What to Do When Product Growth Stalls 9 minutes read.
This is an excellent post by Andrew Chen for everyone who builds products (mostly external products, but also helpful mindset and practices for internal products). Product Managers and Marketing folks have the intuition and numbers, at least most of them. I find that software engineers need to learn the tools and benchmarks to figure out how to become good partners with their peers when experimenting with ideas. This one is golden: "Admit it when people don’t want your product. There’s an ugly truth that when most products are put under a microscope, most of them simply don’t have the retention to sustain growth over time — this is pouring water into a leaky bucket."
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Manager of Managers — Outcomes Over Output 4 minutes read.
The reason that senior managers need to focus on outcomes is the outlook perspective. Nobody cares about what you did, only about themselves. So, your customers care about your product's impact on their lives. To stay closer to the output, this is excellent advice: "I have found a few techniques helpful in keeping me plugged in: participating in demos, architecture reviews, product reviews, etc. Other ways I’ve kept up are through PR reviews, metric dashboards, sprint reports, 1:1s, release notes, etc. Doing the above, you will inevitably find a deficiency. What you don’t want to do is undercut the people running your teams. You want to help, but not fix things yourself. Doing so, would certainly steal away coaching opportunities from those managers."
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