Last Updated on November 11, 2021
If I had to be pigeonholed professionally right now, I’d be some kind of technical product leader. I love leading product development – collaborating with both the commercial and engineering sides – in order to create something customers love.
Here are some of my personal product management principles.
Make good decisions
This is importantly different from making the decision that turned out to be the right one. This is about making the right decision, at the right time, based on the information available at the time
In product management you are always making decisions under uncertainty, and creative decision making is very important. One thing that is crucial, is integrative thinking, which is
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
The Opposable Mind
Write things
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts … writing enables us to find out what we know — and what we don’t know.
William Zinsser
Writing allows you to be more precise. As an idea moves from talking to writing to coding, the precision level increases.
Writing things down makes them more permanent. The assets you create can then be consumed more widely and asynchronously.
I think about this a lot and I wrote a long post about why writing is so important here.
Keep a transparent roadmap
I have a high level roadmap freely accessible to everyone internally at all times. I look at it every day.
Ruthless prioritization could be a principle of it’s own, but roadmap transparency actually leads to more realistic goals/OKRs which drive better priority setting.
Protect momentum
Velocity matters more than speed. Be careful not to impact your teams momentum with changes. I learnt this the hard way. It might seem counterintuitive at times, but even if the team is working on something that is a secondary priority, it’s better they finish that before jumping onto the primary priority.
Keep focused
Build something people want
I borrowed this from Paul Graham. There is nothing more important to remember.