How to Fix Bad PM Habits by Inamoto & Co Fmr VP Product
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Main takeaways: - The worst habits of bad Product Managers I had/saw at Square & YouTube - The consequences of bad habits for you, your team and your company - How to spot and correct bad Product Management habits, and help others who exhibit them
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How to Fix Bad PM Habits by Inamoto & Co Fmr VP Product
- 1. www.productschool.com How to Fix Bad PM Habits by Inamoto & Co Fmr VP Product
- 2. Join 40,000+ Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. CERTIFICATES Your Product Management Certificate Path Product Leadership Certificate™ Full Stack Product Management Certificate™ Product Management Certificate™ 20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS
- 4. Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 5. Will Rocklin T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
- 6. “Business PM” ● Inamoto & Co., VP of Product 2016 - 2018 ● Square, PM 2012 - 2016 ● YouTube, PM 2012 ● YouTube, Sales Ops 2010 - 2012 ● Google, Sales Data 2008 - 2010
- 7. 1. Why does this matter? 1. Who is this for?
- 8. ● Essential ● Manager ● Mini CEO #1. I’m Glamourous & Powerful
- 9. ● Essential ● Manager ● Mini CEO ● Optional ● Facilitator ● Coach #1. I’m Glamourous & Powerful
- 10. ● Smart! ● Vague! ● Golden Docs #2. I Know It All
- 11. ● Smart! ● Vague! ● Golden docs ● Simple ● Instill confidence ● Helpful docs #2. I Know It All
- 12. ● Huh Updates? ● Secretive ● Unavailable #3. I Just PM This Silo
- 13. ● Huh updates? ● Secretive ● Unavailable ● Clarity ● Trust, but verify #3. I Just PM This Silo
- 14. ● Comms! ● Excuses #4. I Talk > I Ship
- 15. ● Comms! ● Victim #4. I Talk > I Ship ● Ship ● Help
- 16. ● Folklore ● Praise ● One-time #5. I Heart Death March
- 17. ● Folklore ● Praise ● One-time #5. I Heart Death March* * Exceptions: major outage, on-call, security breach,, etc.
- 18. ● Folklore ● Praise ● One-time #5. I Heart Death March ● Illusory ● Return to reality
- 19. 1. I’m glamourous & powerful……...............Nope 2. I know it all……....……...…………………...Don’t 3. I PM This Silo…………….………………....Talk 4. I talk > I ship…………………….…………...Ship 5. I heart death-march….…………………....Don’t Bad Habit The Fix
- 20. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management Training Courses and Corporate Training
Editor's Notes
- If you’re interested to connect with other Product Managers, aspiring PMs, or those within tech, join our Slack community of over 40,000 professionals. It’s a great place to network and to find interesting content. We host a weekly AMA through our Slack channel on Tuesdays from 11:15am - 12pm PST. We have also recently launched the Job Portal where you can find the latest Product Management opportunities! As members of the Product School community, we'd like to provide you with these resources at your disposal.
- Product School’s Product Management Certificate Path comprises of 3 part-time courses for professionals with strong technical or business background who want to further explore Product Management at software-based companies. During Product Management Training you will first learn Product Management fundamentals to understand the software product lifecycle and what it takes to successfully transition into a product management role. You’ll then be trained to retrieve data, understand its value and make impactful decisions with SQL, data visualization and Tableau. Learn to understand your users to deliver exceptional UX/UI design and develop a robust digital marketing plan. During the Full Stack Product Management Training, you will deep dive into the technical knowledge to enhance your ability to work with agile teams. Finally, Product Leadership Training will elevate your product knowledge to become an effective Product Leader. You'll do an in-depth analysis on how to implement best PM practices on a strategic level to significantly impact your company’s portfolio and revenue. Learn the soft skills to manage product teams and manage stakeholders to deliver performing products.
- As well as individual courses we provide corporate training across the world! If you’d like to upskill your product team this is the best option for you. We have trained employees from multiple companies such as Deloitte, Salesforce, JP Morgan, Bank of America amongst many other companies across all industries.
- Tonight's talk is “ [TITLE] ” with [NAME]. Welcome, [NAME].
- A bad PM’s habits can cause a lot of damage - whole teams can be impacted, slow down an entire org’s progress, drain resources, lower morale, lead to attrition or tech debt. This is primarily for you, PMs so you can avoid the dark side, but also hopefully can help you work better with another PM at your company. Also good for those who manage PMs.
- I’m the only one of my kind in the room - the rest are just engineers and designers. I must be special. I’m a manager! It says so right in the title. They’ll report into me even if they have managers. Every blog out there says being a PM is like being a mini CEO so I’ll be able to tell people what to do ‘cause of blogs. Also, I have vision.
