My mentor recently sent me this slidedeck from Josh Elman. I had some takeaways…

  • The most important thing you do is document decisions. Follow-up notes usually take longer than actual meetings
  • Talk often about the bigger vision of the company
  • Identify metrics to demonstrate impact
  • Communicate often the value target the product delivers to users

…which led to a pretty interesting conversation about Product Management.

It is the PM’s job to aggregate, study, distill and understand the needs of the users.  The more effective you are in making clear what the problem to solve is, the better the team is at solving it.  Product insight and market awareness is key.

Ask your team, what can I do to make your life easier? Everyone on the team should understand what is important, what isn’t important, what the guiding principles are, and what key tradeoffs are being made.

The mark of a great PM is that the team should understand what they are doing well enough that if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, the team still ships a great product. Find some chaos, make order out of chaos, make yourself unnecessary, then go find some more chaos.

Think about your own personal goals: What is one thing you do really well that you want to continue to do? How are you going to stay in the habit of doing that? What is one thing you need to improve at? What steps are you going to take to get better, and how are you going to measure your progress?