To PLG or not 🤔, Managing up ⬆️, Ultimate guide to positioning 📓⌖, Outcome-driven products 🚀, and more
Weekly Roundup 13 🔁
👋 Hey, Sam here! Welcome back to the 🔁 Weekly Roundup edition 🔁 of The Product Trench. Each week, I curate deep dives, trends and resources related to product management, startups, and leadership.
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Happy Sunday everyone! 😎
This week's roundup contains some good nuggets on product growth, leadership, and other topics, so let's get to it.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
A masterclass on managing up
Pitfalls of being too metrics-driven
The ultimate guide to positioning
Simplify, engage, inspire
Part II: Derisking 12 common workplace scenarios
Decoding "outcome-driven" product development
Should you product-led growth?
Growth teams must learn to play well with other teams... or else
A masterclass on managing up (11 min video)
Managing up involves three key strategies: regular communication, escalation of challenges, and alignment with management's priorities.
Regular status updates, though often disliked, are vital for keeping leadership informed and aligned.
Escalating issues and openly discussing frustrations with management is crucial, especially for high-agency individuals who tend to handle everything independently.
Finally, aligning your team's work with management's current priorities, even if they seem inconsistent, is important for career progression. Balancing these strategies while protecting your team's focus and integrity is essential for effective leadership.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Communicate consistently with your manager, escalate challenges when needed, and align your team's work with management's priorities to ensure ongoing support and success.
Pitfalls of being too metrics-driven (3 min read)
Being overly metrics-driven can lead to negative outcomes, such as focusing on short-term gains, ignoring critical issues, and fostering a blame culture. Instead, leaders should balance metrics with context, set qualitative goals, and consider a range of metrics to guide decisions. Teams should also contribute insights, and metrics' limitations should be acknowledged to avoid tunnel vision. Qualitative research and cross-functional feedback are essential to complement quantitative analysis.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Balance metrics with context and qualitative insights to prevent short-sighted decisions and ensure long-term success.
The ultimate guide to positioning (90 min video)
In his newly launched podcast, Aakash covers everything you need to know about positioning with Anthony Pierri. The episode covers a masterclass in positioning, building a great home page, various hot takes, the role of PMs and PMMs, and the future of product marketing.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway:
Positioning is about giving frames of reference to help people understand the value of a new product or category.
Clear messaging on homepages is paramount to entice your potential customers.
The future of product marketing is to lead with features and product capabilities, rather than just focusing on benefits.
Simplify, engage, inspire (4 min read)
Amy Mitchell provides a step-by-step guide for product managers to prepare and deliver impactful presentations on complex topics. It emphasizes the importance of defining clear objectives, structuring content logically, supporting arguments with evidence, engaging the audience, and closing with a strong summary. By focusing on clarity and audience engagement, you can effectively communicate critical technical insights and drive strategic decisions.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Simplify complex information by breaking it down into clear, logical sections and use visuals to enhance understanding and engagement.
Part II: Derisking 12 common workplace scenarios (6 min read)
This article breaks down 12 common workplace scenarios, such as giving feedback, presenting to leadership, and delegating tasks, highlighting the primary risks in each and offering strategies to mitigate them. For instance, when sharing a controversial idea, clearly stating your intent can prevent misunderstandings, and when raising prices, framing the increase as minor can reduce customer churn.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Always anticipate potential risks and plan simple, clear steps to mitigate them in any workplace situation.
Decoding "outcome-driven" product development (10 min read)
Outcome-driven product development emphasizes aligning customer, product, and business outcomes to create value and drive growth. Understanding the "Outcome Chain" is key, as it connects customer needs to product performance and business success. Product teams should focus on building towards customer outcomes, leading to product and business results. Key practices include continuous discovery, outcome-driven roadmapping, and iterative validation to ensure alignment and adaptability.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Prioritize customer outcomes as the foundation of your product strategy, ensuring they cascade into measurable product and business outcomes.
Should you product-led growth? (12 min read)
The article breaks down the complexities of adopting a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy, emphasizing that it's not a simple yes or no decision. Success hinges on understanding your product's positioning, customer needs, and the balance between self-serve and high-touch models. HubSpot's successful PLG shift and Salesforce's struggles highlight the importance of product simplification, market flexibility, and organizational adaptability in transitioning to PLG.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Evaluate whether your product and organization are ready for a PLG approach by considering product complexity, customer needs, and the balance between self-serve and human touchpoints.
Growth teams must learn to play well with other teams... or else (6 min read)
Growth teams often clash with core product teams because they need to impact areas they don't directly control. A key lesson is to involve surface owners as consultants and share credit for successes to build long-term collaboration. Moving too fast without alignment can lead to strained relationships and operational issues/
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Always engage and credit product domain owners when driving growth initiatives to ensure long-term success.
👋 That's it for this week's edition. Thank you for reading, and enjoy your week.
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See you next time.
— Sam ✌️
I enjoyed this week’s articles. I missed a few and got caught up. Thank you for putting this together!
I appreciate the shoutout too!