Note: As a company moves from stakeholder-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, there are some fairly significant changes to how the product teams need to interact with stakeholders, and it’s important that product teams and especially product managers realize this requires changes on both sides of the equation.  This is a follow-up article to... The post Pledge To Stakeholders appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

There’s an adage about product managers that goes, “When the product succeeds, it’s because everyone on the product team did what they needed to do; but when the product fails, it’s the product manager.” I am fairly certain that I first heard this from Ben Horowitz many years ago, but I’ve no idea if he... View Article The post Value and Viability appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

In my earlier article on the six different models of Product Ops I have found in practice, I mentioned that there were two overarching issues behind the most damaging models, and I promised to discuss each further. In my last article I talked about the tendency to think you can scale with process rather than... View Article The post Two in a Box PM appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

As Product School says in their survey article trying to define what Product Ops is: “Product Ops operates differently at every company.”  Which might be true, but isn’t very helpful.   From my own interactions with companies implementing or exploring Product Ops, I have found no fewer than six distinct definitions. So the first and most... View Article The post Product Ops Overview appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

One nomenclature clarification before we dive into this:  Normally in my writing I try to be consistent and say that when I reference “design” I am speaking specifically about user experience design.  However, for this particular article, when I say design I mean both user experience design as well as software / architecture design. I’m... View Article The post Discovery vs. Design appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

In my last article I highlighted one of the major pathologies leading to weak product managers and weak products.  While the CSPO pathology is large and growing, it is relatively new compared to the MBA pathology. I have not written as much about the MBA pathology.  It’s alluded to between the lines on some of... View Article The post The MBA Pathology appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

Fair warning that this and the next article will be a tough read.  It was a tough one to write, and I expect for many of you, it will be a tough one to read.  But in my view, we as an industry are suffering from a pandemic, but unlike COVID, there is no vaccine... View Article The post The CSPO Pathology appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

One of the most common requests I’ve received over the years is to share a good job description for a product manager of an empowered product team.   And for about as long as I can remember, I’ve forwarded on the job description that Google uses.  It’s still a decent description, but I also think it’s... View Article The post Product Manager Job Description appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

There has never been more interest in becoming a product manager.  There has also never been so many strong and helpful voices that can help these aspiring product managers (at the end of this article I’ll share several of my favorites). However, there has also never been so much noise and nonsense written about product... View Article The post Product Management – Start Here appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more

In my last article I spoke about the concept of an empowered engineer, which I consider the single most important concept for companies that want to move from feature teams to product teams. Overall my sense was that most people understood the points, and many told me they could personally relate as they have seen... View Article The post Empowered Engineers FAQ appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group ..read more