Building-Products-and-Startups-OKRs.md

Building Products and Startups

As a leader of a product development team you might have a PM that you’re working with, but some of your role will involve deciding how/when product is built, who builds what, etc. So you’ll need to level up your product skills.

• After 15 Years as a Product Leader, CEO and Now VC, Here’s the Advice I Always Share with Future Founders - by FirstRound Capital. Takeaway: Todd Jackson (former product manager of Gmail, among other credentials) on how "[b]uilding really high-quality products takes an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes discipline, especially as your team grows." He also advises to protect quality and the user experience, and to take a site reliability engineering approach.

• Aligning Projects with Business Goals - by Anthony Eden. Provides a simple project management spreadsheet of six questions: 1) What is the problem we are trying to solve?; 2) What does success look like, and how does it fit in the big picture?; 3) What are the MUST DO and the MUST NOT DO items?; 4) What is the deadline?; 5) Who should I talk to for help and get feedback?; 6) Have we done this before? Something we already have to get started?

• Am I a Product Manager or a Product Owner? Part 1: Confusion Abounds - by Ellen Gottesdiener. Takeaway: a five-part article series on differentiating the roles, with lots of keen insights and explanations. Part 2: Part 2: 5 Ways to Untangle the Mess.

• From Apathy to Autonomy (video) - by Darko Zelić. Takeaway: You don't have to go full-corporate as you scale up; in this Lead Dev Amsterdam talk, Zelić tells you how.

• The Art of Project Management - notes by Joe Golberg about Scott Berkun's book.

• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything - by Joe Goldberg. Notes about the book by Guy Kawasaki.

• Blue Ocean Strategy - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

• The Bootstrapper’s Bible - Joe Goldberg's notes about the book by Seth Godin.

• Designing Workshops that Work: Getting Better at Brainstorming - by Cindy Chang. Takeaway: Start with an overview, work backwards and think in chunks to start a plan as well as about outcomes, detail, delegate.

• Do the Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram - by Harry McCracken. Takeaway: Instagram founders made technical decisions using a principle which favored practicality over perfection. "If it solves a problem and gets us closer to launch, let’s do it."

• Everyone Forgets Technical Research - by Product Habits. Takeaway: Offers a step-by-step template for creating a 1-3 page technical research outline that will enable product leads to communicate plans more effectively with developers, who can then better do the research on their side required to build a product successfully. "The outline should be a short summary of what you’re looking to create, including required features and functionality. You should also provide guidance on what matters most to you (and customers). What’s the core problem you’re looking to solve, and how do you plan to solve it? What are the most important parts of what you’re building?"

• Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No - by Jessica Kerr. Takeaway: An exploration of what tools are Low-Risk (local developer utilities), Moderate Risk 1 (deployment infrastructure), Moderate Risk 2 (programming language), and serious risk (database). “When you do accept a technology into your stack, make sure it has an owner. Spread knowledge through pairing, documentation, and communication. Make responsibility explicit and set aside time for maintenance, upgrades, and reassessment. The right technology today will be the wrong technology at some point.”

• Growth Hacking Notebook - notes by Joe Goldberg.

• Here's How to De-Risk Your Product Strategy - by Jeff Gothelf. Takeaway: Strategic planning involves three questions: who’s the target market, what’s the value proposition, and what's your Key Result.

• How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes (slides) - by Teresa Torres. Takeaway: A detailed look at how to bring focus to product decisions, including suggested tools like the "opportunity solution tree."

• How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business – Phase 1: 🐣 Crack the Chicken-and-Egg Problem (Part 1/4) - by Lenny Rachitsky. Takeaway: insights from Airbnb, DoorDash, Thumbtack, Etsy, Uber and other companies on how to scale a marketplace. Crack the chicken-and-egg problem, scale your marketplace, then evolve it.

• How to Make Things High-Quality - by Julie Zhuo. Takeaway: "When you get into a TTBQT ('The Tradeoff Between Quality and Time') state, the real question to ask is: 'If we knew X would take this long to get to high-quality, would we have opted to do it in the first place?'”

• How New Startups Can Win at PR — Advice from a 20-Year Comms Career - by FirstRound. Takeaway: Terra Carmichael, VP of Global Communications at Eventbrite, offers tips on attracting media coverage.

• How to Sell the Problem Before Selling the Solution - by David Bailey. Takeaway: Tactical ways to express customer needs and "lead with the need."

• Hypergrowth and The Law of Startup Physics - by FirstRound Capital. Takeaway: "The law of startup physics: humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially."

