success metrics as using a feature, that's, you're teaching to the test. It's not actually driving the outcome.”
Costello: New PMs should directly observe customers rather than trust summaries
“When you take a new role, become best friends with a researcher and spend time with watching customers use the product firsthand, because what they maybe report on or are trying to do a study about might be very different from what you observe, but you really …”
Costello: Genuine confidence comes from openness, not constant assertion
“Real confidence is often conveyed by being willing to ask the question or to say, I don't, Know what you mean by that. Can you say that again?... It's really about being open and that conveys confidence more than being assertive and advocating a hundred percen…”