Product Management — Frameworks, Tactics, and Principles

1. Key Product Principles:

• Produce > Process > Impress
• Persistent Models vs. Point-In-Time Goals
• 80/20
• Values-driven
• Try to be in your zone of genius
• Don’t add your 2c
• Chief Question Officer
• Avoid Certainty Theater
• The Manager as Debugger
• Speak For Yourself
• Curators & Editors
• Recommend, don’t ask
• Leadership as a Performing Art
• Focus + Momentum = Magic
• Pass the Orange test
• Truth Seeker
• Bias for action
• Have backbone
• Simplify
• Over-communicate
• Energy curator
• Culture of high performance
• Insist on the Highest Standards
• Consistency
• Strong opinion weakly held
• First-principles
• Take extreme ownership
• Best things are taken, not given
• Do all 3: Produce, Arrange, Impress
• Lazy leadership
• Fill the shoes before changing the shoes
• Nobody Cares
• Authority derives from merit
• Avoid success theater
• Product rigor over Communication rigor
• Create urgency, not panic
• Amp It Up!
• Leader as a coach
• Intentional
• Internal then external

2. Product Development, Research and Design:

• Super normal
• The pyramid of clarity
• Work backwards
• Data informed, not driven
• Focus on velocity, not speed
• Design sprints
• 10X
• Create a Perfect slice of cake without much dressing
• Frontloaded, not backloaded
• Anxiety reduction
• Start with a cupcake
• Avoid your cupcake from becoming a wedding cake
• Avoid broken windows
• Tiny details
• Have an empty chair
• Don’t push those untested changes on Production
• Push > Pull
• 10X Your Business
• Beware of small, rare problems
• Avoid next feature fallacy
• Done is better than perfect
• Design an 11-star experience
• Macro vs micro
• Be outcome thinkers
• Quick feedback Real customers (QFRC)
• Get one thing right first
• Focus on core
• Be proactive, not reactive
• Write science fiction, then make it a reality
• Best products cut through a straight line
• Out of sight, out of mind
• Don’t do pretend research
• Know if your actual process follows what is written process
• To iterate, first ship
• Product development is a set of sliders
• FWhat’s not going to change in the next 10–20 years
• Design products assuming positive behavior, have systems tackle bad behavior
• Hooked model
• Public channels vs Private DMs
• Do a pre-mortem
• Do a post-mortem
• Have a DRI
• Settings need not be part of your MVP
• Product is like a function
• Short term impatient, long term patient
• Opportunity solution tree
• Understand 2nd order effects; Chesterton’s Fence
• Adjust your levers, dials, and Pulleys
• Write your business equation
• Be creative when you face a capped downside, and an uncapped upside
• Design UX for good actors and systems for bad
• Know your levers, dials and pulleys
• Focus on high leverage activities
• Use speed as a competitive advantage
• Avoid scaling prematurely
• Check support tickets
• Win As Second Mover
• Honest debugging
• Inputs vs Outputs vs Outcomes
• Focus on processes, not tools
• Know what winning looks like
• Give your users a superpower
• Product Dev is not done by a committee
• Controlling Scope is your best option
• Keep digging
• No snacking
• Focus on input
• Be butter
• Ship outcomes, not just features
• Quality is not a tradeoff
• Design sequences not stills
• 3 Stages of Failure
• Why now?
• Thinking Small, at first
• Simple, correct, fast
• Win by Cheating
• By Default, Ship Nothing
• Cost, Time, Quality, Scope
• Make Big Bets
• Position, Position, Position!
• Value, scale, time
• The better mousetrap doesn’t always win
• Avoid regressing to the mean
• Retroactively Bundled
• The Tax of New
• Design for Continuous Experimentation
• Build a Product with a High-Concept Problem
• Forcing functions are valuable
• 4 types of product work beyond PMF
• Phone tilt factor
• Uncola
• 3 major product problems in 10 years
• Testing should not be a substitute of assertion
• Create rituals
• Step Functions vs One-percent Improvements
• Experiments and big bets
• Options, Not Roadmaps
• The Four Big Risks
• 3 types of research
• How to do a design review

2. Management and Org. Tactics:

• Always choose hard talk
• Make sure the trust battery is not low
• Trust is the currency of good management
• Do pre-mortem for work relationships
• Keep your team motivated
• Push ownership down the ladder
• Tackle preventable problems
• Build a team that ships
• Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Superheroes
• A CEO should look back only strategically, never with nostalgia
• 10 times the same person
• Don’t peanut butter strategy
• Building communities — Migrate from other countries to your country
• B players are company killers
• Simplicity Is Speed, And Speed Is Good
• Org chart matters
• Culture is the sum of everyone’s actions, not a slide deck or something written on a wall
• Break the Team Goal Down Into Independent Levers
• It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t
• Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners
• 10x teams, 10x developers
• Dreamers versus detailers
• Craftsvilla learnings
• Coupondunia shamelist
• Enterprise Value > Team Value > Self Value
• Nut out the next ‘big goal worthy of celebration’
• Be a new user
• How to be strategic
• Hard lessons learned as a manager

3. Decision-Making Frameworks:

• Use Eisenhower matrix
• Value creation vs value protection
• Choose AND over OR
• Foster conditions conducive to high decision quality and high decision velocity
• Frameworks vs isolated decisions
• SPADE
• How I take big decisions
• How I take big decisions
• Framing problems
• Elevate and delegate
• Type 1 vs type 2
• What could go right?
• Scaling decision making

Project Management:

• Following these rules will help you to manage a big project more effectively
• Create your own operator’s manual
• Best practices for cross-team collaboration
• Driving consensus
• On meetings

Communication:

• Use pyramid principle for communication
• Write like a Amazon PM
• Write military email
• Give blunt, effective feedback
• Ideas should be communicable in a napkin. Break down your ideas to the most simplified form
• Use documentation as cache
• Stop conversations as soon as there are diminishing returns
• Product Reviews
• Breaking Bad News
• The Silent Meeting Manifesto
• For Better Presentations, Start with a Villain
• Escalate Early and Often
• Make narrative your advantage
• In the absence of knowledge, fear fills the void
• 5 Hard Questions to Ask Yourself During a Conflict
• Tell a better story
• Building Better Products with Escalation