Knowledge shared by our community

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.

Building a Fully Cross-Functional Team

Cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular due to their effectiveness. This article discusses the experience of building a cross-functional team, which included convincing managers to give up team members, identifying all functions that should contribute, creating a common space for collaboration, and arranging socializing activities. The article also highlights the importance of including everyone that needs to be included, explaining the common goal, and maintaining good relationships with managers.

Mastering Delegation: A First-Time Manager’s Perspective

This story is about a new manager who had difficulty delegating tasks to their team. With the help of their manager and a training program, they were able to identify the reasons behind their reluctance to delegate and develop strategies to overcome them. Through self-reflection and externalizing their self-sabotaging beliefs, they were able to become more comfortable with delegating and empower their team to grow in their roles. The lessons learned from this experience are that training and asking for help are important for new managers, and delegation is a two-way street that requires a mindset shift.

Navigating Freelance Work

This article outlines the lessons learned from the author's experience with freelance work. The author suggests researching potential clients, studying job descriptions, and managing expectations to ensure a successful freelance experience. They also advise caution when reading job descriptions and transparency when dealing with clients.

Creating My First Product From Scratch

This is a story of the journey of creating a hotel inventory management system integrated with search and booking engines. It began with one developer and one product manager, and grew to a team of ten within a year. Through interviews, market discovery, and product analysis, the team was able to create a product that was used by 20,000 hotels and handled 100,000 booking requests per minute. Lessons learned include delegating tasks, building a team from scratch, focusing on direct users, and collecting data.

Software Development Life Cycle: A Product Guy’s Perspective

The author joined a new company in a product role and found that the software development life cycle was not being followed. To address this, the author implemented changes to the software development life cycle, including explicit instructions to stakeholders, project tracking with Jira, and workflows for design. These changes resulted in increased productivity and output quality, and other PMs followed the author's initiative. The author also learned lessons about the importance of following a software development life cycle and the difficulty of changing people's habits.

Problems With Prioritization: A Glass Jar Metaphor

Superhuman was faced with the challenge of working on two large projects in parallel. To maximize their capacity, they decided to add a self-contained customer-facing feature of less priority to the mix, allowing the new engineer to become familiar with the codebase. This decision taught them that prioritization is not just about following a stack ranked list, but also requires appropriate balancing of resources and managing dependencies. It requires creativity and flexibility, and the product backlog should include items of various sizes to enable the team to work efficiently.

Why Establishing Long-Term Relationship With Your Manager Can Benefit You

In 2008, Mike was hired as a front-end developer and eventually moved into a management role. Over the years, the author and Mike developed a mentor-mentee relationship that allowed them to trust each other and have honest conversations. This relationship enabled them to move up in their respective roles and eventually Mike took over a more significant scope than the author. The author learned that the best way to build a team is by trusting people and that the relationships you establish are more important than any other work. It is also beneficial to have a mentor who can help you learn in a more efficient way.

How and Why You Should Hire “Boomerang” Employees

A CTO took over a team and found that one of the senior engineers, Joe, was not enjoying his role as a manager. Joe left the team for another role, but eventually returned after the CTO identified a senior technical role that better suited Joe's skills and motivations. The CTO learned the importance of understanding team members' motivations and providing them with career opportunities that align with their goals.

Challenges Faced as the Vice President of Engineering

This article discusses the challenges faced when scaling an engineering team from one to multiple teams. It outlines the roles of the individual software engineer, the test team, the QA team, and the DevOps teams. It also explains the need to limit the size of changes and to release them incrementally with the help of automation and test coverage. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of influencing team members as a leader and building credibility with the leadership team.

Right Is Better Than Fast

A project was underway to redesign the login page at Box, making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. However, the Customer Success team raised a major concern that customers would be unhappy with the reduced space for custom welcome content. To address this, quantitative and qualitative data was gathered, and the design was revisited to add more space for the message. This process took longer than expected, but the reception by customers was better than it would have been without the extra steps. The takeaway is that partnering with customer-facing teams, building trusted relationships, and prioritizing the right solution over a fast one are all important for delivering a valuable product experience.

