Dealing with unprofessional colleagues

If someone is being unprofessional in your work interactions - particularly in group meetings - you must confront them about it 1:1.

You teach people how to treat you. If you tolerate disrespect you will continue to receive disrespect.

Schedule a meeting with the person and let them know that their behavior does not work for you. Encourage them to provide their feedback and concerns in a way that is constructive or in private.

If this doesn’t work, escalate to their manager. If that doesn’t work remove them from your meetings.

As a PM, how accountable are you for the success of the product and the business?

Both 10% and 90%.

The product is accountable 10% because while the product need to be amazing; sales, marketing, support, bizdev, finance, etc etc all need to align and do their part to inform, package and sell the product. A great product poorly sold can't succeed.

However, the product *function* (lead by the head of product) is accountable 90% because it's his or her job to drive alignment across all other functions. A great PM knows that building a great product requires great alignment across all internal and external stakeholders (i.e. the market).

Getting conviction

Team conviction ultimately doesn’t come from data. It comes from leadership.

Be more ambitious with your hiring.

Particularly at the beginning - but also throughout your company’s growth - your goal should not just be to add a but in the seat or a soldier to the army.

Aim to hire rockstars that raise the average quality/effectiveness of the team. If you’re the smartest person in the room you should be very uncomfortable.

If you think you’re company isn’t well-positioned to attract great talent - perhaps because the vision, mission, culture, or brand isn’t strong enough - then ask yourself why are you are content to work for something that wouldn’t excite rockstars?

Work on something great, and invite great people to help.

Combative vs. Collaborative work styles

In some older workplaces and workstyles, there is a tendency to assert authority and insist on certain outcomes using a combative and confrontational style.

This no longer works. In modern companies and work cultures, the goal is to create a collaborative and open environment whereby everyone is encouraged to express their perspective, concerns, and creative ideas freely.

In these environments, a leader's role is not to confront members of the team, but rather ask them questions that identify blind spots, flesh-out under-developed ideas and encourages everyone to do their best work

Rather than asking "Why didn't you...", the question should be "Why don't we...". Instead of saying "You totally missed the point..." the observation might be expressed "I think there's an area we need to explore more...". 

Importantly, this doesn't suggest that communication should be vague. It should be precise and actionable. It just doesn't need to make the other person feel like they're under attack.

Should the product team get involved in shaping technical architecture?

Should the product team get involved in shaping technical architecture?

In general, Product Managers (PMs) should not get too involved in making technical design decisions.

Instead, product managers can contribute by facilitating a conversation with engineering and engineering leadership around the following topics:

Principles

The PM would list the key non-functional requirements for the product. Each might imply a certain technical choice or approach. For example:

a) It must be possible for different teams and engineers to work on various parts of the system independently. This might imply a clear separation of concerns between various parts of the system.

b) We want to invent as little as possible. Instead, we want to prioritize time to market. This might imply the use of off-the-shelf cloud services or open source wherever possible.

c) We want to be able to hire from a large pool of engineers who have experience with our tech stack. Which might imply the use of popular tools rather than new, experimental tech.

d) We should know the moment something breaks or does not function as expected. Which might imply automated testing and alerting for every component.

Visibility

The PM should sit with the engineering team and walk them through the roadmap. While doing so, they should pay special attention to patterns that might repeat or features/requirements that may need to expand over time.

For example: "This concept of transforming data from X to Y happens a lot. You can see it here, here and here." or "Being able to connect to this address book for a list of user contacts is just the beginning. Over time we will want to give the user the option to connect to a wide range of 3rd party address books"

The former implies that a particular component might be generalized to handle lots of data transformations across the system. The latter implies that the address book importer will ultimately need to be designed to support multiple connectors and data types.

Time

Give engineers the time they need to do thoughtful technical designs, reviews and builds so that they can make more durable medium-term decisions. If everything is an emergency -working to a hard deadline - engineers will cut corners to get the job done for you.

Engineering reviews

Encourage the engineering team to have technical design review meetings with each other to pressure test proposed design decisions against the principles and roadmap.

Permission to refactor

Finally, remember it’s ok for engineering to refactor code later. Particularly early in a startups life where product-market fit is still a challenge. If they are not building just enough to make the user experience work well, then they risk over-engineering the solution and getting stuck building things for far too long instead of shipping new value to the market and iterating.

Collectively, this will all help the engineering team make great decisions without the product team getting too prescriptive. It will also help the engineering team avoid over-building sophisticated things that no one will use.

Product and Eng

Product and Eng shouldn’t be in separate “departments”. They should be in the same mission driven group solving problems together.

Should you hire remote workers?

