Over the years I had the opportunity to work with and interview a lot of product managers. Once you see enough people a few traits emerge. What follows is a humorous take on the various PM personas found in the wild via Dilbert cartoons.
Disclaimer: This is supposed to be funny and a caricature. If this offends you I’m sorry, but please no hate comments and/or twitter hate – it’s just not worth it.
I’ve been really fortunate over my career to be in companies that were experiencing tremendous growth. As companies grow, hiring and getting the right team in place is important, multiple interviews and mistakes later I’ve landed on one key insight, one thing that I look for
creating playbooks > following playbooks
What is a playbook?
I define playbooks broadly as a set of processes, principles, required behaviors, and measures that lead to a repeatable outcome. A playbook is structured and is the key enabler for scale in the problem area of your choice. Problem: Hiring, figure out your playbook. Problem: User acquisition: figure out your playbook. Problem: High-velocity product delivery: figure out your playbook. Continue reading “The one thing that demonstrates greatness”
Continue reading “15 minutes is all it takes – practical tips for distributed global teams”
Continue reading “Practical tips for accountability in product teams”
Back to wordpress! Old medium content follows then some new stuff!
I’ve been deeply interested in understanding what actually makes a platform business a platform¹ business ?— are there any patterns? How do platform businesses actually win? Is there something unique about them or is it all just branding? This is a particularly insightful question to ponder on as, if you talk to any company today , you are certain to hear “ we are a platform”:). Everybody wants to be a platform or at least positions themselves as one. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff?
You’re the first PM at a startup. You are a small company with one product, searching for product market fit. You grind and preserve and you achieve the holy grail of product market fit. CEO walks over and says “It’s time to start scaling, give me a plan, how are you going to scale the product management team? Let’s chat in a few days”. At this moment you are probably thinking “whoa what? team? There is going to be more of me (PMs)?”
How can I do it? So many questions. Where do I start? How do I hire? What do I do?
Have no fear, read on.
The Myers Briggs Type indicator (MBTI) is used to understand your personality type. The idea behind the indicator is that if you understand your personality and default preferences then you are able to play to your strengths. In addition, by knowing your team’s preferences, you can communicate better with your teammates and thus become a high performing team.
Continue reading “PM Personality types a.k.a Myers Briggs for PMs”
In the fintech businesses the core product is money. Money is a commodity — and when the core product is a commodity, what provides strategic advantage?
This post is the final post in the series of “The ultimate guide to hiring PM’s”. Post #1, #2 and #3.
This post is all about the close. What are the key areas you should focus on to make the hire?
Continue reading “The ultimate guide to product management hiring, Part 4: Make the hire!”