Making Moves: Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

After graduating with a degree in computer science, the author joined a cloud content startup as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. Intrigued by product management, the author took advantage of the mentorship offered by the product managers at the company and worked hard in their QA role to demonstrate their value to the company. After 1.5 years, the author was able to transition to product management. The author learned the importance of patience, persistence, excelling at everything they do, and finding mentors and sponsors.

Enabling Rural Coverage

This is a story of how the author, 11 years ago, was assigned a project to create a mobile application for a multinational company to push sales of consumer goods to rural retail. With no formal product training or experience, the author had to figure out the logistics and technical aspects of the project, as well as build mock designs and discuss ideas with other teams. Through trial and error, the author was able to successfully roll out the product and learned lessons about job description alignment, delegation, and communication etiquette.

The Simple Rule for Prioritization

This article discusses the challenges of product management in a fast-paced startup environment. It outlines the process of prioritizing tasks, balancing customer demands with the product team's goals, and taking risks to innovate and attract new customers. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritization for product managers and the need to take risks to ensure success.

Tips to Align Stakeholders

The author, a product manager, realized that the success of the product depended on the stakeholders and that they were not always familiar with the product. To address this, the author had meetings with the sales team and presented the product vision to the senior management. The author also implemented a framework called Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to prioritize work and conducted an innovation sprint to keep up the morale of the team. The lessons learned from this experience were that results take time, the people aspect must be kept in mind, and systematic ways of doing things should be looked for.

Challenges of Working From Home

During the pandemic, work from home has been a challenge for many product managers who need to find a source of inspiration. Self-motivation is key, and employee attrition is a concern. To address this, the management implemented a hybrid work-from-home policy and the manager made sure that no one was overworked. Lessons learned include appreciating the little things, finding motivation, and building trust with team members.

Structuring a Scaling Team to Optimize for Growth

As the Engineering Manager at Amazon, the author had to come up with a strategy to scale and right-size the team in order to speed up customer delivery times and provide innovations. To do this, they split the team into smaller feature teams, each with their own specific goals, and implemented modern engineering practices such as continuous integration. They also split the feature teams by experience types that drivers experience throughout their travel. Through this process, the author learned the importance of obsessing over customers and collecting data earlier on for prospects.

Does Remote Work Really Work?

This article discusses the challenges faced by a company transitioning to a fully remote team. The head of engineering had to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the same level of collaboration and quality. To do this, they created artificial points of contact between teams, made it mandatory for people to join meetings from their own devices, and focused on building relationships. The article also highlights the lessons learned from this experience, such as the importance of creating space to build relationships, accepting delays in responses, and handling people sensitively.

On the Way From an IC to a Manager

When transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager, the author faced many challenges. To make the transition successful, the author sought out mentors, practiced delegation, and was transparent about their weaknesses and mistakes. Through this process, the author learned the importance of trusting their team, being open to new approaches, and reading books to gain knowledge.

Managing Employee Experience During Hyper-Growth

A hyper-growth company faced the challenge of evolving their product while managing multiple stakeholders. To solve this problem, they split their product team into two teams, one dealing with delivery and the other with after-sales services. They also formed a business-product partnership and held executive committee meetings to align their priorities and KPIs. Through this process, they learned the importance of communication, understanding the company's needs, and testing out different solutions.

How to Adapt the Roadmap Process to a Hyper-Growth Scaleup

A Product Manager faced the challenge of involving everyone in the process of building a roadmap when their team rapidly grew from 5PMs to 35 teams in two and a half years. To solve this problem, they implemented "problem pitches" and "solution workshops" to prioritize problems and explore solutions. Through this process, they were able to build the roadmap they had initially started working on and learned that prioritizing should be about what to do and what not to do, and that product teams need to find their way into the organization.