Andrei Beno

Me in 2019: “Hiring top product talent is hard” Me in 2024: “Keeping top talent is even harder” After five years of leading PMs, I can say that mastering managing high-performers yields the highest ROI. Nevertheless, taking high performers for granted will shutter your ‘house of cards’ in no time. In this post, I will dive into the ‘Promotion’ topic; the ‘Sacred cow’ leaders consciously try to keep vague. 1️⃣ 𝐓𝐨𝐩 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐝. - Promotion is the ultimate recognition (financial, social, and brand). - Misalignment around promotion can kill performance. - Dangling the promotion carrot quarter after quarter will break trust. 2️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬. - You hire top talent ( = High Performance) to do job X - Ensure the talent does job X for a long time ( = Duration) - Formula: (High Performance) X (Duration) = (Company Success). - Promotion means they no longer do job X. 3️⃣ 𝐑𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬. - Reward performance peaks (take care of your team). - Promote a long-term performance upward trend. - Invest in building your team members’ long-term defensible careers. 4️⃣ 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐚𝐩. - Communicate promotion criteria early, starting with interviews. - Hire only those happy to do job X for at least three years. - Never use empty promotion promises as a hiring tactic. 🟢 Wrapping up with a few 𝐛𝐨𝐧𝐮𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐌𝐬: 1. Ensuring that your work materializes in building a successful company has a higher long-term impact than a premature promotion. 2. The statement ‘Join at level Y and you will get promoted in no time’ indicates a questionable/toxic culture. Don’t take the job. 3. And a counter-argument: As a PM, avoid taking a role you are uncomfortable doing for at least three years. *** What do you love/hate about my ‘promotion’ philosophy? Share in the comments. 👉 P.S. The link to the full write-up is in the comments. #productmanagement #productleadership #productmanagers #product #promotion #leadingdown

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6 Kommentare

Stop throwing a North Star Metric at your team without any context. It doesn't work. A NSM is not a concept that will create immediate alignment. "Here's the metric, now go optimize the product to improve the metric." Product teams need more to figure out what is influencing the NSM. And management needs more to prove its value. The CoCoCo for successful North Star Metric implementations 💃🏻 1️⃣ CONTEXT 2️⃣ CONNECTION to business value 3️⃣ CONNECTION to user value AND 💫 BONUS 1 - Co-creation 💫 BONUS 2 - Co-ownership With a shout-out to Amplitude and Daniel Schmidt. A comparison of Amazon vs. Patagonia. And the evolution of Netflix’s NSM over time - with a surprise, if you haven't heard it yet. 👉 Ask Me Anything: Drop your NSM questions in the comment 👇

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📣 Product Folks: 😡 Have you and your team hit the wall with trying to focus on value? That *could* look like: ▶ No steady stream of data to inform strategy, prioritization + roadmaps ▶ Stakeholder misalignment ▶ Competing priorities ▶ Duplicative or overlapping work streams 🤓 Are you ready to put Product Operations into practice at your company? Join me for Produx Labs' Product Operations June 5 Masterclass! Snag your seat today. https://lnkd.in/ephFvTwf #productmanagement #productops

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Important : ruthless prioritization . Random inputs will generate random outcomes

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Found: A better way to measure product value 📊 NPS feels broken. "Would you recommend?" doesn't match what users actually do. Enter the Sean Ellis Score. It asks one powerful question: "How disappointed would you be if this product disappeared tomorrow?" Why I'm excited to try it: - Measures real product dependency - Shows if we're truly essential - 40% "very disappointed" = product-market fit I'm planning to: - Send it to our power users first - Compare results to our NPS - Share what we learn Used the Sean Ellis Score? Drop your experience below 👇 Looking for: - Survey templates - Response rates - Success stories - Pitfalls to avoid Let's learn together. 🤝 https://lnkd.in/gTEnDVC8

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Breaking up is hard to do.... 🎶 Unless you have a shitty roadmap, in which case, is it really? Plus points for getting the absolute worst/best cover image on YT. Our latest episode is live! #roadmaps #prodmgmt #productmanagement https://lnkd.in/e3zxkndv

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🎙️Tonight is the night! Join Bosky and me for a deep dive into the importance of soft skills in product management. We’ll discuss how EQ can help you grow your career, enhance your products, and build better relationships. See you at 8:30 PM CET at this link 👉🏻 https://lnkd.in/e3RiyHjE

