Alberto B.

There are only 2 true tests of product-market fit. Nothing else matters. The tests: → Will customers pay for it? → If you took it away, will they clamor for it back? That's pretty much it. So, to get to PMF faster, simply ask: → What would you change that would make you want to buy it? → What would you do if you didn't have this? #productmarketfit *** ♻️ Like this? Please repost. ➡️ Follow me for daily executive coaching.

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Prioritization is PM's forte - that's your superpower. But there's one list that's more important than all of them combined. It's not the to-dos. It's not the must-dos. It's the "not gonna do it" list. It's easy to get caught up in creating an exhaustive list of everything that needs to be done - but what about the things that you're not going to do? The stuff that falls outside of the scope of your project... The stuff that would take too much time and resources for a minimal return... The stuff that takes you further away from your goals... That's where the "not gonna do it" list comes in. It's a powerful tool to help you be more productive and more focused. It frees up your time and energy to focus on the things that really matter, the things that will help you achieve your goals. So take a few moments to think about what you're not going to do, and write it down. Trust me, it'll make all the difference.

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One of the biggest challenges I see product leaders face is the expectation gap. There’s often a significant disconnect between the expectations of: 🤩 How we believe things “should” be - influenced by product gurus, books, podcasts, posts 😬 The reality of the situation - feature factories, low / no discovery, limited metrics 🕴 How our key stakeholders believe things “should” be - based on a different set of ideologies and books. Navigating this gap can be exhausting. We’re trained in product management, yet we find ourselves in roles leading transformation whilst keeping up the (already demanding) day job. 🐟 Leading change is extremely tough. It can feel like you are alone in swimming against the current. 😓 We feel like we’re failing. Our product process doesn’t look how it “should” do meaning we feel like we’re not adequate. 🚚 The mis-match in expectations between product leaders and stakeholders often results in us being held accountable for delivery, yet we most often have limited influence over it. It takes time, patience and top class influencing skills to work through this problem set. Sometimes we have to make compromises in order to make longer-term progress. This is not failing, it’s being smart. 👩‍🎓 To avoid burnout, it’s critical you put the right energy infrastructure in place for yourself. The activities that recharge you become non-negotiable in your schedule. If you’re navigating this situation right now and would like a coach / mentor, get in touch!

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Biggest learnings from 10 months as a Fractional CPO and Product Coach (number 4 will surprise you). 1. User research is seen as an overhead (cost & time), rather than an investment. This is fascinating, but not surprising. Most companies envision a desperate PM, clutching the collar of an unsuspecting user, pleading ‘please, please, tell me what to build, I beg of you. Engineers are going to be free tomorrow, hungry for work and I have nothing.’ On the contrary, it’s an investment with a substantial yield and should be done weekly. Proper training is advised; just ‘doing it’ is not enough, there’s a meticulous mastery to candidate recruitment and bias minimisation. 2. Data is limited, highly fragmented, or absent. Making decisions without understanding platform usage is like trying to find your way in a city you’ve never visited with your eyes closed and no GPS. Utter mayhem. Data is power. Make sure you’re tracking and adding all metrics into one repository. If client data is in one place, and usage in another with no way of connecting them, it’s useless for decision-making. 3. Companies tend to think in solutions, not problems. Best founders and PMs are in love with the PROBLEM they’re solving, not the solution. The first question I ask when a new ‘solution’ is presented to me is ‘what problem does it solve?’. It requires a mindset shift to start thinking this way. The key you’re showing me is super shiny and beautiful, but what door does it unlock, and more importantly, why do we want to unlock that door? 4. Product Vision does not exist. Sing it with me: ‘To a ship without a destination, no wind is favourable.’ (Young Seneca). Zackly. How can we decide if this or that problem is more important to solve? If we don’t understand or have a compelling vision statement, and compelling it must be, then there’s no way of knowing if it’s taking us closer to the future we’re creating. So, set a clear Vision. Understand what problems stand in your way to get to that vision. Quantify and deeply scope those problems (data and user interviews), and you’re already ahead of the curve. Hope this was helpful. Any surprises?

