20 posts tagged with "Product Management"

For future plans, please don't create one-liner tickets in your backlog.

The only excuse is when you must "proof" some future work. I knew a project manager in an outsourcing project who told business analysts to create 500 Jira issues to showcase to a customer the scope of work for continuing a development team's assignment.

In recent years, I have been dealing with massive backlogs of outdated items written by people no longer around. That has resulted in painful and time-consuming reviews and (re)-negotiations with stakeholders.

If you have such experience at least once, you are likely a fan of focused and precise backlogs like myself.

Onboarding is a crucial process of incorporating a new person into a team, product, or domain (for simplicity, let's generalize all that as "area"). The purpose is to align or increase performance as soon as possible after the unavoidable drop due to a structure change. If approached wrongly, it may cause substantial trouble, especially when you dive into a new area as a product manager (PM).

Whether it is a new or same organization, new role, or new area - the approach to onboarding will vary. Here, we talk about horizontal growth within an organization, keeping your role but acquiring a new "area" (for simplicity, let's use this term to generalize one or several products, teams, lines of business, etc). That is the situation I am currently in, so I have something to reflect on. Also, most onboarding guides focus on vertical growth with a new role in another business. So, it is a good topic to uncover.

I follow the patterns of 3 key knowledge types in product management suggested in the "Building Products for Enterprise" book (I wrote about it here): organizational, product, and market knowledge. So, let's construct the onboarding strategy for each.

I finished reading "TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model" by Marty Cagan. This is not my usual a few thousand-word review—rather, it is a few aftermath thoughts.

It was a sunny day in 2019 when I found myself in the largest bookstore in Dubai, surrounded by a sea of books. I had three hours to choose my next read, a decision that would shape my professional journey. After careful consideration, I picked up "Product Management in Practice" by Matt LeMay, a choice I've never regretted, even though "Building Products for the Enterprise" was a close contender.

Even though I read and appreciated both books in the end, that choice impacted my career without any doubt. At that time, I was a business analyst in an outsourcing software development company who desperately wanted to become a product manager in a product organization.

I can't say that the book made me a product manager. But it definitely impacted me as the professional I am today - for better or worse (I hope for the better). I read it 3 or 4 times while transitioning from a business analyst to acting as a PM. Each time, I was surprised at how much wisdom was placed in that slim book and how differently I looked at some things throughout the years. It is like a peaceful harbor, and you want a return after fighting yourself through multiple storms.

In 2024, I realized that the 2nd edition was published in 2022, so before writing this piece, I enjoyed reading it. There are many changes compared to the previous version, but it is the same brilliant book. Here, I will talk about the 2nd edition.

If it is not the best, then it is one of the best books about product management. Below, I will prove my point.

I almost missed a point of reaching a three-year tier in my product manager career, which nearly matches with ten years in IT. I wrote essays about my previous years (year one, year two, combined article on Medium) as a retrospective of my thoughts and feelings.

I had doubts about whether I wanted to write the continuation. I re-read previous pieces, which made me realize I needed to continue. First, the "Sophomore Year" was quite depressing. Second, I need to finish the series, and having that as a trilogy sounds right.

I don't say it will be optimistic than a previous one. A bit brighter, maybe. And most probably, the last. Writing that in a third time felt more like an obligation.

Anyway, it is time for a retrospective of my 3rd year of being in product management.

Platform engineering and product management​

Last year, I had an identity crisis because my job seemed to be far away from what is written on product management. It coincides with general terms, but the devil is always in details.

Then, I realized that platform engineering and product managers who are working on Internal Development Platforms (IDP). There is a community, books, webinars, courses, and tools around that. Many people are doing similar things I am trying to do and have similar problems.

After a long break, I return to book reviews in the form of an internal dialog. That time it is one of the most valuable books I have read about Product management: "Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software" by Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines.

OK. I am glad you are finally talking about this book. It is an obvious question, but I must ask it. What this book is about?

The title is self-explanatory enough: the book is about being a Product Manager (PM) in a B2B Enterprise organization.

Sounds fair. What is so unique about working in the Enterprise compared to other PMs?

First, let's agree that Product management is a vast discipline. Every organization looks at it from a different angle. So, a PM's responsibilities and role definition might vary for similar products but from other businesses in the same market.

Enterprise PM differs from a startup PM in that the first needs to survive in a complex hierarchy, build relationships, and comply with an Enterprise's restrictions. Also, it depends on whether it is B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2B, etc. That impacts a lot on how products are developed and sold.

I will paraphrase the book to not expand on this topic further. What makes PM in the Enterprise different:

• business model: usually direct sales or subscription
• specialization: very specialized products
• the split between customers and users

Last year I wrote a short essay summarizing my first 365 days as a Product Manager. One more year has passed, and it is time to share more insights or learned lessons.

Important notice: It is only about my experience, so some things may not apply to what other PMs are experiencing. Product Management is a vast discipline with different responsibilities across different companies and industries.

I fell into a common trap of every manager: obsession with performance metrics. Since I have been promoted to the PO role my responsibilities include tracking stats related to the backlog and team performance. That includes the team’s capacity, estimates, velocity, and other specific metrics. In an ideal world, the estimation of planned features matches capacity, the team performs a predicted velocity and (more importantly) delivers features in time. But we all know that doesn’t work this way.

This is the story of how I became obsessed with numbers instead of being obsessed with a product. And how I overcame that and shifted my focus to real value.

Throughout my career, I participated in the development of a few supplements for so-called “parent” products. They were standalone services with their own, not big, but still considerable business value. Recently I realized that even though those supplement products were developed in different organizations and in different business areas they did have common traits. Moreover, they shared the same problems.

It was something laying on the surface. Sometimes you shoot yourself in the foot twice before starting to see obvious things. What is the nature of those Sidekick products and do they inherit the problems of “bigger brothers”? Let us sort it out in this essay.

One year has passed since I was promoted to a Product Manager position: first six months as an Associate (a Junior grade), and then I stepped in as a fully-fledged Product Manager. And that was a drastic shift that made me revisit some aspects of my work and added a new dimension to my view on product development.

In this essay, I want to summarize my experience with the insights I collected throughout the year. Some of them might be obvious to a more experienced audience. But for me, some were revelations, and some were hugely underestimated initially. It is a good exercise to conduct such a personal retrospective, and others can benefit from that as well.