Daniel Pupius

Everything was late and the company was failing. Then we got introduced to ‘agile development’ that will solve all our problems. We were looking very puzzled - it was 2005. The new CTO said: “we’ll do everything the same way as today - just much-much faster“ (the company did not make it, but that's for another story) If we want to have different results - be different - It’s not enough to do the same thing, just better: we need to do things differently. This podcast is a great introduction to one possible way: https://lnkd.in/dHc6X8Qf ▶️ no large teams -> no large meetings -> no slow decisions ▶️ saying no to more things -> keeping the product simple -> don’t need a big team to just run it ▶️ no fixed promises -> no s̶i̶l̶l̶y̶ inaccurate estimates -> no end-of-project deathmarches The combination of an enforced cutoff time and flexible scope is the closest I found to the investment concept of stop-loss in engineering.

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The biggest mindset shift most senior PMs / Designers / Eng Mgrs / TLs who are building customer-facing products in midsized & large companies must make: Your main job is to make your product win. While it may seem like this Job # 1 should be obvious to all, it really isn’t. Here are some other leading contenders for Job # 1: - Main job is to make my manager happy - Main job is to make execs happy - Main job is to keep stakeholders happy - Main job is to keep team members happy - Main job is to build excellent systems - Main job is to get promoted - Main job is to launch as promised - Main job is to create user delight - Main job is to create customer value (some people LOVE saying this one) Now, I understand that we live in the real world and that there are “good reasons” why the above contenders are at least worthy of consideration. But I am saying what I am saying precisely because we live in the real world and because I think you should do your best to improve your odds of *long-term career success*. You see, as a passionate & ambitious product person who builds the mindset of making your product win as your Job # 1, you will do things & learn things that most of your other peers are not doing & learning. And by doing that over the long arc of your career, you will position yourself to reach closer to whatever is your optimal success potential. This is clearly not the only possible path and it may not be the right path for some / many (no single path can be). But it is at least worth considering if it seems to feel right to you. Most people spend years / decades in mid-sized & large companies and yet are never even told that this is an option they should consider for their long-term career success. If that is you, I want you to view this post just as a possibly helpful pointer. If it doesn’t resonate, that’s totally fine. But if it does resonate, you might over the long-term see yourself becoming a more competent, a more effective, and possibly even a more happy product person.

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Product Rockstars in tech....It's not about strategy. It's not about frameworks. To play big...it's about the soft skills. Yep....your EQ is critical to level up and lead. You need to master the human side of work.  Treating people with respect Understanding how to communicate Executive presence Managing politics (yep...,I said it) Treating people as human beings To level up in the world of tech....it's about the human game. #productmanagement #techleaders #womenintech Are you ready to level up into leadership? Are you ready to learn how to play the human game? Respond with 'yes' and I'll send you my E-Book on The Next Generation of Leadership in Product

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I love a good "drama", so when the guest post "In Defense of Feature Team Product Managers" by Ben Erez hit Lenny's Newsletter, I brought out my popcorns and was ready to dive in. When Marty Cagan released his article "Product Management Theater" in January, it definitely caused a stir in the product community, leading to Lenny's podcast with Marty on this topic. Marty has strong opinions on what makes a “real” PM. Having read Marty's books since I was a PM newbie, his work has been my guiding light, though it sometimes made me question if I fit his definition of a true PM. Ben Erez’s recent post was a breath of fresh air, counter to the popular narrative. He highlighted the value of feature teams, especially for CEOs with a clear product vision, and emphasized the crucial roles PMs play, whether on feature or empowered teams. I appreciate Lenny for bringing these #diverse perspectives to light. It’s easy to be influenced by thought leaders, but hearing different viewpoints helps us form our own opinions and decide what’s best for our unique circumstances. Hats off to Lenny for creating such an #inclusive space! - In defense of feature team product managers by Ben Erez: https://lnkd.in/gaGkSn6f - Product Management Theater by Marty Cagan: https://lnkd.in/gD36X2zU - Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky: https://lnkd.in/gWGpjX7g #productmanagement #diversity