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I love rubrics*, but if I had to simplify, great PMs deliver impact in highly ambiguous and noisy situations, and junior PMs get stuck. At the APM and PM level, it’s all about execution: give them the problem, give them a hypothesis for the solution, and they can do some basic discovery to find the answer and build it. Stakeholder needs are easy to meet, and there aren’t a ton of distractions. It’s basic product delivery. At the SPM level, there’s a little more ambiguity and noise. The problem space is given to them but the exact problem isn’t, the solution space takes some discovery and iteration, and the execution is pretty straightforward once the pieces are lined up. Stakeholders are a bit more opinionated because the stakes are higher, and as a more senior person, you’re fielding more distractions*. At the Lead and Principal levels, you’re tackling situations that could unlock big value but nothing is easy and failure is possible. You’re given a desired business outcome and have to find a big enough customer problem that, if solved successfully, would deliver that business outcome. No one knows if it’s possible, but everyone has opinions. The stakes are high, and if you succeed, you can have huge impact on the valuation and future of the business. I’m sharing this for two reasons. For managers: does the level of your team talent match the problems you are asking them to solve? It could be they need more scaffolding, that you have a Lead level problem but only a PM available. You’ll need to step in and help them solve it. For ICs: if you’re looking for promotion, focus on success given ambiguity and noise. Give your manager and leadership team more reasons to hand you difficult, messy, higher stakes opportunities. “I got this.” Then, deliver. —————— *If you’re interested in reading the footnotes as well as my work-in-progress thoughts (today: are people actually using ChatGPT for vision and strategy?), sign up for my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g44P3_rB

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If you are ever wondering if you are in a product-led environment or not, ask yourself this one thing: Are you given outputs to deliver or outcomes to achieve? [Hat tip to Marty Cagan] On a feature team, you're given a roadmap. 🗺️ You design, build, test, deploy. You're given dates and timeframes. The goal? Deliver output. But here's the catch. 🎣 Output is easier to deliver than outcomes. And let's be real - Product Managers in a feature team? Might as well be called Program Managers. Now consider an empowered product team. 💪 They're given problems to solve. The measure isn't just shipping the product. It's about solving the problem. Strong product companies get it. 🎯 It's all about outcomes. No points for just shipping. Points for delivering value.

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There’s a question I ask product leaders to help me assess the state of product at their company:  “What’s the last idea you explored in Discovery but decided to kill instead of promoting it to Delivery, and why?” Usually, they can’t think of a single example. This suggests that either: - Every idea was worth building (highly unlikely), or - There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of Discovery And the product leaders I’m talking to are not outliers. Why is there so much confusion around Discovery and its relationship to Delivery, despite clear definitions by thought leaders like Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres? - Discovery: Figuring out what things to build - Delivery: Building those things These are accurate, succinct definitions I use all the time. No one bats an eyelash. That said, because they are so pithy, they leave room for some misunderstandings, especially: - Missing the nuance that “figuring out what things to build” includes, significantly, figuring out which solution(s) should be built at all. - Not appreciating that “building” prototypes — whether user prototypes or technical feasibility prototypes — is a Discovery activity, not a Delivery activity. To avoid these misunderstandings, I like to elaborate on the definitions slightly, even if it’s just by consistently appending a verbal “footnote” — by tacking six words onto the definition of Discovery and four onto Delivery: - Discovery: Figuring out what things to build, [which includes both which and what]. - Delivery: Building those things [in production quality code]. I find that these ten extra words, repeated assiduously, go a long way in helping people really grok Discovery.  Of course, simply reiterating “which and what” isn’t a silver bullet for transforming a “feature team” model — which is epitomized by a “which"-less definition of “what” — overnight. That said, it can start to change the conversation with stakeholders, and raise the bar for your product teams, by making clear the ambition to move to a more empowered product operating model. Clarifying that Delivery means “...in production quality code” reminds people that there’s an alternative way to build — prototyping! — and that prototypes are part of Discovery. Next week, I’ll discuss how effective product teams support and reinforce these concepts by maintaining two separate backlogs: a Discovery Backlog (Opportunity Backlog) and a Delivery Backlog (Product Backlog).

