What does good product management look like?
What does good product management look like?
Early and a bit briefer this week because of the bank holiday. My take on what good product management looks like; how Notion uses Notion; and why bad product quality lingers like cigarette smoke.
I put this up on LinkedIn this week - along with a bit of narrative. [Full article here].
It’s an evolution of something I worked on at Sky, but also reflects a lot of what I’ve been thinking / reading over the last couple of months.
As I say in the article - it’s very high level; and to be useful you really need to go the next level down.
But I think there’s something powerful about being able to get an overview of what you do; and how you do it on a single page.
Still - it’s just my view. If you want to see how others do it take a look at these Five product management frameworks used by billion dollar companies - over on the Product Board blog.
How Notion organises themselves - using Notion
I’ve become a huge fan of Notion. I found this post by Notion’s CPO, Madhu Muthukumar fascinating, partly because it shows what a formidable tool they’ve built - but also because it gets under the skin of a team that’s scaling up and having to think how they need to work, organise and communicate with each other.
And it’s not just Notion..
You might or might not be aware that there’s a pretty rich movement of document-based collaboration tools out there at the moment. All have gorgeous interfaces and are both powerful (ie - you can do a lot more in their docs than just have words and pictures) and extremely configurable.
Coda; Almanac; and Craft are the three main ones I’ve stumbled on, but I’m sure there’s more out there. You can read some reviews/ comparisons here; here; and here
Compared to them, Google Docs, Office/ Sharepoint; and even everyone’s friend from ages ago Evernote, look remarkably flat. But they also steal a lot (but never all) of the functionality from Confluence; Asana and others. Keen to see where this ends up: both in terms of the evolution of these companies; and the capabilities that tools like these will give Product Teams of different shapes and sizes.
Don’t defer quality.
Love this from Jason Fried of 37 Signals, talking about shipping something you know isn’t really good enough.
You can often make yourself feel a lot better by wrapping the uneasiness with a statement like "We can always come back and fix it up later". You can, but you won't.
New priorities pull harder than old ones. You may add new things later, but coming back to tidy things up later is a different story. I'm not talking about bugs — those you'll probably fix. I'm talking about leveling up quality. A lack of quality rarely qualifies as a bug, and it's hard to justify the time, effort, and tradeoffs required to come back with a polishing cloth down the road. It's not just customer-facing quality either — it's behind the scenes code quality too.
Bad quality gets baked in. It sticks around like cigarette smoke.
By the way - if you haven’t read it, his book Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way To Build a Successful Web App (.pdf here) which is (I think) at least a decade old, is still an essential read. One of my favourite bits: ‘Build half a product, not a half assed product’
Pragmatism, Edge-casing and Nemawashi
Just three of the nine PM concepts that Andre Albuquerque lists in this post which goes a bit more fine grain than my high level framework. Well worth a read. Anyone who has done the job gets these. Nemawashi, by the way is the “informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project”.
Worth a read…
How Amazon uses deep learning AI to achieve results by Peace Akinwale, over at HackerNoon. You might well know all this, but when you see it all together you realise just how deep some of the moats they’ve built around their business are.
Quantum computing might just save the planet - which feels a bit optimistic, from McKinsey
The Guardian has launched a Tor onion service - for those who need security (and as a by product - fewer ads)
‘A scam within a scam’ - Vox’s verdict on We Work’s founder Adam Neumann’s newly funded carbon credits/ crypto venture.
Scrapping with Apple and Google Fortnite maker Epic Games’ boss interview with the FT. Quote: ‘Paypal charges 3%; Mastercard and Visa 2%; Apple charges 30%’.
Netflix’s trial to reduce password sharing gets off to a rocky start in Peru, apparently
How Sonos shrank its sound bar - from Techradar. However they did it, it was enough to get 5 stars in the Guardian.
If you want to change user behaviour - make sure you’re measuring the right thing - from Irrational Labs.
Listen in..
Bit of a BBC week this week. Just as we’re getting ready for the new Love Island, a 10 part documentary on Radio 4: ‘Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV’. I’m a few episodes in, and it’s definitely a few steps above one of those late night ‘The 20 most shocking reality TV moments’ shows. This is going to be keeping me company during the bank holiday DIY binge.
I finally finished Our Friends In The North. I’m not sure the transition to radio quite worked: there were too many characters and too many short scenes where you had to think,..’ok, who was that?’. But overall, it remains a great mini epic (or as the creator Peter Flannery calls it ‘a posh soap’) , with something to say. The final episode which took us up to 2022 definitely felt like a bit of an unnecessary bolt on.
And before you eat that Pot Noodle, listen to the Drs Van Tulleken talking about Ultra Processed Food in A Thorough Examination.
Gig of the week: Patti Smith @ Cambridge Corn Exchange
A whole load of gigs are cropping up - either covid delayed; or just booked months ago. Sunday night was spent in Cambridge watching one of my all time greats: Patti Smith. Fantastic. The guitarist, by the way, is her son Jackson who - trivia point - was previously married to Meg White from the White Stripes. This week it’s the Killers at the Emirates. Finally!
And with that..
Thanks, as always, if you’ve made it this far. Likes, comments, feedback all very welcome. Have a great Bank Holiday (if you’re in the UK). Back to Friday delivery next week.