Diego Granados

“If there is no clear owner, then it’s the PM that owns it.” I sat down with Esteban Contreras from #ProductState to discuss Product leadership, or Prioritization process at Productboard. We also dug into the concept of Extreme Ownership, which is a principle I firmly believe in. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eVN47mWn #productmanagement #productexcellence #ownership

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With tech layoffs still ongoing, finding a product manager role is tougher than ever. I'm sharing some helpful PM interview content (from my own interviews) to help others navigate this challenging market. They span almost all stages from screening to behavioural to product sense. Topics covered: Product Management Interview Process - https://lnkd.in/grPHFbsg The Backgrounder - https://lnkd.in/gyv5FRZe Company Research - https://lnkd.in/gMdKkZsw Why You (Screening Interview) - https://bit.ly/PMWhyYou Questions To Ask - https://lnkd.in/g3Hb3JiQ Behavioural Questions - https://lnkd.in/ggs3YCiY Product Sense / Product Design - https://lnkd.in/gSHZcfQj Metrics - https://lnkd.in/g3YWEYYJ Links in Comments #productmanagement #product #PM

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Tip 1/10 for people managers in tech!👇 Whether you're a people manager or an individual contributor leading your team, Julie Zhou's takeaways (VP Product Design at Facebook) from her book "The Making of a Manager" will apply to your day-to-day! Takeaway 1. The job of a manager. "Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together." There exists a challenge in the mindset shift required to let go of hands-on tasks and rather focus on overall team success instead. In addition to learning how to delegate as a manager, even as an IC PM, you need to learn how to delegate as you grow in seniority. Just like an IC, delegating doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility; rather, delegating helps you scale yourself and your team in a way that puts the broader vision in a better place for success. 👋 Check back tomorrow to see the next tip, or watch the full LiftoffPM 🚀 video on "10 Tips for Managers in Tech" here: https://lnkd.in/exxjVF8X #productmanagement #productmanager #techinterviews

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My team has been hard at work building the next generation developer experience at Stripe—so proud of them for unveiling a step change for people building on Stripe. Today, we're introducing three big new features: 1) Sandboxes: the next-generation of Stripe test mode. You can *finally* create multiple, isolated environments—handy for building a new feature, or just playing around with something new safely. 2) Workbench: our reimagined developer space, available everywhere in the Stripe dashboard. Inspect anything on the dashboard and get under the hood with the raw JSON in just one click. 3) Event Destinations: our webhook tools are evolving to make it easier to get just the events you need, and now delivering to cloud destinations for the first time. Check out the next generation of Stripe—and get early access—here: https://beta.stripe.dev

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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Let’s get real. In the tech world, we love our rockstar engineers and visionary product managers. But what about the unsung heroes who make sure the trains run on time? Enter: Technical Program Managers (TPMs). Here’s the deal—TPMs are the connective tissue in any tech org. Without them, your next big thing is just a pipe dream. Here’s why they matter: 1. Master Planners: TPMs are the strategists who see the big picture. They map out the journey from idea to execution, ensuring every cog in the machine is working towards the endgame. 2. Diplomatic Leaders: These folks are the UN of tech. TPMs navigate cross-functional teams, aligning everyone from engineering to product, and making sure egos don’t derail progress. 3. Execution Powerhouses: Think of them as project ninjas. TPMs oversee the whole process, managing timelines, resources, and risks. They get sh*t done. 4. Tech Savvy: A TPM isn’t just a project manager with a fancy title. They understand the tech stack and can speak geek. This lets them make smart decisions and steer the ship effectively. 5. Communication Gurus: Ever been left in the dark on a project? Not with a good TPM. They keep stakeholders in the loop, ensuring transparency and trust all the way. 6. Risk Avengers: TPMs spot risks from a mile away and crush them before they become a problem. It’s like having a crystal ball and a wrecking ball in one. 7. Efficiency Experts: These pros are all about optimizing. They refine processes and drive continuous improvement, making sure your team isn’t just working hard, but smart. Bottom line: TPMs are the unsung heroes who turn chaos into order and dreams into reality. Next time you see a project succeed, know there’s probably a badass TPM behind the curtain making it all happen. To all the TPMs out there: You’re the backbone of innovation. Keep rocking.

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I recently wrote a PRD with AI and it worked out surprisingly well. Tomorrow, I'm sharing a new post with: - My personal PRD template - My AI prompt to fill in the template with real customer feedback - My favorite PRD examples and AI tools 📌 Sign up to get my PRD template, AI prompt, and examples in your inbox: https://creatoreconomy.so/

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How do you live in the future? ~5 years ago, I heard one of my favorite phrases about Product Management. A colleague in the middle of discussing a project on a walk around the Google campus said “Y’know, Product Managers need to live in the future….” Most of our conversation was about something completely different, but that phrase stayed with me. It’s such a great way to remember a mindset that PMs need to have - the ability to predict the future: of how their customer will evolve, the competition will evolve and indeed the entire ecosystem in which their products exist evolve. What will really matter and what won’t? That span can be months, years or (for some ideas) even decades.The best PMs or product leaders are often those that are exceptional at predicting that end or future state correctly, and are able to navigate their teams’ strategy to win there. While product intuition informed by deep product empathy is generally the most important PM skill, in some products, you need to predict a future world/consumer/ecosystem to do that well. I’d say that’s somewhat true in my current job. So, I’m trying to live in the future a lot these days, and an trying to build this muscle up again. I was talking to someone explicitly about how to do this and figured I’d jot a couple of thoughts down. Please let me know if you have better ideas.. 1. Some people are already in the future - talk to them: As the William Gibson quote goes: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed” - there’s products, companies, people, countries, markets that are ahead of where you are. In some cases, they might be your future state. Study them all; try a lot of cutting edge products, learn from every person, case study etc. that might be helpful. 2. Understand, map out and try to predict different future states: I remember way back in the day, I was trying to convince a particular product team to spend more time on their mobile experience (they were spending almost none!) and just couldn’t get them to do it. I then asked the team to predict how much of their experience would be mobile in 2 years - all of them said over 50%. It made it a lot harder for them, once they all realized that, to ignore their mobile experience. 3. Make a habit of talking to people good at this: This might be specific to me, but I find talking about the future to the right folks - even to your favorite LLM - can help you advance your own thinking. I generally build off conversations and ideas bouncing back and forth, so this is particularly helpful to me. 4. Make a habit of studying the past, and predicting the future: History is not a perfect predictor of the future, but pattern matching helps me and so I try to learn from the past - successes and mistakes. Also if you try to predict a lot, it gives you a chance to calibrate your own judgement. What are some things you try to live in the future? Full post here: https://lnkd.in/dbKpA5GU

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