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🤦‍♂️ Absolutely not. No No No. Not every company is setup the same, not every company is capable of implementing all principles, not every company wants to prioritise this over continuing, or struggling to earn money and survive. The last thing the tech sector needs is another wave of 'purism' on a list of things you must do to be successful, based largely on a microscopic subset of business, and further putting pressure on product professionals. Understand what principles you actually already do, what else makes sense for you and is practical for your organisation to achieve, and just keep doing your best. Do not 'live and breathe' anything, be flexible, be practical and be pragmatic. Do not join a 'community' that looks down on others for not knowing certain books inside and out, or for not being a 'purist'.

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I use a pretty simple 4-part framework for finding Product Market Fit. Nothing can make finding PMF easy, but this structure helps me break it down. Achieving PMF* means solving 4 questions: 1. What problem are we solving? (For the customer, for our business) 2. How are we solving it? 3. What is our market? (who is the customer, and is it big enough) 4. What is our GTM strategy? (Repeatable, scalable growth engine) Using that, we can build a table with four rows, one for each of these questions. We can then add a column for our hypotheses. This is what we think the answer is, based on what we know now (which might be nothing more than a guess). Now, for each of these hypotheses, there’s an underpinning set of assumptions that need to be true in order for the hypothesis to be true*. These assumptions might be about user behavior (“people are willing to buy [x] online”), internal execution (“we’re actually able to do [x]”), performance (“users convert at [x%]”), or spend (“customers pay at least $x”)*. We can then sort these assumptions into two sets: “Probably true” and “Not validated”. Our task is to open up our toolkit — e.g. user interviews, surveys, card sorting, data analysis, modeling, user testing with design prototypes, painted door tests, A/B tests, Pilots, etc. — and find the cheapest & fastest way we can move these assumptions into the “Probably true” column. At some point, we’re going to run into assumptions that prove to be probably NOT true. That’s when we need to go back and iterate on the hypotheses, and restart this entire exercise, with new assumptions born out of the new hypotheses that need to be moved from “Not validated” —> “Probably true”. As you get more experienced, you’ll get faster at 1) spotting the assumptions that are most likely to be wrong, 2) identifying the right tool for the job of testing that assumption, and 3) coming up with hypotheses that are more likely to be right. None of this is easy* and it’s not quick. But I’ve found this way of structuring things to help me not get overwhelmed by the complexity of going 0 → 1, and more quickly get focus on what to do next. I hope it helps you, too. —————— *If you’re interested in reading the footnotes as well as my work-in-progress thoughts (today: r/ProductManagement as a reminder of what Product is like for many people), sign up for my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g44P3_rB

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When debating prioritization or scope, the question isn’t “yes or no”, it’s “instead of what”. Same with strategy, by the way. Strategy is about defining a choice, “this instead of that”, not “also”.