The only thing more powerful than having a group of people in a room working on a problem is having the best people anywhere in the world working on that same problem. Virtual teams allow you to pick the best talent - wherever they may be.

Should your business focus on sustainability?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: Yes because...

1. The environment will die without us all pulling our weight and improving the situation. Without the environment the economy (and your company) is dead

2. Green is often cheeper over the long term. Control the climate in your stores better with insulation to save on aircon. Solar energy installations pay for themselves long term etc etc

3. There is a large and growing base of customers who are prioritizing a) simplicity b) minimalism c) quality d) sustainability in their products and brands. They are increasingly finding their needs met by new, direct to consumer companies online. No stores, no fuss.

How can you tap into this new opportunity?

The twist is that all these new priorities are actually about sustainability.

Simplicity & minimalism is about doing more with less effort and less stuff. Quality is about buying things once and not having to throw it out and get a new one.

So, while developing your sustainability strategy, don’t forget that it’s about much more than just materials and process. It’s also about...

1. How your product or service is designed: Simple and easy to use.

2. How your product or service AND brand (often overlooked) looks and feels: Minimalist. Clean.

3. How your product or service is constructed: High quality build. Built to last. And finally and most obviously...

4. How your product or service is manufactured and delivered: Recycled materials. Second hand markerplace. Recyclability. Etc

As a PM, where does your data come from?

As a PM, a big part of your job is collecting and triangulating data. Where does that data come from?

Customers (short term)

• Sales feedback

• Support feedback

• Usage analytics

• Customer interviews

• Focus groups

• Churn reasons

Business (medium-term)

• Where does the business want to go?

• Where does the board expect to go?

• Where are the new markets and new opportunities?

• What are competitors doing?

Your Vision (long-term)

• Where do competitors seem to be going?

• Where do technology and culture trends seem to be headed?

• What framework do you have to help rationalize the world?

• What niche do you want to fill?

• What novel innovation can you and your product/company deliver?

It’s a feedback loop between all of these sources. Customer and business data should inform your vision and your vision should be a lens by which you filter customer and business data in and out of your plan.

Sometimes you need to go slow to go fast

So much of startup advice is essentially "focus more and go faster". But as always, it's not that simple.

As with anything in life, the devil is in the details, and wisdom is found by applying the right advice in the right context.

It is certainly true that you should execute your overall strategy with an appropriately high degree of hustle and ambition. This is essential to scaling fast and bending the curve up and to the right.

It is also certainly true that you need to break the problem you're working on (and the product releases you need to make) into small, lovable iterations that you can ship with a degree of expediency.

However, you must execute each tactical step with a degree of care and precision that sometimes requires you to slow down for a few moments or even a few days. This added time will allow you to properly think through the details and implications before you act.

Without this kind of precision, you risk making costly mistakes, thrashing your team, and essentially spinning your wheels while standing in place.

Are you paying enough attention to your cancellation funnel?

Everybody focuses on their on-boarding funnel. Make sure you spend equal amounts of time thinking about and refining your cancellation funnel. Reducing churn is just as important as increasing new user acquisition - perhaps more so.

Don't worry too much about what slips through your fingers

It's easy to focus on what's slipping through your fingers. Instead, focus on what you have in your grasp. Grab it, shape it, build off it.

Is it reasonable to pivot your company to capture an “opportunity” like caronavirus?

As a startup and as a founder, it’s critical to respond to day-to-day opportunities in an agile way. Your company must be able to flex and pivot to leverage unexpected moments (yes, including coronavirus) to capture new users/opportunities. These flexes, however, should be...

A. Relatively minor deviations from the existing product/product priorities (as it is, not as you wish it to be)

B. Aligned with the long term strategy of the product and business (not locking you into a new/different path)

C. Executed by an effective, hungry, happy team (not add to any existing burnout).

Rationalizing complexity in an irrational world is, in and of itself

Rationalizing complexity in an irrational world is, in and of itself, value creation.

It's also essential if you're creating a 2 sided marketplace.

Building a marketplace takes the following broad steps, in the following order.

1. Rationalization

2. Liquidity (increasing supply and demand)

3. Rapid (ideally instant!) Matching

What complexity have you taken out of the world and how?

Product can't be built in-house

The closer you get to true product (with polish, scale, support, fault-tolerance, simple UX, analytics, etc) the further the question (from your potential customers) of "why can't we build this ourselves' gets in the rear-view mirror.

Try to argue well

Whenever two or more people collaborate, differences of opinion and perspective will always happen. We each see the world from our own particular vantage point. Often that’s the very point of the collaboration!

For this reason, being able to have good arguments with your cofounder, peers and/or significant other is a priceless superpower that can be the difference between failure, mediocrity or a raging success.

So when you inevitably argue...

