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Product: How I Work

Philosophy & values


Product process

Product area vision & strategy

For a new product area:

  • Research market direction, organizational knowledge and hypotheses, customer opportunities (i.e. conduct user research), and product data
  • Organize customer insights into an evergreen opportunity tree
  • Map out a direction:
    • Why should/shouldn’t we invest in this area?
    • What end state are we targeting, for our customers and the business?
    • Which target audiences and opportunities should we address first and why?
    • How will we know we’re successful: what’s our North Star and supporting metrics?
    • What are some risks and assumptions we should account for when investing in this space? How can we manage and respond to this risk?
  • Course-correct the vision & strategy as we learn more by shipping solutions and listening to customers
Roadmapping
  • Focus in on an area of the customer opportunity tree that I prioritized in vision/strategy setting
  • Run some candidate opportunities-to-solve through the RICE prioritization framework
    • Often, I’ll modify this framework to suit the current realities of the organization
    • Frameworks are guides, not edicts. We might need to swap the order of initiatives. That’s expected, we just need to be able to articulate our choices.
  • Validate the quarterly plan with partners and stakeholders (engineering partners, Sales, Support, leadership, etc.)
  • Adjust plans based on any important insights gleaned from reviews
Product development lifecycle
  • Discovery: gather any additional customer insights and requirements need to crisp up our understanding of the opportunity space
  • Solution refinement:
    • Create a stub PRD (product requirements doc) with the customer opportunity set and a plan for key success metrics
    • Run a cross-functional solution ideation session against our customer opportunities, and select a set of solutions/experiments
    • Build out the PRD with selected solutions, broken down into milestones of discrete, deliverable user value
  • Design:
    • Work with designers on mocks and review engineers’ technical design docs
    • Validate the direction with customers. Which strategy to use depends on the project:
      • Showing design prototypes to hand-selected customers to validate functional requirements
      • Running an unmoderated usability study to see how successful and efficient users might be with a given task
      • Shipping betas quickly and learning from customers’ hands-on use
    • Collaborate with product marketing (PMM) on naming and framing
  • Execution:
    • Craft a data/observability plan
    • Support engineers on any product/functionality questions; review pull requests
    • Coordinate with a docs writer on product documentation
    • Create a manual testing plan and test the feature along with other contributors
    • Help prioritize any issues uncovered
    • With engineering, confirm compliance with fundamentals (accessibility, security/privacy previews, SLO definition, etc.)
  • Release:
    • Work with partners on a go-to-market strategy
    • With engineering and PMM, create Support training and Sales enablement materials
    • Implement any feedback mechanisms
    • Write public messaging (blog post, forum post)
    • Write SQL queries and confirm data dashboards are ready to go
    • Schedule a launch party and release the solution! Bonus points if we assign someone to pick some launch tunes 🎶
  • Post-release:
    • Monitor customer feedback and prioritize any followups
    • Review progress against feature success metrics at regular intervals
    • Use the above insights to define next steps and iterate on the solution space

Special interests


Skills

  • Accessibility
  • API design
  • Competitive analysis
  • Cross-organizational collaboration
  • Customer research & discovery
  • Data analysis
  • Data-driven decision making
  • Experimentation
  • Leading cross-functional execution teams
  • Market research
  • Open source
  • Product messaging and sales enablement
  • Product metrics
  • Product vision & strategy
  • Project management
  • Public speaking
  • Risk management
  • Roadmap development
  • Stakeholder management
  • Technical writing
  • UX/UI design (I was a designer first!)
  • Web development
  • Web standards

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