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Everybody hates the Product Manager. PMs - turn that hate around to gain strength from it instead of getting weighed down by it. First though, let's have fun talking through why there's so much hate: - Engineers are not fans - PMs incessantly ask for updates and never listen to tech debt concerns - Designers are cynics - PMs treat them like pixel pushers and don't build most of what they (had to for some reason urgently) design - Customer-facing teams aren't supporters - PMs refuse to fix those important bugs and never respond quickly to support requests - Sales reps are dubious - PMs won't build the upmarket and/or downmarket features needed to close deals and can't seem to execute against the roadmap to keep new clients happy - Marketing is disappointed - PMs prioritize unsexy (read: unmarketable) features and make it impossible to plan marketing campaigns since timelines apparently don't matter - Leadership and other stakeholders, nope - PMs don't get the broader company vision and keep missing their OKRs - PMs don't like other PMs - PMs overstep boundaries of ownership and steal resources from each other - End users are far from appreciative - PMs keep sending emails about useless recent releases and meanwhile deprecated the few features that were absolutely vital to specific use cases / workflows - PMs don't even believe in themselves - they have impostor syndrome and keep making bad calls Eesh. That's a lot of hate to go around. And it all comes down to 4 reasons: - PMs make unpopular decisions - PMs apply reasoning that is either not communicated, misunderstood, or disagreed with - PMs are where the buck stops - PMs are the bearers of bad news PMs - you need to transform the dislike from poison into fuel. First off, recognize you're basically working through stages of grief: - You deny there are any problems - You’re angry at everyone who suggests there are issues - You’re willing to bargain with the troublesome reporters of ineptitude (or yourself) in seeking a solution - You’re depressed at the sheer impossibility of it all - You’re accepting of negative views - [Bonus!] You feed on declarations of wrongness Second, help yourself on this de-griefing journey of self-improvement: - Diffuse tension by acknowledging the emotional undercurrents so people feel heard - Over-explain why it is how it is so people understand - Manage expectations by pre-telling how it's going to be so people aren't surprised - Avoid squeaky wheeling so you don’t prioritize the wrong work - Err towards consistency by continuously delivering value so people have confidence in your ability to routinely generate positive results You are in a more advantageous position than it may seem on the surface. You have people that care so much about your product that they hate you for all its woes. How privileged you are! More thoughts on how to capitalize on PM hatred here: https://lnkd.in/e3KXRPcu

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Are You Wasting Your First 30 Days as a PM in 1-1s? 🔍 The conventional wisdom says you should spend your first month setting 1:1s with your team, understanding the business model, and building rapport with engineering. While those are all important, the highest leverage activity is not relationship building (it will build over time in any case) but creating a visual map of your product's customer journey. This may sound basic, but you'll likely find that stakeholders have conflicting assumptions and interpretations of how customers interact with your product. 👁️ Marketing sees one journey, support sees another, engineering yet another. This misalignment often goes undetected. Within your first 30 days, use tools like Figma, Canva, or Lucid to sketch the customer journey. In your 1:1s, ask stakeholders to describe their version of the journey. Highlight areas where there is disagreement or confusion. 🤝 Then bring the key players together to align on the true journey. With an AI assistant like ChatGPT, you can even get suggestions on the right way to address potential misalignments. A shared understanding of the customer journey is like having a map for your product road trip. Without it, your users will get lost and frustrated. Don't expect customers to clearly articulate their needs either. Like a cat knocking over a vase, their behaviors often don't tell the whole story. 🔍 Dig deeper into the Jobs To Be Done—the underlying motivations driving customer behaviors. In your first month, resist the temptation to make quick changes. Your highest leverage task is bringing alignment across the org on the true customer journey. With that foundation in place, your product efforts will gain tremendous speed and clarity going forward. Your stakeholders will appreciate you taking the time to build this understanding. 🙌 Not because you did the work but because many misconceptions and assumptions get removed for your stakeholders themselves. #ProductManagement #CustomerJourney #StakeholderAlignment #JobsToBeDone #ProductLeadership

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According to Marty Cagan European companies are "addicted to process", which is a big barrier for doing proper product work. Here are some key points from Marty's talk that I personally found important: (1) Marty believes that real product work is about solving customer problems. The main negative character in Marty's world is feature teams—teams that just implement features following a roadmap someone else wrote, instead of engaging in product discovery. – You don’t want to be a feature team, do you? – Marty asks. According to him, teams should be actively searching for answers to questions like: → What problem should we be trying to solve? → How can we solve this problem? If you're just developing something, you’re not a product manager but a project manager at best, and you don't belong in the profession. In delivery, Marty values speed (in the spirit of CI/CD); he doesn’t see anything else as valuable or interesting. "Think about time to money, not time to market." (2) Marty strongly advocates for autonomous cross-functional teams that can quickly experiment with solutions to discovered problems. He believes that everyone on the team, including engineers, should be involved in product work. "We don’t hire great engineers to tell them what to do, we hire great engineers so they can show us what’s possible". (3) Marty views processes and frameworks as the main enemies of product thinking because they replace analysis and critical thinking. This is especially true for Agile; while the original principles are good, the way they're often implemented in practice tends to be just mindlessly following a prescribed process. (4) Instead of frameworks, Marty suggests a set of "first principles of product model", which you can interpret and practice to the extent of your understanding and talent. These principles are shown in a picture. (5) Lead with context, not control. To elaborate on this point, Marty shares a story of a product leader at Netflix. When his team started doing something weird, his first instinct was to fire everyone. But then he remembered that Netflix fires anyone whose performance is even slightly below "exceptional" every year. Then he realised that if a smart product person does something strange, it means he, as a leader, dropped the ball and didn't provide some crucial part of the context. So, he went to figure out what critical piece of knowledge the team was missing.

