Knowledge shared by our community

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Change Management: Rebuilding from scratch

The speaker was brought in to overhaul the R&D organization of their company, and identified four layers of problems: technology, people, ineffectiveness of the system, and no scale or proper redundancy. After talking to all the developers and receiving the backing of management, the speaker decided to rewrite the entire system. They outsourced day-to-day operations to an outsourced team in Ukraine, hired top talent, and migrated workloads to AWS. After two years, the migration process was successfully completed. The speaker learned lessons about trusting people, communicating a plan to those affected, and managing power shifts.

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

How to Effectively Manage Stakeholders

This article discusses the challenges of joining a startup and the different opinions of stakeholders. It suggests understanding the other side, finding common ground, building a strong feedback culture, and exposing them to the better in order to foster strategic relationships with all stakeholders. It also emphasizes the importance of investing in the process and being patient with the results.

Solving the Right Problems

Startups often try to solve too many problems and lose focus on the most important ones. Leaders should create an environment where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and keep an open mind. Validate the problem by determining the number of people affected by it and the value it brings to the company. Make sure the problem aligns with the company's mission and secure company-wide buy-in before proposing a solution.

Building a Gender-Balanced Engineering Organization in the Middle East

Jordan's tech scene has a gender distribution of 50:50 in colleges, but this does not translate to the workforce due to women not being expected to stay late at the office. To challenge this, the core team responsible for establishing the Expedia Jordan office focused on making sure to build a sustainable gender-equal presence from the get-go. This included top-of-funnel sourcing, resume screening, tech tasks, and onsite interviews. The outcome was a 50:50 gender balance, showing that women engineers were succeeding in the recruiting process at a higher rate than men. This highlights the untapped talent pool of female engineers in Jordan.

Establishing an Outcome-Driven Roadmap

This article discusses the importance of creating an outcome-driven roadmap instead of a feature-driven roadmap. It suggests using the Opportunity Solution Tree, created by Teresa Torres, to help create a roadmap that is focused on outcomes. The article also emphasizes the importance of validating ideas against outcomes before adding them to the roadmap.

Growing Well-Rounded Product People

Product management is a multifaceted area and product managers need to have a wide range of skills. To help product people grow in their careers, managers should identify a super skill in their reports and build around that skill to make them well-rounded product professionals. A clear growth framework should be created that itemizes key areas that direct reports should focus on, and they should be encouraged to learn one skill at a time.

How Skip-Level Conversations Can Help You Create Strong Relationships with Your Engineers

Product managers can become disconnected from the reality of their team, which can put trust and confidence in their leadership at risk. To build strong relationships and trust, product managers should establish skip-level conversations with individual engineers on the team. These conversations should be personal and frank, allowing the product manager to get feedback and build trust. This will help the product manager better understand the team and have them believe in the visions and strategy set.

Growing the Culture of a New Product Team

When taking over a new team, it is important to build a strong team culture in order to foster a successful team. This process is time-consuming and requires a unique approach for each team. Four common rules to follow are providing clear direction, identifying culture champions, making culture a priority, and setting up a leadership group. Additionally, the team should come up with their own values and meet biweekly to get to know each other better. Ultimately, the team should become the leader of the product and success, and a strong team culture will lead to continuous improvement.

Should Tech Debt Be Managed

Tech debt is a widely discussed topic, but it is not always necessary to prioritize it. Leaders should think from the lens of what is most impactful for the business, and ask themselves a sequence of questions to determine if it is the right thing to do. Leaders should also remember that the relationship between Product and Engineering is a partnership, and they should apply the Expected Value framework to determine the highest value decision. Lastly, leaders should remember that their job is to ensure the business has the highest impact, and not just to make the team happy.

How to Embrace Mistakes Without Idealizing Failures

A new product was launched with much hype, but it failed to meet expectations. The team spent months trying to improve the product, but ultimately had to make the decision to discontinue it. The leader had to make the decision and communicate it to the team, and also had to own up to the failure and share the lessons learned. The main lessons learned were that failure is acceptable as long as you learn from it, you need to be involved in coming up with the solution, and you have to be accountable and own the problems.

Some Challenges I Faced When Growing in My Role

This article discusses four challenges that engineers may face when transitioning into more senior technical roles: letting go, accepting that others may be better than you, finding the balance between technical innovation and pursuing a broader perspective, and differentiating communication styles. It provides advice on how to deal with each challenge and emphasizes the importance of continual professional growth.

Are We Solving the “Right Problems”?

It is important to take the time to ask yourself if you are solving the right problem before putting in effort to solve it. Three examples are given to illustrate how to avoid common detours engineers face when they are pressured to fix a problem instead of the right problem. The fast pace of the industry, pushy customers, and demanding stakeholders can drive people to solve the wrong problem. It is important to analyze the root cause of the problem, question methodology, and re-evaluate customers’ pain points before beginning.

Delivering Performance-Related Feedback

This article discusses the importance of delivering feedback to new managers and how to do it effectively. It explains the need to be aware of biases and to practice delivering feedback in a caring but straightforward way. It also suggests using the book Radical Candor to help new managers understand the concept of delivering feedback.

Overcoming an Analysis Paralysis on Your Team

When the author joined a new company, they inherited a team of highly technical back-end people who were stuck in their own quest for perfection and not making any progress. To help them move forward, the author set clear expectations and created a team culture that championed progress and embraced mistakes. They also introduced processes such as the RAPID model and the 80/20 rule to help the team make decisions and prioritize tasks. Through one-on-ones and setting expectations with upper management, the team was able to make progress and learn from their mistakes.

Climbing Up the Engineering Ladder

This article outlines the journey of a software engineer who climbed the ladder from individual contributor to managing multiple teams and managers. The engineer identified the most troublesome problem the company faced and created an actionable solution. The engineer was given more responsibilities and was promoted to a director role. The article provides lessons learned from the engineer's journey, such as being proactive in solving problems and nurturing relationships with peers and stakeholders.

How to Improve Collaboration Between Different Stakeholders

A product leader navigated divergent goals and interests among stakeholders to improve collaboration and alignment. Through regular check-ins, they were able to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up projections, and through collaboration with Marketing, they achieved a 58% growth in revenue. The key lessons learned were to establish a routine of check-ins and to address problems quickly.

The Importance of Cultural Differences in Product Design

When the app was opened in India, it presented 500 options to the user, making it difficult to find what they were looking for. With the help of international experience and living in India, the list was narrowed down to the top 10 providers that worked for 95% of the customers. Additionally, cultural differences had to be taken into account, such as the meaning of words and the use of icons. In the end, data analysis and understanding regional preferences were key to tailoring the app to the Indian market.

Not Taking the Initiative

A new team leader found himself in a difficult situation when a PM assigned to move to a different role did not have a defined timeline for when this would happen. The leader took proactive steps to address the confusion, such as setting ground rules, talking to the PM, and educating partners on who was responsible for which project. This resulted in successful releases and the leader learned the importance of being proactive and addressing confusion immediately.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.