The one question that saves product careers

If you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs.

If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away.

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.

We still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work, rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.

You can follow all the best practices, but if your company goes out of business, they're not going to keep writing your paycheck for two years because all of your OKRs were a 0.6 or a 0.7.

The things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape, if you let them be.

So the first is in setting team goals, no more than one step away from company goals. Don't let it get cascaded into oblivion.

More product managers and teams are getting laid off. The problem is the message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in 2024, we still have too many teams doing work around the work.

The magic lies in the way people work together. That's really what I think has been the consistent thread between all the work that I've done.

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.