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Very timely I just received the news in my inbox. 📣 Flash Sale Alert! 🚨 For a limited time, my book is available at an exclusive 50% discount! 🎉 🔗 Grab your copy here: https://lnkd.in/e5WKJNJU 🛍️ Use Coupon Code: FLSH50 ⏰ Offer valid until: October 3, 2024, 11:59 PM EST Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just starting out, this book offers valuable insights into crafting a winning Go-to-Market strategy, emphasizing a customer-centric approach, and effectively enabling your teams for success. 🎧 Also, don't miss out on the podcast where we dive deep into these concepts! 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQQdicRC I'm passionate about helping others navigate the complexities of product management, and I hope these resources provide you with actionable strategies and inspiration. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts or questions—let's keep the conversation going! 🤝 Happy reading and listening! 📖🎙️ #GoToMarket #ProductManagement #FlashSale #BookDiscount #SoftwareDevelopment #GTMStrategy #ContinuousLearning #SalesEnablement #Marketing #Podcast

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I respect Pawel's breakdowns and Marty's leadership, but this is so far off from reality for >90% of people in product teams. Here are 7 reasons why: First off, I worked in product roles for the past 15 years, advising big brands outside of tech for the past 7. These are just based on my observations, so they are biased & I don't have any numbers. Comment to confirm or disagree. I put a long version of my observations into an article. Link in comments. 1 - PM advice is not actionable. 2 - PMs are project managers. 3 - No dedicated Product Teams. 4 - No build capabilities. 5 - No focus or long-term thinking at the executive level.  6 - No real transformation efforts.  7 - No support for change makers. I don't doubt that most stakeholders in companies want to make things better. But looking at these 20 product model first principles, most don't even know where and how to start. They also don't see this as relevant or important enough. These read like a fuzzy, feel-good manifesto with no applicability. Just take outcomes over output. What does this even mean? If you haven't been in an outcome-driven environment, you think you already are in one. After all, you have deliverables, your metrics, you create results. Then something like OKR comes along and is driven through the company, you are forced to put KPI on anything and get the "data" mantra everywhere you look. But none of these is "outcomes over output". That's why no amount of reading thought leaders on product changes a thing. Read my article for details on this. #productmanagement

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The post below highlights a troubling trend: SaaS companies explicitly opting out of serving the EU market because of regulatory challenges. And honestly, I can relate. As an EU citizen, it’s often easier to start something targeted at the US market and distribute it there than it is to operate within Europe. The US market is massive, vibrant, and—crucially—easier to navigate from a regulatory perspective. On the other hand, Europe, with its patchwork of regulations, feels like a minefield. GDPR, while well-intentioned, often becomes a barrier rather than a facilitator for innovation. Take the cookie banners, for example—those intrusive pop-ups we’re forced to navigate on nearly every site. They’ve become a meme at this point, something everyone ignores or blindly clicks through. What’s the point of regulations like this if they alienate users and stifle innovation while doing little to actually protect privacy? We’re seeing innovation bypass Europe. How did it come to this? Where is Europe heading if the cost of compliance outweighs the reward of serving the market? It’s sad to see, but it’s the reality we’re living in. Unless something changes, I fear this trend will only accelerate. Europe needs to rethink its approach if it wants to compete on the global innovation stage. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Have you had similar experiences, or do you see a way forward?