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🌟 Are you a leader in the UX & Product world? Join me for an exclusive gathering at the PUSH UX & Product Leaders Lunch next week Thursday, June 6th at Gigi Trattoria in Munich from 12:30-14:30! 🇮🇹 WHY THIS LUNCH IS A MUST FOR EVERY PEOPLE LEADER: - 🤝 Product Leaders Unite: Connect with a select group of ten leaders in a cozy, intimate setting. Imagine the insights and partnerships that can emerge from such high-level discussions. - 🧠 Focused Discussions: Utilizing the Lean Coffee method, every voice gets heard, ensuring dynamic and democratic conversations. It's your chance to share, challenge, and refine your ideas among peers. - 🍝 Delicious Cuisine: Who says great discussions can't happen over great food? Enjoy mouth-watering Italian dishes, with vegetarian and vegan options available, ensuring a delightful culinary experience as you engage. 🍽️ THIS IS NO ORDINARY LUNCH It's a place where thought leaders can delve into the nuances of UX and product management, ignite new ideas, and discover collaborative opportunities, all while enjoying some of the best food Munich has to offer. 👥 SPACE IS LIMITED Designed specifically for founders, directors, and top-level leaders in the UX & product scene, this lunch ensures you’re interacting with peers who share your challenges and ambitions. 📅 Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to enrich your leadership journey and enjoy meaningful conversations that could shape the future of UX and Product. Let's push the boundaries of what's possible together! Reserve your spot now and join us for a lunch that promises to be as enriching as it is delicious. 📩 RSVP today to secure your place at the table. Join me at UX & Product Leaders Lunch #17 https://lnkd.in/dCDq2_Zh 👤 Want more details? Feel free to connect with me! #Leadership #BusinessLunch #PeerCoaching

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Can a Product Manager own the P&L for a product if the teams building and supporting the product don’t report to the #ProductManager? You must set people up for success if you want them to succeed. Giving a product manager the responsibility of profit and loss over a product without authority over how it is built and maintained is the opposite of setting them up for success. I had a conversation with Ruby Raley about this yesterday. I shared a story about a company I know where the CTO was charged with building a new product. He outsourced it to an IT vendor. They got it built in about 9 months. It was sold to a handful of clients. The clients started using it. The bill arrived from the cloud hosting service and it was $1.2M for the month‼️ The company was going to lose over $1M a month just to run the product. 👆🏻This is what happens when goals and incentives are misaligned and constraints are not communicated. The CTO was not involved in pricing; nor had he considered the cost of the architectural decisions made by the outsource team. I rarely see the engineering organization report into the Head of Product. And even more rarely are product managers setting pricing for the products they manage, or determining the size and quality of their design and development teams. Honestly, I am on the fence about this topic. I see so many product managers struggling with the demands of doing all the things they need to do to manage their products. Many PMs only have 3-5 years of business experience. Do they have the time, skills, training, and aptitude for managing a P&L too? Does the reporting structure support it? Will the executive team support it? I would love to hear from product managers. Do you manage your product’s #ProfitAndLoss? Do you want to?

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> you always have a strategy, even if it is implicit and not written down. Writing helps you sharpen it, have a shared understanding. > one of the simplest yet most powerful things you can do, is to write your strategy down.

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Having a chat with Simon Bristow the other day, we discussed the idea of Design Debt. It inspired me to write a full article :) What exactly is Design Debt? It’s the buildup of nasty assumptions and misfires that happens when you spend too much time in the lab and not enough time on the street. It’s what happens when your team falls in love with their own ideas, research artefacts and designs, instead of listening to what real users actually want and need in real life. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gpKiNj9x #Design EverestEngineering

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Ever felt like product marketing was an afterthought? I often hear this from my Product Marketing colleagues: "We want to be included as early as possible in the product lifecycle." And I agree with them! Product Marketing is a CRUCIAL function of top-performing product teams. So what is the best way to ensure that Product Marketing is tightly integrated throughout your team processes? 🎙 Next up on the Bounce Podcast ⚫️: Tune in on August 1st with Claire and me as Olivia McNaughten, Senior Director of Product Marketing & Partnerships at GRIN, reveals how a pod structure can transform your approach and close the gap! Plus, learn the best ways to work with your PMM teams! Very excited for this one. #Podcast #ProductMarketing

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One of the most received feedback during design reviews and discussions in day to day design life. Aka “maza nahi aaya” Very well 👌 explained on how to counter it. One thing to add here would be: - Present any alternatives which were explored to see what changed in the feedback. It also shows flexibility to improve and adapt to feedback.

