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FOCUS MAINTAINING in Product Management

The ultimate guide to maintaining product focus

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FOCUSMAINTAINING

in Product Management

We’ve got a recipe for maintaining focus.

Here’s what it consists of…

things

1) Align your team to your product roadmap

2) Spend less time in meetings

3) Have a process for deciding what to build next

1

Team alignment(with a fast paced roadmap)

OKRs

OKR

bjectives

ey

esults

Here’s an example of an OKR:

Objective: Get better at project management.Key results:ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.

Q2 OKRs

Objective:project management.Key results: 90% of features ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.

Q2 OKRs

Objective: Get better at project management.Key results: 90% of features ship on time. Product update X shipped. 100% of team don’t quit.

Q2 OKRs

OKRs ensure team is aligned with company direction.

Set OKRs quarterly. Company & Individual OKRs are critical. REVIEW them.

Developers

It can be hard to predict how long development projects are going to take.

It’s like planning a walk from San Francisco to LA…

http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3

Beuncomfortablyopenwith metrics

Share the metrics that matter. Not just the ones that are easy to share.

Recap

Team alignment

Budget projects with time

Be open + transparent with metrics

Set OKRs every quarter (this takes practice)

2

Spend more time buildingLess time meeting

FACT: Developers don’t like meetings

FACT: (most)

People don’t like meetings

Here’s what we do…

StandupsMonday morning

Friday afternoon

On Monday mornings we have a one hour meeting to plan the upcoming week.

StandupsMonday morning

Friday afternoon

Every day we do a quick standup catchup – everyone says what they are working on and if they are blocked by anything.

StandupsMonday morning

Friday afternoon

Friday afternoons we catch up over a beer to round off the week. We demo what we completed and show the team how much awesome we have added.

Internal tools set culture

We use Slack for team collaboration and communication. It rocks.

We also use many other tools. Things like Recurly, Trello, Sequel Pro, and GitHub make our lives a lot easier.

We also use GoSquared a lot for understanding what our customers are up to.

Recap

Spend less time in meetings

Fewer but better meetings

Internal tools set the culture

The right amount of process

3

Deciding what to build next

Feature requests come fromcustomers

Feature requests come fromcustomers

AND your team

Keep trackHave a process

A lack of ideas

A lack of ideasis rarely the problem

Focus is about handling requests like…

Can’t we just…

No

It’ll only take a few minutes to…

No

It shouldn’t be too hard to…

No

If you don’t say “no” to enough feature requests your product will end up looking like…

http://tomtunguz.com/series-a-overloaded/

And that doesn’t look terribly comfortable.

Funnily enough, a small company called Apple put it rather well in a beautiful animation they made.

there are a thousand no’s for every yes

Another trick we learned…

Write the press release first

It’s the best way to align everyone on the team with what you expect from the end result of the product.

Recap

Deciding what to build next

Say no before it gets into the product

Write the press release first

Process for handling feature requests

Align team to roadmap

Spend less time in meetings

Know what to build next

The GoSquared Team

Maintaining Focus in Product Management

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