[Project Lumos] Product Management Principles, Frameworks & Reads
(Last updated: 11 Oct 2022)
Values and Principles
- Pass the Orange test
- Truth Seeker
- Bias for action
- Have backbone
- Simplify
- Over communicate
- Energy curator
- Culture of high performance
- Insist on the Highest Standards
- Consistency
- Strong opinion weakly held
- First principles
- Take extreme ownership
- Best things are taken, not given
- Do all 3: Produce, Arrange, Impress
- Lazy leadership
- 80/20
- Values driven
- Produce > Process > Impress
- Persistent Models vs. Point-In-Time Goals
- Try to be in your zone of genius
- Don’t add your 2c
- Leadership as a Performing Art
- Focus + Momentum = Magic
- Fill the shoes before changing the shoes
- Nobody Cares
- Authority derives from merit
- Avoid success theater
- Chief Question Officer
- Avoid Certainty Theater
- The Manager as Debugger
- Speak For Yourself
- Curators & Editors
- Recommend, don’t ask
- Product rigor over Communication rigor
- Create urgency, not panic
- Amp It Up!
- Leader as a coach
- Intentional
- Internal then external
- Create scope
- Lead through strategy and not inertia
- Optimism Shapes Reality
Product development, Strategy, Research & Design
- Super normal
- One level up
- Single decisive reasoning
- The pyramid of clarity
- Work backwards
- Data informed, not driven
- Focus on velocity, not speed
- Design sprints
- 10X
- Create a Perfect slice of cake without much dressing
- Frontloaded, not backloaded
- Anxiety reduction
- Start with a cupcake
- Avoid your cupcake from becoming a wedding cake
- Avoid broken windows
- Tiny details
- Have an empty chair
- Don’t push those untested changes on Production
- Push > Pull
- Beware of small, rare problems
- Avoid next feature fallacy
- Done is better than perfect
- Design an 11-star experience
- 10X
- Macro vs micro
- Be outcome thinkers
- Quick feedback Real customers (QFRC)
- Get one thing right first
- Focus on core
- Be proactive, not reactive
- Write science fiction, then make it a reality
- Best products cut through a straight line
- Out of sight, out of mind
- Don’t do pretend research
- Know if your actual process follows what is written process
- To iterate, first ship
- Product development is a set of sliders
- FWhat’s not going to change in the next 10-20 years
- Design products assuming positive behavior, have systems tackle bad behavior
- Hooked model
- Public channels vs Private DMs
- Do a pre-mortem
- Do a post-mortem
- Have a DRI
- Settings need not be part of your MVP
- Product is like a function
- Short term impatient, long term patient
- Opportunity solution tree
- Understand 2nd order effects; Chesterton’s Fence
- Adjust your levers, dials, and Pulleys
- Write your business equation
- Be creative when you face a capped downside, and an uncapped upside
- Design UX for good actors and systems for bad
- Know your levers, dials and pulleys
- Focus on high leverage activities
- Use speed as a competitive advantage
- Avoid scaling prematurely
- Check support tickets
- Win As Second Mover
- 10X Your Business
- Honest debugging
- Inputs vs Outputs vs Outcomes
- Focus on processes, not tools
- Know what winning looks like
- Give your users a superpower
- Product Dev is not done by a committee
- Controlling Scope is your best option
- Keep digging
- No snacking
- Focus on input
- Be butter
- Ship outcomes, not just features
- Quality is not a tradeoff
- Design sequences not stills
- 3 Stages of Failure
- Why now?
- Thinking Small, at first
- Simple, correct, fast
- Win by Cheating
- By Default, Ship Nothing
- Cost, Time, Quality, Scope
- Make Big Bets
- Position, Position, Position!
- Value, scale, time
- The better mousetrap doesn’t always win
- Avoid regressing to the mean
- Retroactively Bundled
- The Tax of New
- Design for Continuous Experimentation
- Build a Product with a High-Concept Problem
- Forcing functions are valuable
- 4 types of product work beyond PMF
- Phone tilt factor
- Uncola
- 3 major product problems in 10 years
- Testing should not be a substitute of assertion
- Create rituals
- Step Functions vs One-percent Improvements
- Experiments and big bets
- Options, Not Roadmaps
- The Four Big Risks
- 3 types of research
- How to do a design review
- Let Fires Burn
- Product Strategy is Really About Offense vs. Defense
- Defensibility
Decision making
- How I take big decisions
- Framing problems
- Elevate and delegate
- Type 1 vs type 2
- Use Eisenhower matrix
- Value creation vs value protection
- Choose AND over OR
- Foster conditions conducive to high decision quality and high decision velocity
- Frameworks vs isolated decisions
- SPADE
- What could go right?
- Scaling decision making
- Your organization needs product principles
- How to tell if you have a real product strategy
- Speed is a function of simplicity
Meeting
- Get an Inspiration, an Organizer, a Questioner, and a Peacemaker
- Write down your thoughts
- Hold off until necessary
- Steer into the Objection
- Always send a MOM afterwards
Managing and scaling an org
- Always choose hard talk
- Make sure the trust battery is not low
- Trust is the currency of good management
- Do pre-mortem for work relationships
- Keep your team motivated
- Push ownership down the ladder
- Tackle preventable problems
- Build a team that ships
- Org chart matters
- Culture is the sum of everyone’s actions, not a slide deck or something written on a wall
- Break the Team Goal Down Into Independent Levers
- It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t
- Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners
- 10x teams, 10x developers
- Dreamers versus detailers
- Enterprise Value > Team Value > Self Value
- Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Superheroes
- A CEO should look back only strategically, never with nostalgia
- 10 times the same person
- Don’t peanut butter strategy
- Building communities - Migrate from other countries to your country
- B players are company killers
- Simplicity Is Speed, And Speed Is Good
- Nut out the next ‘big goal worthy of celebration’
- Be a new user
- How to be strategic
- Hard lessons learned as a manager
- Craftsvilla learnings
- Coupondunia shamelist
- Risks of PM’ing at a big company
- Directi Shamelist
- Part clouds and part dirt
- Extreme Focus
- Product leader anti-patterns
- Connecting the Dots: From Vision to Execution
- Synergy between strategy and org structure
- Horizons and storytelling
- VPs tilt the Curve
- Job of a COO
- Swinging the Pendulum
Stakeholder management
- Hero meetings
- Executive Presentations: A Guide to Achieving the Outcomes You Want
- Docs for busy execs
Project management
- Following these rules will help you to manage a big project more effectively
- Create your own operator’s manual
- Best practices for cross-team collaboration
- Driving consensus
- On meetings
Data
- Data should be accurate, automation, and accessible
- Correlation doesn’t imply causation
- Metrics roulette
Communication
- Use pyramid principle for communication
- Write like a Amazon PM
- Write military email
- Give blunt, effective feedback
- Ideas should be communicable in a napkin. Break down your ideas to the most simplified form
- Use documentation as cache
- Stop conversations as soon as there are diminishing returns
- Product Reviews
- Breaking Bad News
- The Silent Meeting Manifesto
- For Better Presentations, Start with a Villain
- Escalate Early and Often
- Make narrative your advantage
- In the absence of knowledge, fear fills the void
- 5 Hard Questions to Ask Yourself During a Conflict
- Tell a better story
- Building Better Products with Escalation
- Do, Try, Consider
- Leaders build consensus
- The 10/50/99% Approach to Feedback
- Communication decisions as a CEO
- Writing an exec summary
- Running a review as an exec