Chapter 1 – Practice of PM

• Three responsibilities:
  • Bring out best in people on your team
  • Work with people outside of your immediate team, who are not directly incentivized to work with you
  • Deal with ambiguity
    • The skill of actually figuring out what you need is probably as important as what you do after you figure it out
• PM as stewards of a value exchange between business and its customers
• Consistent themes
  • Lots of responsibility, little authority
  • If it needs to get done, it’s part if your job
  • You are not actually building the product yourself
  • You can’t wit around until somebody tells you what to do
• What NOT to do
  • Use stupid fluff words
  • Ask big provocative questions
  • Hero an idea
  • Overachieve and kill your team
  • Be the martyr and become depressed
• PM role names are too ambiguous across companies just embrace that and ask a lot of questions to see what is expected from you specifically

Chapter 2 – Core Skills

• Hybrid mode: Business, tech, UX
  • One size does not fit all
• CORE skills:
  • Communicate with stakeholders
    • Clarity over comfort – don’t let uncomfortable communication pass if it means trivial stuff in the future
      • Ask questions and facilitate necessary conversations to make sure the team has clarity on what they’re doing
      • Proactively reach out to other product teams if coordination will deliver better customer and business outcomes
      • Respond promptly to stakeholders who reach out to you
  • Organize the product team for sustainable success
    • Make yourself obsolete
      • Would the team have information to prioritize and deliver for a month without my day-to-day?
      • Would access to what we’re working on be easily accessible?
      • Does everyone know what and why they’re working on something?
  • Research the needs and goals of the product’s users
    • Live in your user’s reality
      • Is my team learning directly from our customers at least once a week?
      • Is every product decision my team makes informed by both business goals and user needs?
      • Is my team using both the product and competing products to understand our user’s needs and behaviours
  • Execute the day to day tasks required for the product team to meet its goals
    • All efforts in service of outcomes
      • Is my team starting with the customer and business impact we seek to drive and then evaluating and prioritizing multiple ways to achieve that impact, as opposed to starting with features and retroactively justifying them by estimating impact?
      • Are my team’s strategic goals and objectives front and center during tactical conversations and activities
      • Am I prioritizing my own time in a way that reflects the goals and priorities of my team?
• Hard skills
  • Debunking:
    • You need hard skills to win the respect of technical team
      • Just communicate well
    • You need hard skills to challenge technical people
      • Useful indeed
    • You need hard skills to stay engaged with technical work
      • I guess
    • You need hard skills to do things like query databases, write documentation
      • Definitely but not all jobs require

Chapter 3 – Stay Curious

• Message people on different teams to see if they’d want to coffee so you can see what they’re up to
• Take genuine interest
  • Understand hard skills contextually
    • Ask tech teams about their work
  • Build bridges before you need something
    • If you only talk to people when you need something from them, nobody will fw your requestsremot
  • Expand your network of trust
• ‘I’m curious to learn more about the work you do’ is big dubs
  • Have coffees, get to know their work and their problems
    • I’m new, idk anything, tell me your problems
• Cultivate a growth mindset
  • Failures and setbacks are learning opportunities
  • Overachievers typically have fixed mindset as they avoid areas they need to work on and see things they don’t immediately excel in as useless
• Gift of being wrong
  • Know why you’re wrong, and value overall goals you are working towards above your own plan for achieving these goals
• Staying off the defensive
  • Defending something ends up being harmful at times
  • Provide options, not arguments
  • If you feel compelled to do something out of anxiety or defensiveness, write it down and reapproach it the next day
  • Say OK great, then figure out the rest
    • Say Ok Great to any defensive inducing statement, and then figure out the rest to break tension
  • Ask for help
• Do NOT conflate product failure with personal failure
  • You are your product’s worst critic, so do not associate your self-worth with the value of your product
• Do not ask why without asking why
  • Reframe why into open and genuine questions