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Hey rockstars. MASSIVE NEWS. I am hosting a COMPLIMENTARY LIVE session for Product Mgmt Rockstars to help you LAND an amazing product ROLE QUICKLY. We'll build your brand, show you how to stand out in the market, interview like a rockstar, and land the right job....quickly. We'll even do some LinkedIn reviews LIVE! When: May 7th-9th Time: 7pm ET / 4pm ET It's real content I have trained over 600+ product managers on. I would LOVE to see you there. Just comment LAND and I'll send you a registration link. LET's GO! #productmanagement

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Pressure-testing your product stories: A 7-step framework. There’s a lot of storytelling frameworks out there. But there’s not a lot of frameworks for testing your story. Ada Story spoke at Product Marketing Summit in London. She spoke about how she came across the context-testing QA framework that software developers use to put products through various settings and use cases to try to break them. She found it fascinating, and wondered... What if we could pressure test our messaging with that same level of discipline, baking it into our go-to-market strategy and messaging initiatives? So, she put together this version of context testing, drawing inspiration from the existing framework to make it useful for her team's messaging initiatives. A way to pressure test our stories. Think of it as a mental checklist for when you’re building messaging and stories in any format. 1. Lead with value 2. Own it 3. Define your category 4. Be bold 5. Sell it 6. Let data be your guide 7. Take your story out of context Break down of all 7 in the carousel.

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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Normally I'm a huge, huge fan of John Cutler and his newsletter, which you *should* subscribe to if you want to learn how to be an effective dev or PM. However, his missive yesterday is off the mark. What he's observing is 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere. https://lnkd.in/gdCg3-VR #PMI #softwaredevelopment #productmanagement #agile

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Arrival of ChatGPT has threatened the profession of QA in Customer Service. The people we work with were having to answer to Execs who said 'lets use AI to automate QA'. Technology tools were popping out of the woodworks saying 'hey, we can AutoQA your scorecard'. Heard this before? Vendors are over-promising and under-delivering in this aspect. Execs aren't in the details to know what is automatable vs. not. Both are signaling a message to QA teams - YOUR JOB DOESN'T MATTER. YOUR JOB IS SO SIMPLE A ROBOT CAN DO IT. 😥😥😥😥 And the worst part -> the story is backwards. Straight up wrong. QA Teams have never been more important in the age of AI. Why? B/c AI and LLMs take the average of what's out there and deliver the average result. Differentiation is built on nuance, specifics, details - which leads to UNIQUE insights that result in UNIQUE experiences. QA teams live in the details and deliver this when they are operating at their best. Leverage AI to super-charge QA teams to drive unique insights.

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Metrics come up all the time in talking about how to prove design systems value. The prevailing idea is that increasing adoption is the key to unlocking value. I disagree. I think it may be a part of success, but it is a bad way to express value. Here is why! Adoption is the kind of metric you get when you throw up your hands because you can't get the right data or you're more focused on building the design system than what you can build with it. It is the equivalent of "well, people seem to use it, so it must be great!" this can be fine if you're just starting out, but it doesn't tell you how your system is actually delivering value. Heck, NPS (which is also pretty imperfect), or a qualitative ask of product teams of "how valuable is the design system to your daily work?" or "what would change if the design system went away tomorrow?" is a better proxy for value than just "do people view some pages or login once a week?" Adoption can be pushed as a mandate. After seeing hundred of design systems up close, I can say definitively that high adoption doesn't differentiate between dream design systems and that 17 tool spaghetti monster that has documentation in Excel with hundreds of links to a private Git repo along with a 22 swim lane flowchart that you just... keep... scrolling... down. The only reason why adoption persists as a common metric is because even really bad design systems have the ability to generate significant value. So what's better? First, we need to hone in on the unit of repeatable value. This differs depending on the stated goal of the design system, but the vast majority of good design systems that operate at a significant scale are focused on how fast the organization can build products using the system (that's not the same as building components or designs in the system itself). At Knapsack, we tend to express this at this as cycle / iteration time from design to code across product teams that consume the design system -- either faster iterations or fewer iterations. We tend to focus on capacity because individual cycle velocity is often poorly understood and varies between product teams or disciplines. However, most teams have a fair handle on their capacity both for a single cycle and across a historical range of cycles. These can also be expressed easily as a relative percentage increase or decrease. It also accounts for a lot of secondary things (e.g. QA time) There is a goldilocks zone that consistently lands between 20 - 40% greater cycle capacity. For most of our customers, that's literally millions of dollars. If you're using adoption, you're not alone. We've heard time and again on the Design Systems Podcast that folks look at this metric ALL THE TIME as a measure of success, but it certainly doesn't paint the full picture, nor is it the north star for understanding value.

