Driving alignment within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape

The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing documents and then being the team secretary and running around getting approvals, but products live and die in the pixels. You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you.

And many of the companies that I've either worked with or advised, coached over the past few years, it was all about outcomes. Everyone was, 'Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes,' which is right. You want to make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal, and that's fine. And some folks, myself included at certain points, swung way too far on the outcomes train and forgot that output is an indicator of that.

If you have a team that's doing all of the ideation and figuring out how to make decisions quickly and getting the right documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and experiment briefs, all the things that we know go into to successful product development, that's great, but if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much.

I think that smaller teams, especially folks that are ideating, when you haven't landed on what you're going to build yet, I think Trello's a great product for that. For pulling ideas, for prioritizing them, for tracking how we're progressing through discovery, I think Trello's really great for that. For things that have been decided and are ready to go and are really in the breakdown these tasks and assign it to people, then something like Jira is probably a better use case.

Put live chat customer support in your app 24 hours a day. It sounds insane. It's like the whole point of tech is you don't need to do that. But then users get this white glove experience, and that eliminates another confounding variable.

When I think about work-life balance, I don't use the word balance, I use optimization. It's this question of what are you optimizing for right now? Whether it's today or this court or this year, with the understanding that I don't think you can have it all at the same time all the time.

You never want to walk away from an experiment or test and say, 'Well, maybe the execution was bad because it takes a lot of energy to mobilize a team to test something,' and you really want to make sure your tests actually provide signal.

I think product managers are increasingly I think a bit more technical or expected to be. I think there was a moment where they were technical and then it was, 'No, no, we're all generalists,' and now I think we're going back to PMs need to be more technical. I think designers, the expectation is that they'll be more business-oriented, design as a means, honestly, to an end. And I think engineers are increasingly becoming what more product-focused, more user-focused.

I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Sarahah, but the entire app was in Arabic, like the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something.

Where people are trying to obtain a particular value and going through a very distortive process. If you can actually crystallize what their motivation is, you can have this kind of intense adoption.

For me the biggest thing is just if folks are working on a sprint, it's very simply, 'What did you deliver this sprint?' That's it. Just ask a bunch of questions. 'What did you deliver?' And more questions, 'Okay, fine, but what did you deliver to production? Great. And how long have you been working on that? How long? What was the cycle time?'