OKRs are great, but there’s a problem with how most companies use them. — OKRs (objectives and key results) are a critical tool. I helped bring them to my last company. Using OKRs successfully made us more objective and quantitative in how we built products. My favorite part of OKRs is the KRs (key results). It’s easy to be sloppy in our thinking when…

The way great companies do it follows the same structure. — The way that the FAANG companies use metrics to build products is vital to their success. They invest an army of people and homegrown tools to pull it off. My last article, Balancing short-term and long-term product bets, describes Google’s process. While the very top companies are great at using…

What I’ve learned from Dan Rubinstein — Dan Rubinstein has a unique vantage point on the evolution of the product management craft. He joined Google as a PM in 2005. His initial role was to put in place processes and systems to help other product managers understand the efficacy of what they were building. In 2005, Google…

Changelogs are a medium with the potential to transform how we work. — Publishing a changelog is the highest value activity that you’re probably not doing. You might think that keeping a changelog is a boring chore reserved for developers. On the contrary, changelogs are a medium with the potential to transform how we all work. For those of you that already keep…

We’re seeking design partners. — The Problem What are the heuristics for separating “important” product changes from minor changes that are essentially background noise? If this question sparks your interest, keep reading. Everyone who works at a software company must perpetually ask the question: “How did our product change?” The folks who sell, market, or support the…

Applying mountaineering strategies to startup building — When I meet aspiring startup founders, I’m struck by how many of them quickly abandon their ideas and pivot to something totally different. Sometimes the pivot is relatively small, like a different type of product for the same persona they were already targeting. Other times the pivot is huge, like…

How to fill a fundamental gap in your product dev process. — Accountants have ledgers. Scientists record their experiments. Marketers have CRMs. Engineers have code version history. Product builders, however, lack a sufficient source-of-truth for their past work. It’s a fundamental gap that holds back product management craft. What is a “source-of-truth” (SoT) for product iterations”? A SoT for product iterations consists of

How product managers can help each other improve — It’s a common practice for art students to critique each other’s work as a means to improve. To conduct a critique, one student shares their creation. Then, the artist’s peers describe, analyze, and interpret what they see and feel. …

Exploring the connections between meditation and innovation — In How Adults Build Products, I explored a cognitive difference between adults and babies: adults have “endogenous attention” while babies only have “exogenous attention.” In other words, adults have the capacity to control their own attention. For babies, in contrast, their attention is directed by the external world. Adults behave…