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Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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Andrew Chen puts into words what many product people have realized in the trenches. There is more to product decision making than data. Having taste, sometimes rebranded as "product sense", is something I've been leaning into. There's usually not any meaningful data at the earliest stages anyways, it's about a developing a vision informed by your depth of experience, your conversations with customers, and your differentiated view of the world. https://t.co/ZR3HFdfDX9

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Chief Product Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-Suite member: 2.5 years. In my recent interviews with Product Leaders, a common theme emerged - navigating a role under a non-technical Founder/CEO can be extremely challenging…but not impossible: CPOs that focused on educating their org about how product works, shared their vision and strategy constantly, and showcased how product metrics tied to clear ROI and customer value had longer tenures and better, more collaborative relationships with the rest of the organization > those who didn’t.

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As a product builder, one of my favorite concepts is Balaji Srinivasan's Idea maze (attached below). End users of a product only see the final decisions made. They don’t see every tradeoff the builders agonize over and the alternative universes that could’ve been. Great product are designed by builders that put an incredible amount of thought behind each decision. Steve jobs talks about a similar feeling in building the Mac. IMO this is the essence of finding product <> market fit, and makes a world of a difference in outcomes. For example, “video on the Internet” in the early 2000’s was an obvious emergent trend. But Youtube and Vimeo are very different products, and company outcomes. I think about this concept often for the market of “GTM signals” and "AI for Sales." It’s hot right now, many GTM teams are talking about using signals and AI, and there’s a wide diversity of products to choose from. Some tenured GTM operators gripe about how this is nothing new and it’s a renaming of age-old concepts like ABM, intent, B2B marketing, etc. There’s some truth to that and as a builder I’m always curious about the history of our space, but I also believe that AI (specifically LLMs) are unlocking new use cases that were previously not possible. So next time you see a new product in a confusing market, keep an open mind and see if it helps you accomplish something radically new. You could be looking at the next Youtube.

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If feedback is a gift, why does it keep punching us in the face? “Your test coverage didn’t grow as much as we asked, you should care about quality more.” “You should be be better prepared for our meeting.” “You should care enough about this company to pick up the phone when I call you at 7pm.” “Why so serious? Lighten up, you should smile more!” When you think about it: why do we feel the need to repeat this “feedback is a gift” mantra over and over again? If feedback is so obviously a gift, would it need to announce itself so explicitly, or are we just gaslighting ourselves? Slap in the face. “Ouch that hurts!” “No, no, it’s a gift!” Classic.

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Today's episode of the Skip Podcast focuses on Chief Product Officers and how the role has shifted in the past 12 months. Even if you aren't ready for the number one role or you work outside of product management, you'll find the advice by stage of company helpful if you are thinking through a transition. I also debunk a few myths about founding a company, as often people who are considering starting-up don't do it - but for the wrong reasons. https://lnkd.in/gJP48gPh

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Truly mature design systems are almost always looking to have fewer components and less complexity at their core. Let composability and inheritance (systems of systems) build on top of a core foundation. There is a budding "ecosystem" model for design systems that have a maturity / adoption curve we should be able to model.

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