Black box of PM Podcast: Season 01, Episode 01 — tap tap tap… is this thing on? It’s been three years since I’ve last written, and I’m happy to share that I’m going to be — slowly at first — writing and creating again. …

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions. Here’s an example: the Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of all outputs comes from 20% of the effort. In the context of…

If the craft of Product Management is often mired in ambiguity, managing product managers is ambiguity². When you start managing PMs for the first time, you are forced up a steeper managerial learning curve than in other functions. This is because the average PM you may manage is already quite…

Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles. A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”. An example of one that we use for our developer platform team are that “all platform…

While product managers may not build the actual product, they do produce something very tangible for a team: decisions. July 23 update: in retrospect and from feedback, this framework applies to any role, not just product management. These decisions can be about anything: small ones like a line of copy…

For as long as I’ve been working in tech I’ve heard this oscillating debate about the use of deadlines in projects, with particularly strong opinions from those against them: “I don’t believe in deadlines. They are bullshit created by (predominantly business) people who don’t understand how hard it is to…

All high functioning teams must prioritize. Not once a month, not once a week — but rigorously, and ruthlessly. — Prioritization means doing the things that are most important first. If you build products, it means doing the things that create the most customer value first. In my experience, the craft of making prioritization decisions is one of the most difficult skills to impart on teams because of how complex…

I get every new PM I manage to read (or re-read) High Output Management by Andy Grove within the first month of joining my team. It’s a timeless, no bullshit overview of what a manager is and how to think about being one. …

We just enabled 325,000 merchants to sell in messaging, without building a bot. — Our team at Shopify has been working on “conversational commerce” for about year now. On Oct 5th, we launched the ability for hundreds of thousands of Shopify merchants to get their products into chat threads and sell directly to their customers through Facebook Messenger. Check it out: