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How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.

How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.

How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.

How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.

How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.

How to Align Individual, Team, and Organizational Goals for Success

Managers must ensure team members understand their roles and responsibilities and are held accountable for their decisions. Building trust and collaboration is key to creating a high-performance team. Alignment, communication, collaboration, and motivation are essential for team success. It is important to align organizational, team, and employee goals to avoid conflicts and ensure team members are on the same page.

Best Practices of Working Cross Functionally

As the product operations manager, it is important to ensure that all teams are on the same page when working on cross-functional projects. To do this, it is important to have a centralized communication method, a stage-gate process, and kickoff meetings to involve all stakeholders. Additionally, document the purpose of the project and tasks that require collaboration, and be prepared to face difficult people and sticky situations.

Building a Product Team as an Engineering Leader

When a VP of engineering joined a company, they found a huge disconnect between the product roadmap and what was achieved by the engineering team. To bridge the gap, they created a parallel product team and hired a product owner for each engineering team. This helped to reduce the "engineering versus product" competitiveness and created a single roadmap. To ensure success, it is important to clearly define roles and create a platform of opportunities for product and engineering leadership.

Tips to Scale an Existing Engineering Team

When scaling a team to meet the demands of a growing business, it is important to identify the pain points from a customer and product point of view, define teams and managers, focus on knowledge sharing, and measure the productivity of each team. Additionally, it is important to not be afraid of making mistakes, collaborate with other groups, and analyze the skill sets and gaps within each team.

Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager

This article discusses the importance of communication and staying focused when managing a team. It emphasizes the need to communicate problems instead of solutions, to sketch out ideas to communicate thought processes, and to identify and develop top talents. It also stresses the importance of over-communicating, being transparent, and avoiding false promises.

How to Grow Your Business by Changing Product Dimensions

As the head of product, the problem of customers not using the product for more than a year was addressed by changing the product strategy to showcase the strengths of the product and targeting particular customers to tailor-meet their specific needs. A Flywheel approach was implemented to ensure customers were successful with the product, and employees were valued just as much as customers to ensure the solution was welcomed. Communication of the actions back to the customers was also important to help them stick around.

Take Calculated Risks, Not Chances

This article is about the importance of hard work, calculated risks, and believing in yourself when trying to build a strong career. The author shares their experience of taking a calculated risk by moving back to their home country and pursuing an MBA from a top college, as well as joining a startup to learn about product management. The key to success is to stay motivated and look for the bright side in every situation.

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication

A team of experienced professionals with strong opinions was hired to update a company's CMS. The team was unable to come to a consensus on who should lead, resulting in a power struggle and a destructive environment. The executive team split up the team, assigning each individual to lead their own initiatives, which ended up being a win-win solution. This experience highlights the importance of understanding intentions and hiring for long-term legacies.

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager

The author was tasked with leading a combined development experience and technical writing team, but faced challenges due to lack of collaboration and understanding between the two teams. To mitigate the issues, the author implemented one-pagers to learn about each team member on a personal level, and held team-wide meetings and lunches. After seven months, the author was able to build trust and rapport with the team, showing that product management is not only about features, but also organizational dynamics.

Executing a Sprint to Maintain Results

Two friends, who had been selling products on Amazon, decided to join forces and create an online course about selling through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). After researching the competition, they launched an MVP video on Udemy for free and received positive feedback. They then launched a three-part lesson about selling on Amazon, which became the top-selling course on Udemy and other platforms. The importance of sprinting when the opportunity calls for it was highlighted, as well as the need to differentiate oneself from the competition.

Engaging with Customers to Find Successful Solutions

This article discusses how to combat a high churn rate for an identity product. The author's first step was to meet with customers and understand their use case and pain points. After looking into data, the author found that outdated linkages were the primary reason for churn. To combat this, the author created a feature that gave customers more control over the linkages. This feature minimized the number of questions sent to customer support and solved the customer's problems. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the technical customer, as they usually want more customization and complex features.

How to Validate a Product from Start to Finish

This article discusses how an enterprise SaaS company in the ad tech industry created an audience segmentation product to increase ROI on marketing spend. To explore a new product idea that allowed customers to join different data sets, the author conducted user research to understand the customer use cases and segmented them into two major personas: marketers and data operations managers. After experiments and validation, the author concluded that the combination of data was more beneficial to marketers, and the company released the product, resulting in a double-digit increase in data usage and revenue. The article also provides advice on how to find new product ideas in a company.

The Quiet Efforts to Overcome the Men-Only Environment in a Startup

This article discusses the issue of "bro-culture" in startups, where men outnumber women in senior executive positions. It suggests that to address this issue, people should understand the cultural dynamics, communicate with colleagues, and actively participate in changing the environment. It also suggests that events such as Brene Brown's TED Talk on the power of vulnerability can help create psychological safety.

How Process Feedback at Work Without Triggering a Stress Response

This article discusses the importance of taking upward feedback seriously and how to do so. It emphasizes the need for open communication and understanding, and suggests taking the time to process feedback with the help of mentors. It also suggests over-communicating intentions and asking for specific feedback to get better results.

Managing Expectations: Product Management in a Startup

When a product lead joins a startup, they must manage up and collaborate with the founder to create a product vision. This requires clear communication and transparency, as well as collecting data and getting perspectives from all functions within the company. It is important to tailor the content according to the audience and to be proactive and forthright in conversations.

Knowing How and When to Let Go of an Underperforming Employee

Letting a team member go is a difficult task for a manager, and often they wait too long to make the decision. It is important to provide feedback to the individual and to involve HR in the process. After the decision is made, it is important to be transparent with the team and to remember that the situation is isolated and not related to the company or team as a whole.

Creating a Product Org with Agile Methodologies

This article outlines the author's experience in transitioning from a real estate company to a tech startup, and then to a larger corporation and a small startup. The author explains how they created a product organization using an agile methodology, which included setting core values, reducing the number of team meetings, and using agile as a set of guidelines. The author also discusses how to increase motivation of a team by creating alignment and goal setting, and by having team members voice their opinions.

Introduction of a Matrix-Based Organizational Model in a Software House

A silo-based organization was losing profitability due to lost contracts, so a matrix-based organization was created to recover profitability. This organization grouped engineers and project managers in a single cost center, and programs were aggregated in separate organizational units. After some time, Program Directors stabilized their profit centers and started to build their own organizations. Lessons learned included the difficulty of performance review in a matrix organization, the challenge of building innovation, and the importance of defining clear responsibilities between line and project managers.

Unexpected Outsourcing Contract Termination

In this situation, a team of engineers was outsourced to a customer organization and the customer decided to terminate the contract. To ensure a smooth transition, the vendor secured excellent communication with employees, involved senior management, verified potential alternatives, agreed on a course of action with the customer, and established communication between the customer and their teams. Lessons learned include addressing tension and emotions with communication, identifying allies, and remembering there are three parties involved.

Taking Over Maintenance and Development of Existing Customer Applications From Other Vendors

A team was gathered to investigate and analyze 30 business support systems for a 3-year outsourcing contract. The team used a similar methodology for each system, gathering artifacts and setting up a source code repository and CI tooling. The team divided the systems into four groups and created templates for each group, with a schedule and workload estimate. The team also tuned the plans for specific applications to reflect their individual characteristics. The team learned to use the divide and conquer approach, make assumptions, and write them down.