Product Management Career Day: An Adventure in Teaching Kids

Leave a comment

Last Wednesday was ‘career day’ at my fifth grade daughter’s school. They’d asked any parents with “interesting” careers to volunteer; figuring that product management should count, I signed up.

I had thought that it would only be fifth graders that I’d be teaching; they told me that there would be 5 classes, and that I’d be in the same room the whole time. With about ~20 kids per class, for 2.5 hrs, it sounded difficult, but doable. That’s what I thought, anyway…

Surprise! Teach the WHOLE School!

whiteboard from the class where I didn't have a computer for my presentation.

When I got there, it turned out to be 6 classes, for all of the grades – that’s 3rd through 5th at my daughter’s school – with 40+ kids per class! Each class was in a different room, and the schedule they gave me was less than accurate in terms of which room I was supposed to be in. In the last room, there wasn’t even a computer, so I did the presentation with a whiteboard (that was probably my best class, actually!)

While it was an exhausting experience, it was also a rewarding one. I’m sharing more about that experience in case anyone else is doing a ‘product management career day,’ and wants to use any of what I put together for the kids.

Continue reading →

Metrics Sharing at a PM Community of Practice

Leave a comment

As part of our Product Management Community of Practice, we regularly share metrics. 

We experimented with a few ways this could work. 

At one point, it was anything goes:

  • Data to help make a decision
  • Pre-shaping opportunity estimate
  • Team dashboard
  • ROI estimate
  • Ongoing project goal metric
  • Post-launch metric

They also talked about where they were having challenges and got input from the group, such as knowing what they wanted to measure for their project, but not being sure how to measure that information.

Continue reading →

Invite ‘Special Guests’ to Community of Practice Meetings

1 Comment

Continuing in the series of how to keep a community of practice engaging, for our PM Club, we’ve had a number of ‘special guests’ that have led to interesting conversations.

We were lucky enough to have Rich Mironov present to us one time, which led into an interesting conversation. We followed up that conversation by reading another one of his blog articles that related to that conversation, and continuing the conversation on our own.

Examples of other special guests have included:

Continue reading →

Use “Vote & Discuss” for an Engaging Meeting

1 Comment

To encourage engagement in a book club or a community of practice meeting, have everyone vote before you start a conversation.

It’s a lot easier for people to agree with what everyone else is saying, or just stay quiet, but if they have to vote first, then you can have more conversation about where the group has variances in how they voted. 

Depending on what tools you’re using, you can vote anonymously, or you can have team members vote in such a way that you know who voted for what. The advantage of the latter is that you can call on people to ask them why they voted the way that they did. Of course, you don’t want anyone to get defensive or dislike the workshop, so this will depend on the topic and how close-knit your group is. 

Continue reading →

Communities of Practice: Making it Engaging

Leave a comment

It can be hard to keep regular meetings interesting, whether that’s a book club, or a community of practice such as the “PM Club” that I lead weekly with my team. 

Even with good questions as prompts, I found just bringing together the group to talk about an article or a chapter didn’t seem to be quite enough after a while. Particularly as the team grew, it became harder to have great discussions. And what came out of the discussions? Could I really be sure that everyone walked away with an understanding that they could apply to their work? Particularly when we did this week… after week… after week… for months. It got a little old, honestly. 

But what else is there to do? 

That’s what this series is about.

Continue reading →
Example of the filled-in prioritization 'tray'

Running a Cross-Team Initiatives Prioritization Brainstorm

Leave a comment

Late in 2022, I was looking to get alignment on cross-team initiatives we’d work on in 2023 across multiple teams. I wanted input from a certain group of engineering managers and product managers on:

  • Which initiatives we wanted to go after
  • What our order of priority was

Whenever possible, getting input from everyone involved leads to far better results from both a buy-in perspective and from a two (or more) heads-are-better-than-one perspective than just making the decision yourself in a vacuum. You can’t always make decisions by committee, but you can get input that way. In this case, I was able to both get consensus and the input ended up changing my mind so that I was aligned with the group on the priorities.

This post is about how I set up the brainstorm.

Continue reading →

Creating Team-Driven Product Management Principles

Leave a comment

Inspired by Martin Eriksson’s Product Decision Stack video, I set up a brainstorm for my team. What were our PM principles that could act as “shortcuts” in helping us make difficult decisions that would also ladder up to our strategy and vision?

The product managers watched a few key minutes of Eriksson’s video, and then we brainstormed.

The board was set up  like this, in Miro:

[sticky note] even over [sticky note]
[sticky note] even over [sticky note]
Continue reading →

Careers in Product #OhioTechDay

Leave a comment

Recently, I had a conversation with Jariatu Mansaray and Mike Belsito about careers in product for Ohio Tech Day, facilitated by Shawn Leitner. Shawn asked us about:

  • How did you get into Product Management?
  • What’s your day-to-day job like?
  • What’s your advice for those considering a future in Product Management?

Take a look!