5 reflections on technology from 2018 –
1. Tech has far outgrown tech. I recently came across the origin story of “ThirdLove.” Heidi Zak, a Marketing Manager at Google, was tired of wearing undergarments that didn’t fit. She was also tired of the sexed up images that came with brands like Victoria’s Secret. So, she started ThirdLove.com to build a more inclusive bra and underwear brand, has grown ThirdLove to 250+ employees, and raised $13.4M along the way. And, as ThirdLove is an e-commerce brand, ThirdLove is considered a “tech startup.”
I remember a discussion with Disqus co-founder Daniel Ha where he made the point that companies which were founded around the time electricity became mainstream called themselves “electric” companies (e.g. General Electric). Over time, however, every company began using electricity and, thus, electricity became a foundation layer. …
A product manager brings a team of cross functional stakeholders together to build a product that is valuable, usable, feasible.
This definition builds on Marty Cagan’s articulation of product management by explicitly calling out the role of the product manager in bringing a team together. …
“What is a day in the life of <insert role you’d like to learn more about>?” is a common question when you’re looking to learn more about a role in a particular company. It is a surprisingly powerful question as you aren’t expecting the person on the other side to open their calendar and rattle out their schedule for the day.
Instead, the question behind the question often tends to be — “What are the skills required to do what you do?” That turns out to be a difficult question to answer because the skills required to a job well are rarely covered on the job description. And, my journey to understanding the skills required for my job as an IC/individual contributor Product Manager involved drawing extensively on the 3 sources of learning — books/synthesized information, conversations with other product managers, and my own experiences — to map out the product creation machine and the skills required for each phase. …
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