• In Praise of SWARMing - by Dan North. Takeaway: "I am offering a new acronym, SWARMing: Scaling Without A Religious Methodology. My argument isn’t that packaged scaling methods are unhelpful per se, rather that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for successful transformation. They can be anything from a useful starting point to an expensive distraction, but one thing they are not is a solution."

• Informal Doesn't Scale - by Jim Grey. Takeaway: "People sometimes fetishize startup smallness. It feels so good! But clinging to it will limit your growth trajectory. Like the overgrown fly, lack of process will crush your company. You need to change your ways of working to fit the company’s size. But this doesn’t have to be terrible. It totally can be terrible, if you do it wrong. Even if you do it right, it will change and even get rid of some of your company’s original goodness. But it enables new levels of goodness that you can’t imagine yet."

• Key Learnings in My First Year as a PM at Amazon - by Venkatraman Prabhu. Takeaway: Lessons learned after a year at the global retailer. Choose the right manager, always measure the product's impact, keep experimenting, have weekly 1:1's with key stakeholders, and get advice.

• Knowns vs Unknowns — Are You Building a Successful Company or Just Typing? - by Aaron Batalion. Takeaway: “You’re probably not the only one in the world with your idea, but if you focus the best people in the room on only the known unknowns, you’ll have a much better shot at winning.”

• Lean-Agile Product Management - by Jez Humble. Takeaway: the course website from Humble's class at UC Berkeley, with syllabus and resources that cover the product lifecycle, team-building, and other key topics. Includes lots of links to talks/articles/etc. that you might also find linked to here.

• Lean Startup - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Eric Ries.

• LeanStartup.com - based on the book. Offers an e-newsletter.

• Little Red Book Of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Jeffrey Gitomer.

• The MVP is dead. Long live the RAT. - by Rik Higham. Takeaway: "There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it. Replacing your MVP with a RAT will save you a lot of pain."

• Notes from “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy” - by Jeff Zych. Takeaway: a focused overview of the book by UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Richard P. Rumelt. “Strategy is designing a way to deal with a challenge. A good strategy, therefore, must identify the challenge to be overcome, and design a way to overcome it. To do that, the kernel of a good strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.” Includes some critical thoughts on OKRs.

• Observations on Product Management - by Dan Hill. Takeaway: "Most Product Managers (and everyone probably) spend too little time thinking about how to solve a problem. They jump straight into solving it. Problems come in different shapes, and not all need the same process. The process that shipped the last product is unlikely to be the one that you need for the next...Incremental development and vision are not orthogonal; they both require the other. All product must start with a vision — a point of view — but then be built critically step by step. It’s ok to learn something new as you go."

• The Only Metric That Matters — Now With Fancy Slides! - by Josh Elman at Greylock Partners. Takeaway: "[T]he only thing founders need to think about is: Are people using your product? Are they using it how you expect (i.e performing the core action)? And, are they performing the core action at the frequency you expect?"

• The Product Dartboard - by Janet Brunckhorst at Carbon Five. Takeaway: offers a deep dive/description of a tool that assesses a team or individual against attributes associated with project success.

• Product Discovery Anti-Patterns Leading to Failure - by Stefan Wolpers. Takeaway: "The main contributing variables to various product discovery anti-patterns are: * Existing organizational dysfunctions, for example, the organization is structured in functional silos; * A substantial degree of ego issues among individual players—the what-is-in-for-me-syndrome—resulting in personal agendas being pursued; * A complex, multi-layered reporting structure within organizations that filters as well as delays the flow of information, thus impeding communication and decision-making."

• Product Manager vs. Product Owner - by Melissa Perri. Takeaway: "A good Product Manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear outcome oriented goals, how to discover and validate real customer and business value, and what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty that the product will succeed in market. Without this background in Product Management, someone can effectively go through the motions of Product Owner role in Scrum, but they can never be successful in making sure they are building the right thing."

• The Product Manager Superpower: User Science - by Brent Tworetzky. Takeaway: "While finding the perfect user-product fit is rarely easy, trained product managers can find great fits consistently with User Science–the field of deeply understanding people interacting with products through rigorous toolings and process. User science involves understanding both user needs (identifying which problem to solve) and user behaviors (understanding how and why users react to products). This distinction is important: winning products need both a meaningful problem to solve and strong execution."

• Product Strategy Means Saying No - by Intercom. Takeaways: Review common reasons for making product decisions and ask whether they are actually good for the product.

• Reminder: Your “Product” Company is Just an Implementation Detail - by Jeremy Baker. Takeaway: The progress our customer wants to make is the most important thing. We think about our features and what they can do, and present them that way. When we do this, we’re "forcing our customer to do the hard work. They have to map features to their process and figure out if it helps them make progress ... Instead, talk about the progress our customer wants to make, and build tools that enable that progress."

