Products That Count has a podcast as well as a monthly meetup. SC Moatti — product leader, author and now venture capitalist — hosts the postcast. She invited me on to talk about technology product management roles, tips on moving up the product career ladder, and the importance of cross-functional communication. We also touched on how incentive structures shape the behavior of non-product groups (such as Sales), and when a startup should hire its first full-time product manager.
Discussion included how do we focus each product on one valuable Job To Be Done to avoid feature bloat; and can we stick with one broad product concept long enough to get something shipped?
Product management may feel like a new discipline, but some of us have been doing it for decades. (I encourage companies to hire at least one senior product manager who’s been in this role before: better than having an entire team/company learn from scratch. We’d never hire an entire software development team with no previous coding experience…)
Click here to listen.
Hat tips to Ellen Chisa, Teresa Torres, Ken Norton, Jess Ratcliffe, Des Traynor and the new generation of product-management-specific tools that work (for product folks) better than than the project/engineering tools designed for our peers.