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🔎 How Most Product Teams SHOULD (Vs ACTUALLY) Spend Their Time ⏱️ The Ideal Balance: 🟩 60% on Discovery 🟦 40% on Delivery In a perfect world, teams would dedicate most of their time to understanding customers, experimenting with ideas, and validating solutions before jumping into full-scale development. This emphasis on discovery means we’re uncovering the “why” behind each product decision and ultimately building more valuable and impactful products. The Reality: 🟥 20% on Discovery 🟧 80% on Delivery For most teams, delivery takes center stage. Deadlines, feature requests, and the pressure to ship often push discovery to the backburner. It’s no surprise that this imbalance can lead to products that don’t fully address user needs or that miss critical insights. What Would Happen if We Shifted the Balance? Imagine the compounding impact if more teams had a discovery-first mindset—focusing on deep customer insights, reducing rework, and shipping with confidence. Making this shift isn’t easy, but the rewards could reshape the way products come to life. How does your team stack up? Share your thoughts on achieving a healthy discovery/delivery split below. 👇

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My # 1 collaboration tip for product managers working with product designers: Clearly define areas of ownership. Few talk about the product manager <> product designer overlap. But this is a CONSTANT source of conflict (my teams and I have experienced this on more than one occasion). PMs and PDs are the dynamic duo behind every great product experience. Their roles have significant overlap, and with their collaboration comes potential friction. It's inevitable - just like in any other relationship! What product designers should own: - Customer impact / value - Crafting top-notch user experiences - Visual & interaction design - Building prototypes - Running usability testing - Developing personas & journey mapping What product managers should own: - Business impact / value - Leading strategy & prioritization - Setting context, team goals & project scope - Defining success criteria - Leading data analysis Note: This does 𝗻𝗼𝘁 mean that PMs should not help in (significantly) shaping customer outcomes - on the contrary, creating impactful products for customers is THE most direct path to capturing business value. Where the two roles overlap and share responsibilities (this is a GOOD thing): - User research - User scenarios & use cases - Low-fi sketching & flows - Team workshops & whiteboarding This redundancy is intentional. It's healthy to have multiple people thinking big picture, but blurry roles can lead to power struggles. The solution? Collaboration & clarity around who leads what. Also important? Leaning on Each Other: - Product Designers: Use your PM to clarify scope, use cases, and project goals. Collaborate with engineers for technical insights. - Product Managers: Use your designer's creativity to refine scope. Get them involved in early ideation, and tap into their research expertise when needed. The Bottom Line: Who's accountable for the overlapping parts? Whoever owns the final result holds the decision-making power. It's about disagreeing and committing after discussions, even if you don't fully agree. Embrace the overlap; it's a strength, not a flaw. Thank you for attending my TED talk. ------- 
 🔔 Follow me, Kunal Punjabi and hit the bell for more insights
 ♻️ repost to share with your network PS. Credit to Jeff Zych for the visual (and inspiration behind this post). Give him a follow! PPS. I hope this is relatable, and helps level up your way of collaborating. PPPS. If this post resonates, I will cover PM <> PD collaboration anti-patterns in the future.

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Worthy Read: In defense of feature team product managers by Ben Erez After Marty Cagan appeared on Lenny’s Podcast to promote his new book, Transformed, lots of people stepped up to disagree with some of Marty’s spicier assertions, like the fact that product managers on feature teams are not real product managers. Lenny invited product advisor Ben Erez to write a guest post explaining why he believes this isn’t true and sharing his insights into why sometimes feature teams are the right choice. Note that you need to be a subscriber to read the full article, but you can still get a lot of value out of what’s available to everyone. Check it out here: https://buff.ly/4bDLKVi ❓ Do you think feature team PMs are undervalued compared to empowered team PMs? How do you see the role of feature team PMs contributing to a company’s success? #prodmgmt #ux #engineering

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