Be careful of repeating the same arguments and patterns over and over again.

Try to avoid recrimination (you meant to hurt me!), exaggeration (fine! Then I’ll never complain again), straw man arguments (you just want me to do whatever you say), martyrdom (ok, fine, you’re always right) and other patterns that undermine a constructive argument.

Try to listen, use “I feel” instead of “you always...” and keep your eye on the true goal of any debate:

To form a new, true, durable consensus based on a deeper understanding of the world from multiple perspectives.

Dig deeper into the details to drive better, faster results from your team

Do you feel like your team is continuously in firefighting mode? Are your customers always unhappy because you're not delivering on the promises your sales team has made? Is your app crashing all the time? Does it feel like weeks and months pass by but no meaningful progress gets made?

These are usually symptoms of a lack of proper product discipline and focus within your company. A wide range of reasons might cause this kind of problem. 

A common reason I've come across a lot lately is that your team might be conflating multiple different use-cases together.

For example, you might be in the "widget" business. If any customer asks for widgets, your sales team jumps on the opportunity, sells a big account, and then hands it off to the product and engineering team to customize your widgets to handle the customer's needs.

The problem is there are many kinds of widgets. Small widgets, medium widgets, and large widgets. Widgets for lawn mowers and widgets for sports cars. Widgets for ceiling fans and widgets for windmills.

If your company is responding to everyone who wants a widget, then you're never going to be able to specialize and scale. And. Specializing and scaling is the only way to capture a market and, when you're ready, introduce new categories of widgets to expand your way to world domination.

If you can't tell the differences between the use-cases (widgets) you're selling, then you need to dig deeper into the details. The details matter a lot.

The chances are high that you will find differences and distinctions in those details.

If not, dig deeper until you do. Then...

1. Pick one of the use-cases. Typically one that is easy and simple to start with and can that be expanded into logical adjacencies over time.

2. Help create the space for your product and engineering team to build it in small but meaningful iterations.

3. Insist that your sales and marketing team sells nothing else until there is an intentional decision to support new use-cases over time.

If you don't do this, you risk building a messy tech stack that does nothing very well. Worse, you might end up selling a broad vision to a lot of big customers who will demand that you deliver on your promises - pancaking your team and choking off possibilities to scale your business with a polished self-serve product.

How should your company deal with the Coronavirus?

Read this important artcile from Seqoia…

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020

Dear Founders & CEOs, Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020. Some of you (and some of us) have already been personally impacted by the virus. We know the stress you are under and are here to help. With lives at risk, we hope that conditions improve as quickly as possible. In the interim, we should brace ourselves for turbulence and have a prepared mindset for the scenarios that may play out. Read the article.

---

My thoughts on the article above and the Coronavirus generally…

While the entire letter I linked above is important to read and act on, these are the most interesting parts of the letter to me...

"Could you turn a challenging situation into an opportunity to set yourself up for enduring success? Many of the most iconic companies were forged and shaped during difficult times. We partnered with Cisco shortly after Black Monday in 1987. Google and PayPal soldiered through the aftermath of the dot-com bust. More recently, Airbnb, Square, and Stripe were founded in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. Constraints focus the mind and provide fertile ground for creativity."
...
"Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”"

I couldn't agree more with the statements I've highlighted above.

In particular, this one:

"Constraints focus the mind and provide fertile ground for creativity."

During a happy status-quo, it's easy to power through in rather ineffective or inefficient ways without really feeling the consequences because a rising tide floats all boats.

During times of distress, however, you need to focus, spend every dollar wisely and make every action count.

Now is the time to remove dead weight from your team, drop ineffective workstreams, and insist on a higher level of execution quality and speed from your org.

Those that navigate through this period will come out stronger than their competitors and in a position to win the market.

Presenting to leadership can be hard, but necessary and valuable

I used to resent creating presentations for “higher” authorities (VCs, Execs, Board etc). I felt like it was just a necessary and painful evil trying to get them to understand what I already knew. A distraction. It didn't help that my anxiety made such reporting extremely difficult for me personally.

I came to realize, however, that ensuring that you think through your tactics and strategy through the lens of a good leadership team forces you to get very clear (in your own mind, and amongst the operational team) about what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you're measuring and the cadence at which you're executing.

Done correctly, it can ensure that…

a) You don't get caught doing too many urgent things at the expense of important things

b) Your efforts ladder up to a larger strategic vision that drives the right business outcomes.

c) Your team has clarity about what's going on and why - helping them make the right day-to-day decisions as part of the larger context.

So embrace the accountability and discipline that comes from having a strong board or executive team. Lean into the process - not just as one of satisfying leadership, but rather as one that helps you to crystalize and clarify everyone's thinking for shared success.