• Risk Assessment and Prioritization for Startups - by Leo Polovets. Takeaway: a slide deck about the value of addressing risks head-on, and early. Includes self-assessment tips.

• Scaling Airbnb with Brian Chesky — Class 18 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C - by Chris McCann. Takeaway: about Airbnb’s “10 star service” thought experiment, in which they transcended the usual five-star review by adding five more measurements for success.

• The Scrum Product Owner Theses - by Stefan Wolpers. Not necessarily tied to the Scrum agile framework, this list of 56 "theses" addresses the PO's role; examines product discovery and stakeholder management; roadmap planning, and more.

• The Shortest Path Is the Scariest - by Omri Ben Shitrit. Takeaway: "To be good at execution ... Continuously identify the next most important problem we should be solving for our customers. We’ve written about this in the past. Understand (roughly) the cost and benefit of solving the problem, and our confidence level in both side of the equation. Find the optimal set of tradeoffs between product scope and engineering costs in solving the problem."

• Think Like a Founder - by Jothy Rosenberg. In "Think Like a Founder: Anecdotes of an incorrigible entrepreneur" Jothy tells stories from his decades in business that will give guidance, insight, and inspiration to anyone who’s ever thought of founding or running a company.

• To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO - by First Round. Takeaway: "There’s a list of questions companies should ask themselves as they head into rapid growth — ideally in that relatively brief moment right after clinching product-market fit." The post provides these questions, to help you become less reactive and more proactive in managing your growth.

• Transforming from Projects to Products - by John Yorke. Takeaway: "Agile Transformation means thinking of Products rather than Projects. Agile is a Mindset not a set of rules to be followed. It requires a cultural change not a process change. Agile changes the way we measure project success and how we measure people's behaviour. Change is Hard. Project Management and People Management are those that need to change the most."

• The Ultimate Question - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Fred Reichheld, which focuses on measurements like the net promoter score (NPS).

• Veteran CTO (with Multiple Successful Exits) Answers Your Top Startup-Building Questions - by FirstRound. Takeaway: an interview with/profile of Adil Ajmal, CTO of LendingHome, who has scaled up teams at seven tech organizations. He covers topics ranging from interviewing to hiring a VP Product.

• What Happens When Startups Turn from Their Innovation Stage to Operational Excellence? - by Mark Suster. Takeaway: "Startups are fun and exhilarating and filled with challenging problems to solve. To the neophyte it seems like startup challenges are strictly product or technical in nature but to innovate, systematize and scale a billion dollar company it involves way more decisions about strategy, economics, resource allocations and team composition."

• When, Which...Design Thinking, Lean, Design Sprint, Agile? - by Geert Claes. Takeaway: “It probably makes more sense to just look at Design Thinking, Lean, Design Sprint & Agile as a bunch of tools and techniques in one’s toolbox, rather than argue for one over the other, because they can all add value somewhere on the innovation spectrum.”

• Why Software Sucks - by Scott Berkun. Good ways to think about why it happens and what you can do to make it happen less.

OKRs

• All About OKRs: How To Set Them, Achieve Them, And Track Them In Trello - by Kevan Lee. Takeaway: A concise and clear description of what OKRs are and how to create them (i.e., for both productivity as well as agile/cultural reasons).

• Applying OKRs - by Dan North. Takeaway: Insights from Dan about working with companies applying Objectives and Key Results; do's and dont's.

• Awesome-OKR - by Domenico Solazzo. Takeaway: an Awesome List of OKR-related decks, articles and videos.

• Beyond OKRs: The Formula for High Performing Teams (video) - by Christina Wodtke. Takeaway: the creator of Radical Focus talks about different kinds of teams, team-building, experiential learning, and more.

• Learn OKR - by Felipe Castro. Takeaway: A comprehensive resource of information on how to create and plan to OKRs. Includes a link to a free, downloadable book.

• OKRs - by Eleganthack. Takeaway: articles on personal OKRs, "one objective to rule them all," and miscellaneous resources.

• OKRs.com - by Ben Lamorte. Takeaway: a resource for anyone using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or considering using OKRs to make measurable progress on their most important goals at work.

• Set Goals with OKRs - by re:Work. Takeaway: a step-by-step guide to creating, developing and grading OKRs.

• Why OKRs Are Not Delivering the Result Executive Managers Expect - by Veronika Goncalves. Takeaway: "In many cases, when organizations apply OKRs, they apply the process the in the same format as Management by Objectives: using a Top-Down Approach. But this format does not create value for the organization because the top managers do not understand what the customer’s real problems are. When defining the objectives, they are usually not in alignment with the company’s current reality." Also, OKRs might not be the right framework for every company; consider options like agile portfolio management.