Jeff Lynch

When launching a new product I see alot of product managers wait until they're asked "how it's going", before thinking about what their metrics of success are. This is something that I learned as a new product manager when trying to get funding for my first product. Think about the metrics that are important both your company, as well as what is going delight the customer to the point that they're publicly championing your products and organization. #productmanagement #GTM #productlaunch #launchstrategy

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A critical mistake many product managers make is getting too wrapped up in the tactical aspects of Agile and feature prioritization. While these are important, neglecting strategic skills like user research and vision development can limit your impact and career growth. Focus on what truly matters to elevate your product and your career.

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The most common question I ask my product team members: "What trade-off is this forcing you to make on the roadmap?" When something new gets scheduled, there is always a trade-off. There's no such thing as "squeezing something in." And it is the product person's job to decide and communicate the trade-off we are making, and - just as importantly - ensure that all stakeholders are aware of it.

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Product peeps - who are you using for incentive payments based on product feedback? As in take a survey, get paid cash. Or, agree to an interview with our Pm and get cash. Or, provide a product review and get cash?

“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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A huge foundation for product success is for Product Managers to consistently reinforce the strategy all the way down to each technical team. This is certainly more challenging when there are multiple Agile/Scrum development teams contributing to the whole product. Additionally, it is vital to have a method for verifying that the message has been effectively communicated to every developer. This ensures alignment and clarity throughout the team, making it easier to focus on impactful outcomes. Thanks for sharing these insights and highlighting the Decision Stack framework by Martin Eriksson. It's a powerful tool for product leaders.

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So here in the UK it is election time. What if our new PM was a Product Manager? I have been exploring how to manage the most complex product organisations like a country or a big company. I would love to hear your thoughts. #Election #Elected #ProductManagement #PM

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We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩‍🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!

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Last week, I posted about how the "Tools" is the most important of the "People, Process, Tools". Let me tell you about some of my favorites: 1. Coda - If you've held a 30-minute conversation with me over the past few years, I've brought up Coda. It is quite literally my killer app, replacing most standard Excel, Word, and PowerPoint use cases, as well as Airtable, Notion, and more. It's excellent at turning something from a simple note all the way to a light app. If you aren't using it, you should be. 2. Vimcal - Throughout my career, I've been frustrated with juggling multiple calendars- personal calendars, work calendars, client calendars, etc. I've been dying for the right tool to give me visibility to them all at once. Enter Vimcal- it allows me to see all of my calendars at once, as well as create and send meetings for any of them. It even has Calendly- like features, allowing me to send a link for someone to book a meeting. 3. Loom - Want a tool that can reduce / eliminate meetings? Use Loom. The concept is simple: record yourself sharing your screen, and make that recording easy to share. I've used to replace update meetings, saving my stakeholders valuable time and energy. They even have AI features that create captions for your video, as well as a summary of your content. 4. Workona - Listen, a lot of our work nowadays can happen in-browser. How many times have you opened your browser and had 10+ tabs open? A messy browser is like a messy desk- you're going to have a harder time finding what you need. Workona allows you to quickly group, hide, and categorize your browser working sessions to have a cleaner, more organized work life. Deeper dives on all of these (and more) to come later 👀

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Normally I'm a huge, huge fan of John Cutler and his newsletter, which you *should* subscribe to if you want to learn how to be an effective dev or PM. However, his missive yesterday is off the mark. What he's observing is 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere. https://lnkd.in/gdCg3-VR #PMI #softwaredevelopment #productmanagement #agile

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Product managers, designers, engineers who are successful have an "impact transcending ability", according to Aleks Bass, M.A, Chief Product Officer of Typeform. Learn what she means by that in this short clip. The full conversation on the Product Leader's Journey pod is at: https://lnkd.in/gshXfyMx #productmanagement

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As a Product minded professional and fellow human; I think “product market fit” can mean a whole lot more then time, engaugment, or dollars spent on platform. Driving value for a user or customer can actually mean freeing them from using your platform. Think about it.

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This month's essay is on the topic of pathfinding through a solution space to complex products. I've often observed strong product teams adopt one of two approaches to exploring solution paths. One path being a "divergent" one to explore the bounds of tradeoffs as quickly as possible, to get clarity. The other path being a "convergent" one to deliver a hypothetical 'optimal' solution as efficiently as possible. Hint: there is no single perfect approach. I explore this idea more in the essay: Concave vs. convex pathfinding https://lnkd.in/g8jdETf2

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Delivery-focused. Execution-oriented. Not Strategic. Or (my new favorite internet slur) ZIRPM. In a startup context, getting stuff off the production line IS strategic (despite what the haters say). Here are a few reasons why: Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog: https://lnkd.in/dPDuKYQb

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Interviewing in Product? While much has changed, the fundamentals remain: ➡ Great product people think deeply, execute quickly, and communicate clearly. Tips for top tier product folks to stay anchored in their builder story. ✍ https://lnkd.in/gzf5rRkx

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Chief Product Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-Suite member: 2.5 years. In my recent interviews with Product Leaders, a common theme emerged - navigating a role under a non-technical Founder/CEO can be extremely challenging…but not impossible: CPOs that focused on educating their org about how product works, shared their vision and strategy constantly, and showcased how product metrics tied to clear ROI and customer value had longer tenures and better, more collaborative relationships with the rest of the organization > those who didn’t.

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