the ultimate guide to maintaining product focus
DESCRIPTION
3 key principles for maintaining focus when creating a product in a team of developers and designers. Originally presented at ProductTank in London in May 2014.TRANSCRIPT
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
See this Quora post. It’s awesome.
Awesome Quora Post
Try budgeting time
(rather than estimating it)
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.
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…
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
Watch the video. Get inspired.
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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