A] Here’s what I say: It’s my job to make a product better so that it makes more money for the company and it’s a better experience for the user.
I’ll use any product that I have around as an example. Usually a shoe or a phone case.
I tell them that I want to change the grip on the phone case or the color. I asked people who bought the case before if they think is a good color change or good grip change, and the people who I want to buy it I asked them as well. Everybody agrees that purple is the best color. I send those requests over to the people who build phone cases. By the time the people who build a case make the changes. I would have already made a commercial, to tell everybody about the color changes. Then we hope that the phone case sells more cases than it did last year.
That’s how I explain it. My job is to make the company more money by making the product better for the people who buy it.
– Lawrence
B] I’d tell it like:
Say my company has a goal to increase phone sales by 15% this year. It’s my job to interview phone users with my team and understand what problems we might solve to drive sales. Now say we discover the phone is difficult to hold and unappealing. Members of my team take a crack at those problems and I’m responsible for making sure their ideas are actually going to increase sales for us before we start mass-producing them.
Say that through testing we discover that a phone back that’s purple and more narrow test the best; I work with the development side to get those phones built and with marketing, sales, and other internal teams to make sure they have the info they need to successfully launch and support the new phone.
– Rob
C] My company builds software but I’m not a developer, I don’t code. My job is to find out what to build next. I find out what other companies are doing, find out what our customers need, and build out a list of things that will make the company the most money in the shortest period. Then I work with the team to build it.
– Juan
D] I manage a team of people who manage teams of people who build software things, all the while vacillating wildly between feeling super empathetic to my team when they complain and asking for help when things don’t go perfectly (which is constantly) and wishing they would toughen the heck up and batter down doors and figure some shit out for themselves like I had to and suddenly understand why people don’t take a chance on new PMs because it’s so, so, so hard to bring even good ones up to speed, then feel like a total shitbag for feeling that because my job is to enable them and I knew what I was signing up for rather than building products anymore, then I feel it again the next day anyway and wish for the fiftieth time I went Principal instead.
I’m almost a year into this company as a PM and need your opinion/advice on this. Is telling my manager I feel pressured at work a bad thing?
When I talked with my manager about personal/professional goals, I communicated that I wanted to have a better work/life balance. Not sure if I screwed up since this can give the impression that I “can’t handle more responsibilities”, which is not what I meant. I just worried about how to handle this.
– Risa
Discussion
A] If you’re in a work environment where you’re feeling the pressure already, leveling up may mean more pressure. Work doesn’t need to feel like pressure but, likely, you will always feel like that in that environment unless you’re able to change how you feel about it.
To be super duper frank, telling someone you feel under pressure and need more work-life balance doesn’t exactly scream ‘Put me in a leadership position’ – that being said, if you can work with your manager to build a solution where you are equally or more productive, you feel less pressured, and you have a better work/life balance and your manager is happy too then it will reflect well on you.
The gap between the two is how you go about articulating the problem and designing the solution together.
– Priya
B] I’m not sure what your company’s growth is like right now, but one successful way I’ve seen people handle this kind of scenario is by presenting a hiring plan. Put together the roles you think would need to be added to support and grow the product sustainably – whether that means more product managers, or you need some kind of ops role or product marketing, some additional QA solution, etc.
If hiring is a total non-starter in this case, it might not be the best move, but in general, I think it shows that you’re thinking strategically about the product, and hopefully also showing how you’re prepared to show some leadership (i.e. if some/all of these new roles would be reporting to you).
– Naomi
C] How well do you know your manager? Guessing what his reaction going to be will help craft your communication. And I think this also depends on the work culture in your organization. Some companies do promote work/life balance to be more sustainable and increase overall productivity. Some others just looking at who stays up to reply to emails/slack at late night.
I am a PO for a risk management app. We have built the app from the ground up and our users are using it pretty happily. The sponsoring business has also said that their needs are fulfilled and has no time and money appetite for further big changes to the app. And further change is not necessary.
My question is, in your organization, what happens to the product once a product roadmap is not required? Do you continue to ‘look after it or hand it over to some other team?
– Rob
Discussion
A]Uber on day 1: “Holy mackerel I can get someone to pick me up from anywhere through my phone!”
Uber on day 1000: “The drive was slightly bumpy and the driver had a weird mustache. 1 star”
User satisfaction always deteriorates. You can’t just hang up the roadmap and leave it. Either improve it or delete it.
– Juan
B] In this scenario, the app goes into maintenance mode. You won’t need to maintain an exclusive roadmap for the app but the app maintenance will fall into another roadmap of some description and managed via that but it might just be “bug fixes” that appear on the said roadmap. Or perhaps they’ll fall into a tech debt bucket.
Either way, I suspect you’ll still “own” the app/product so not sure who you’d hand it over to. Is there another team that could pick up the maintenance?
– Rohit
C] At a minimum you’ll need some kind of resources to maintain it in the future:
iOS/android updates & support
other library/dependency updates
security updates
bug fixes when found
app store management
– Nathan
D] Products are like babies, once you give birth to them, they forever require constant attention and love until they die. And just like parents, the best group to provide support for a product is the group that gave it life.
That might be L2/L3 support, with L1 support coming from a shared customer support team.
Hope that makes sense.
SQL stands for Structured Query Language, but that’s a misnomer; SQL isn’t a programming language like Javascript or Python. It’s a standard (like a blueprint) for how to query data, sort of like directions for building a language. Each database like PostgreSQL or MySQL has its own lil’ flavor of SQL, and that’s what’s more analogous to a language. So the specific syntax of how you write SQL depends on which database you’re using.
Applications are just a bunch of functions that get things done: APIs wrap those functions in easy-to-use interfaces so you can work with them without being an expert. Let’s start with an example. If you’re an e-commerce company, there are a bunch of things you need to get done internally that power your site.
When a team of engineers builds an application, it’s just a bunch of code. And that code needs to run somewhere for users to access it and get value out of it. During development, developers tend to run that code on their personal computers, but that’s not scalable – so when they’re ready to share the software with the world, they’ll put that code on big powerful servers, and let people access it via a domain name.
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