Knowledge shared by our community

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Balancing A Reorganization Between Business Goals and Product Divisions

The onboarding process at Hired revealed a lack of organizational structure and ownership of projects. To address this, the R&D organization was restructured into vertical slices with teams based on core elements such as the candidate and customer sides of the marketplace. Key engineers and product managers were identified through one-on-ones and feedback from other divisions. The restructuring was then sold to the engineering team through an all-hands, and a Google Sheet was created to provide transparency across the company. The restructuring resulted in team durability and continuity, dedicated Slack channels, and the ability to set OKRs for the teams.

When A Product Roadmap & Career Ladder Helps A Company Scale

The product team needed to be expanded to accommodate the increasing product surface area. To solve this problem, the team looked at existing teams within engineering and other departments, and reached out to industry professionals to understand different profiles. They developed a matrix of eight to ten skill sets to identify the right people for the team, and created a formal interview guide to ensure fairness and consistency in the hiring process. This allowed them to build a team that was capable of executing their aggressive product roadmap goals.

Impactful Mid-Level Thematic Objectives

This article discusses how to connect a company's vision and strategy with the work of a team. It suggests creating a mid-level tiered view of 12 months for the roadmap, brainstorming ideas, pressure testing them, and creating a thematic template. It also suggests focusing on the goals to build a shared understanding, testing the three thematic messages, and using 1:1s and brainstorming sessions to structure individuals' thinking. Ultimately, the goal is to align the work with the three subsets to ensure progress against the mid-tier goals.

Bringing a Business Analyst Onto a Product Team

This article explains how a business analyst was brought onto a product team to ensure a wide perspective and proper utilization of data. The analyst was embedded into the team and given a problem statement to solve. Data was connected back to customers to validate decisions and predictively determine features that correlated with retention. Lessons learned include the importance of analytics in the product development process, the value of having someone with broader statistical thinking, and the need to make analytics a habit by incorporating it into strategy reviews and team check-ins.

A New Perspective on Continuous Delivery

This article discusses how to align the entire organization, from building to releasing, supporting and implementing the product in a way that eliminates the “game of telephone” between front and back processes. It outlines the actions taken to build a team that encompasses all of the core functions of the product, and the lessons learned from this process, such as establishing a specific OKR for the team and creating relationships with otherwise seemingly disconnected departments. This model has become seamless and second nature, and has been a successful innovation.

Building a Product Management Rubric

This article outlines the process of creating a rubric for product management at a particular organization. The rubric was simplified to four characteristics: technical execution, product health and growth, strategy and vision, and communication and collaboration. It was also leveled across different roles and included activities that were unique to the organization. The rubric was also used as a performance evaluation mechanism and a launching point for conversations around career development.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Why You Are Not Getting Feedback

This article is about the importance of being open to feedback. It discusses the reasons why people may not be receiving feedback, such as not making themselves available, reacting too quickly, and having a public demeanor that mirrors their private behavior. The author shares their experience of giving feedback to a senior executive and the lessons they have learned from observing people who are bad at receiving feedback.

Lessons Learned From Failed Feedback

A senior executive was asked a question in a Q&A session that came across as entitled. The executive tried to respond in a sober, dispassionate way but his tone and facial expression telegraphed frustration, impatience, and disdain. The speaker then gave feedback to the executive in a meeting, but the setting was not ideal and the relationship between the two was not intimate. The feedback was clumsy and ineffective, and the speaker learned lessons about giving feedback in the future.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.