Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.
Last week, PM Fast Track hosted Mihir Nanavati of Tradeshift; he spoke to about two dozen people. It was great for those who attended: first it was a fabulous talk about applied lean principles in an enterprise setting, and two, we had some of the highest hosting PMs to attendee ratio ever (which makes for a great networking event for job seekers).
Tradeshift asked us not to share the talk, lest all of their hard work go down the drain, but some of the biggest takeaways for me were thinking about how to bring down the cycle time in Build Measure and Learn lean triad. Another impression I had was how much enterprise sales intersects with enterprise PM responsibilities. And applicable to all product managers, Mihir talked about zealous focus, and the challenge of prioritization:
“How do you prioritize, in a way that you deliver results?”
Those topics also got me thinking about the product management practices shared by other enterprise product leaders, like Yammer, Atlassian, and Zendesk.
Did you know you can submit your Medium posts on product management to PM Fast Track Medium Collection?
Questions? Suggetions? Email us: productloverssf@gmail.com.
Ryan Braastad, Yammer
This post points to the importance of focus, especially in an enterprise development cycle where the feedback loops may not be as cheap as in consumer-oriented product context. Mirroring Lean mantra “build, measure, learn,” Yammer’s Senior Manager of Enterprise Strategy Ryan Braastad talks about how Yammer remove features in its cycle of build, break, repeat.
“As hard as we try to only build things that are useful for everyone, sometimes needs change, priorities change, and users change. So we change.” Read more.
Demis Bellot
Interesting perspective, because it is shared by an enterprise developer now working on a consumer product. Demis shares some useful side-by-side comparisons. Read more.
Matt Bond, Atlassian
Granted this is written from the design team perspective, but I thought the march toward a unified vision, and a common conventions that would aid in communicating decisions is pretty awesome. Does your product team have a product toolkit that borrows from these insights? Maybe you should check with your design team.
“Our design team had worked hard on a unified design vision for our products. What we hadn’t worked out was how we’d be able to communicate all the decisions we’d made to the wider company for implementation across our product suite.” Read more.
Dan Olsen
“Dan discusses how to apply Lean Startup principles as a product person.”
Video
Slides
Accompanying slides: How to be a Lean Product Ninja.
Other
What are you reading? Please share it with the community. Or would you like to propose a meetup idea?
Silicon Valley and SF
June 18: Building great products using the insights of irrationality at Yelp.
July 22: Product Management Meetup at Yammer.
July 30: UX Night: Emotional Design - with Marissa Louie. ($15)
Ian Kennedy's recap of ProductSF 2014.
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