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Seeing this says to me the Ruroc EOX launch has flopped. If you're asking customers "why didn't you buy" with options of: "Product Design isn't good enough" "I am waiting for a good promotion" ...You have to be deluded if you think you're going to get actionable information from a survey like this. Here's what has gone wrong for Ruroc. Firstly, "EOX" was designed as the 'Finale' of the Atlas line. It should have been positioned as the pinnacle of the range and should have replaced the Atlas 4. Atlas was plagued with issues from v1.0. We rushed, the pandemic hit, suppliers messed us around, we had to build our own factory REMOTELY to keep up with demand. To fix the issue once and for all I hired a specialist product designer who built out the team to deliver the 'perfect product'. It was costly, but it would allow us to reduce our Customer Service costs, return logistics costs, and reduce our in-house QC team from 18 to just 2-3. A huge cost to get a huge saving. Absolutely necessary for Ruroc to stabilise and continue growing at 70-100% YOY. That product, the one that should have been Ruroc's biggest success, is now called "EOX". To sell products online and grow successfully you need: - Scarcity - "I want stuff other people don't have yet, or I don't want to regret not buying when I had the chance." - Innovation - People want the latest greatest and best... if it's not that, why am I giving you my money if my current product does the job? - Social Proof - it's FOMO, who's wearing it, who's buying it, am I going to be the odd one out if I don't buy? - Reciprocity - What's this brand done for me? How have they engaged me? Do I buy into their mission, do I feel obliged to be part of it. - Commitment - OK I've pre-registered, I've followed the page, I've signed up for the newsletter, I'm watching the launch video, I'm going to buy. Not one of these tactics was properly employed during the launch of the "EOX" Further to that, some genius has made the decision to continue with the Atlas 4 and have it run alongside the EOX So now, as a customer of Ruroc, what does this say to me. Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Track - $679.00 (Has no real track certificate) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Carbon - $595.00 Ruroc "EOX" - $559.00 (brand new should be better than Atlas 4) Ruroc Atlas 4.0 Street (fibreglass) - $319.00 (Confusingly is lighter than the Track and Carbon Atlas) So if I want the best, I buy the most expensive helmet? I can wear it on the Track right? No, not in USA or MotoGP. I want the lightest, so I buy the cheapest? I want the newest, but is it worse than the old models because it's cheaper? This is beyond confusing for customers. Customers give brands minimal attention. Your messaging is as much in the decisions you make around naming and pricing as it is anything else. Ruroc "Atlas-X" - $659.00 Drop the Atlas 4.0 and discount til it's gone Clear message to consumers - "the new product is better, replace your old helmet now" It's not hard.

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When Product/Growth/Marketing/Dev Teams Get Too Fat Nothing slows down progress like teams that have grown bloated and unfocused. You’ve likely experienced the painful meetings with 25+ people, multiple overlapping roles, and a lack of clear leadership and ownership. These enormous teams often devolve into unproductive bureaucracies rather than driving real outcomes for customers. The Warning Signs of an Overgrown Team 🚩Meetings with 20+ attendees where it’s unclear who is driving decisions. 🚩More than 5 people claiming to be “project managers” or “product owners.” 🚩A severe lack of customer/user focus – the voices closest to pain points get drowned out. 🚩Ambiguity around who truly owns different workstreams and deliverables. 🚩Lots of wasted time finger-pointing between sub-teams over responsibilities. 🚩Meetings that end without clear action items or ownership. At the end of long, bloated meetings, there is rarely clarity on what the specific actions are and who will accomplish them by when. Different factions feel like they own the same work, leading to territoriality and re-work. The Plight of the Bloated Team As teams grow, roles can become redundant, and leadership can become unclear. This leads to teams prioritizing internal processes and headcount over delivering value to customers. They become fixated on heavy processes, org charts, and headcounts rather than real outcomes. Bloated teams also frequently suffer from analysis paralysis and decision by committee. With so many voices in the room, even small decisions get bogged down in endless meetings and discussions. One role that is critical yet often underrepresented on bloated teams is the data/analytics expert. Without clear data leadership, teams risk making choices based on anecdotes and opinions rather than real user insights and performance measurement. Customer feedback tools, product usage data, A/B tests and other sources get underutilized. How many times have you sat in a large meeting with 30 people in it, without clear decisions made and confusion around ownership, accountability and who will do what for next steps? The Fix: Lean Teams Focused on Outcomes Some keys to lean, mean teams: 👉No team should be larger than 8-10 people 👉1 Product Owner/Manager as the clear, decisive decision maker 👉Customer data experts are fully embedded to incorporate insights 👉Cross functional team members like UXR, engineers, etc. aligned to drive full solution 👉Dedicated Analytics resources tracking key metrics 👉Empowered teams self-organize around delivering outcomes, not just output. While cutting bloat is painful, the result is teams that are nimble, motivated, and focused on rapid learning and real impact rather than bureaucracy. The customers and the business results will be better for it. Lean teams are: Nimble and adaptable Highly motivated Focused on rapid learning and real impact When in doubt, stay lean and stay focused on your critical data sources!

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This is spot on. In my experience, design can be a game-changer when it’s treated as a strategic partner, not just a service. At RealizedCare, I’ve seen firsthand how elevating design to a peer level with Product, Clinical, Marketing, and Engineering drives real, lasting impact. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about reshaping how we solve problems and create strategies that fuel growth. That shift in mindset, especially at the leadership level, is what unlocks design’s true potential to transform business outcomes.

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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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Hey product folks - asking for feedback. I've noticed many PMs in my network have a hard time finding a community to get support from and share ideas on "How to Product." I've heard repeatedly that it is a lonely profession (true!) and while there are a couple of social groups for PMs, I did not find any of them actually helpful (soooo much spam). And given that most product folks are coming in from different roles (sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc), many also privately hold an inferiority complex (me too!) making it difficult to reach out for help. So, I just want to take a quick minute to validate if this is a real problem others face – do you find it challenging to find a supportive product community to discuss and share ideas on product management? If not, where do you go to connect and discuss?

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