- Optional - Factually untrue. Engineers and designers have built lots of successful products over the years without PMs. Without you, the product could still get built and designed. Ask yourself where can you add value? It might be as simple and humble as taking notes. And if that sounds like the opposite of glamor and power, welcome to being a PM. Facilitator - It’s highly likely no one reports to you. Designers and engineers each report into their own managers. Your job is not to manage them, but the process of building a product. You help facilitate decisions, not make them. Foster a feeling of shared empowerment among the team. How can you do that? (Ask your team questions, get data, talk to customers, look at competitors, etc.) Coach - You don’t have any hard power and if you did that alone wouldn’t get you very far because you need to motivate others to execute. Observe what’s happening, offer support where needed, show them their impact, congratulate, inspire. Repeat.
- I’m smart! I have 2 degrees, I worked at our biggest competitor and say big words like “orthogonal”, or drop eng terms like deploy, or expound on the complexities of the apps and systems I oversee Vague - When asked a specific a question like, “when is it shipping” I respond with business-speak or zen buddhism because whatever we’re building is so complex I can’t break it down for you Golden Docs - I write a 50 page requirements document - with citations - therefore if it isn’t in there, it’s not in the product, otherwise my genius would have birthed it
- Intelligence is taking complex things and making them simple. You aren’t here to impress people, but to listen, inform and help. I knew a brilliant PM who to counteract this would say, “I’m dumb, so tell me like I’m in 3rd grade.” Helped everyone relax. The problem of being vague is that over time it will erode trust in your colleagues. So, be specific - even if the answer is I don’t know - to instill confidence and maintain integrity. You’re representing your team in these meetings, so hold yourself to a high standard on this. A PM’s ability to write a long complex doc doesn’t exactly help anyone build use or market it. You don’t work at Microsoft in 1992. Approach writing documentation for the people reading/consuming/using it. At Square, for example the PRD was kept pretty short: why we need this, the use cases, what we can ignore for now, competitive examples.
- At weekly check-ins, this PM’s updates are mysterious OR super boilerplate. Goals seem to shift and the work somehow evades basic project management techniques such as timelines. Hallmarks here are everything is code-named, they decide to use a different tech/PM stack than the rest of the company, they have physically secluded themselves, have a “mandate” that comes from the top no one has seen. An engineer everyone likes and respects is asking major questions, but never seems to get a satisfactory answer. If you want to know what’s going on, you have to come to them between the hours of 3 and 3:14PM on Saturday via Hipchat only.
- If this is you - help everyone and provide clarity. Proactively communicate in plain English what you are building and why. When are the milestones, ask for help if needed to get it done? Ask other PMs if they understand your project and get their feedback on it. If this sounds scary or hard, take a step back: is there a genuine business case, is the project scoped adequately? Does the success of your project depend integrating with another team? If you see this from someone else - trust but verify. Avoid assumption, speak with fellow PMs & managers - is their spidey sense up too, ask your eng manager what they think. Speak with that team directly, takes notes. Depending: possibly lunch with an eng on their team (inside baseball) or offer to take on a task or two to help earn goodwill/build trust.
- I am super busy communicating/politicking - I write docs, FAQs, newsletters galore, I speak with our customers relentlessly, everyone on my team has a check in with me every day, I manage up like a boss, no one is pushing us around because of it. I am a victim in some way - My team is understaffed, we’re in transition, the competition is causing us to rethink our plans, you’ll see next quarter, etc.
- Ship, ship ship - Your must facilitate the shipping of products. If you have only one engineer, you can still do this because at the end of the day your primary job is to ship (successfully) your product. All the other stuff like comms, is supposed to ease the process, but is not the same thing a getting something out the door. Remember your user. At YouTube was easy to take it for granite, but later learned Square and even more so at our start-up, every user was wildly important. As a PM, you can help someone - lots of people - so focus on consistently delivering for them.
- I’m following in the footsteps of the greats. From Steve Jobs to God, great PMs make stuff happen in as little as 6 days. Everyone will applaud me when I land this - especially our beloved customers/board members who will surely recognize my greatness. Even my eng who may hate me now will be grateful later on. Not only are there no downsides to this, it’s just this one time.
- I’m talking about standard product development, not a major outage
- Death marches tend to exist for two illusory reasons: Soft deadline - some external date for marketing or execs for go to market strategy, beat competition, hit our numbers, etc. Haywire culture - pervasive pressure just says this is the way it is, a culture doesn’t sufficiently scope the project and boxes people in. Return to reality. Your eng are already looking to leave the team because you don’t respect them or their efforts. They will burn out. Even if they stand by you, they’ll start the next project sluggishly and with resentment as you repeat the “process” again. You may be under-staffed or over-scoped, so tell your manager, tell your team and resize things. What’s an MVP you can ship? Can you chunk up the project into smaller bites? Give them a day off. So so so much research backs this up. Might want to explore further if needed.
- Feel free to speak with me and I can point you in the right direction (explain where to apply). Or you can visit www.productschool.com Have a good night!