[Project Apollo] How to run a product team
(Last updated: 11 October 2022)
I wish I had hold of something like this when I started my Product Management career. There are lot of books on the macro aspects like Strategy. And there are books on the micro like how to run an agile process. But none of them have been able to tie the macro with the micro. Or given easily customisable templates which people can use at their own companies. This Project is my humble attempt to fix that.
This post as well as the templates will be written keeping the following aspects in mind
- Long term
- Mid term
- Short term
They will also include the
- WHY
- WHAT
- HOW
- WHEN
I plan to create templates and best practices for the following over the next 3 months. If I think there are better resources out there for the same, I will link them instead of creating a new document.
Note: I am indebted to my last two companies: Directi and Gojek, where I learned most of these. Most of these are iterations of documents/mails me as well as other PMs used. Remember, everything is a remix.
- Vision and Strategy for the company (Long term) (Why)
- Vision and Strategy for product teams (Long term) (Why)
- OKRs Walkthrough
- Team OKRs
- Themes based Semester Planning
- Team charter
- Team vision
- Team members
- Product Strategy Workshops
- Definitions, Equations, Metrics and Dashboards
- Monthly Product/Business Review Meeting
- Monthly Product Review Update
- Design principles
- Product principles
- Lens
- Quarterly Team Update
- Evolution of OKRs planning exercise
- Planning for a semester
- Team planning (Medium term) (What) (How)
- Creating your backlog and prioritisation (Long term) (Mid term) (What) (When)
- Running the team (Mid term) (Short term) (How) (When)
- Inception
- Naming a team
- Projects in Dev Prioritisation & allocation
- Team Work view
- Schedule of features
- Release planning
- Skunkworks
- IPM
- Stand-ups
- Jira
- Sprints
- Velocity tracker
- Weekly Sprint retrospectives
- Ice cream meter
- 1 on 1s
- Demos
- Essential Manager meetings
- Showcases
- Slack workflow
- Design jam
- Quarterly Retrospectives
- Making big decisions
- List of all meetings
- PM Weekly Learning Session
- New PM Onboarding
- Folder Structure
- Update on features
- Dashboards
- Weekly Slack update
- Creating a new feature (Short term) (Why) (What) (How) (When)
- Naming the project
- Pitch doc
- Product spec
- Design spec
- Design checklist
- Backend spec
- Frontend tech spec
- Milestone planning
- QA checklist
- Product development Checklist
- Acceptance criteria
- User stories
- Dev stories
- Job stories
- Slack workflow for feature development
- Product update mail
- Product release mail
- Project Retrospective
- Running a project better
- Working with other teams/external Stakeholder (Mid term) (What) (How) (When)
- Data (Mid term) (Short term) (What) (How)
- North star
- Dashboards
- Experimentation
- Daily email with data
- RCA
- Project management (Short term) (What) (How) (When)
- Career development (Mid term) (Long term)