Thriving in a virtual team 🤩, PM decision-making dilemma 🤔, Invent & simplify AI products 💡🤖, and more
Weekly Roundup 22 - November 11, 2024
👋 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 and leadership.
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Happy Monday everyone! 😎
Usually, you’d be getting this email on a Sunday morning. I wish I could tell you I am doing some A/B testing for my newsletter or trying something new, but I got nada.
The past few weeks have been hectic at work, home and preparing for my next local CrossFit competition. This makes writing a newsletter a bit difficult as my brain is fried at the end of the day, especially the Weekly Roundup, which requires some time for reading and digesting different articles.
I am trying the 5 AM club as a writing space. I hope it gives me an hour or so in the morning before the chaos starts. So, I am sorry for being late sending this.
I know you didn’t subscribe to read my rant and complaints (I am not btw), so let’s just get to it.
PS: If sending on Mondays magically spike some metrics, I might consider moving Sundays to Mondays 🫠.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
Thriving in a virtual team.
Always be launching.
The context matrix.
5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager.
The Product Manager's decision making dilemma.
What finesse looks like when reading people and situations.
Thriving in a virtual team (4 min read)
In virtual team environments, product managers must navigate multiple roles: leading, contributing, and supporting. Thriving requires mindset shifts, such as seeing support as a form of leadership, sharing early work to maintain momentum, and always having an adaptable plan. Leaders need to organize work clearly, communicate goals, and set up structured checkpoints. Contributors should share their work proactively, while followers provide active, meaningful support. Success hinges on flexibility, communication, and balancing roles seamlessly.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Embrace proactive communication, timely work-sharing, and adaptable planning to boost productivity in virtual teams.
Always be launching (4 min read)
The "Always Be Launching" (ABL) strategy encourages continuous engagement over singular, polished product reveals. This involves sharing updates, customer quotes, insights, and even challenges regularly to build momentum. ABL moves away from one-time Big Bang Launches, focusing instead on long-term relationships and authentic interaction. Founders should embrace consistent, human-centric communication directly with audiences, avoiding dependency on traditional media channels. The strategy builds reach over time, fostering deeper connections and growth through persistent, relatable content.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Share frequent, honest updates and engage directly to build trust and maintain product visibility.
The context matrix (2 min read)
Product management at every level involves creating and interpreting context. For product strategy, this means analyzing market data, capabilities, and long-term goals and forming strategic relationships. Product OKRs align with vision and strategy, focusing on key results that drive outcomes and adaptability. Product Discovery relies on strategic goals and customer insights, requiring effective problem framing, research prioritization, and solution validation before development.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Align context creation and sense-making in strategy, OKRs, and discovery for informed decision-making and cohesive execution.
5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager (3 min read)
The article discusses how AI/ML product managers can apply Amazon's 'Invent and Simplify' principle to enhance product development. It outlines five main methods: focusing on ways of working through iterative prototyping and outcome-based strategies; defining and tracking LLM quality metrics; adopting a fail-fast approach with rapid testing and feature flagging; mastering prompt engineering to create prototypes without engineering resources; and incorporating robust privacy and security controls in collaboration with legal teams. These methods help build impactful AI products that meet user needs and comply with regulations.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Streamline your AI product development by adopting iterative prototyping, defining quality metrics, incorporating fail-fast strategies, leveraging prompt engineering, and embedding privacy and security measures collaboratively.
The Product Manager's decision making dilemma (5 min read)
Product managers must continuously prioritize by balancing diverse feedback from customers, sales teams, engineers, and designers against limited resources and the promise of consistent value delivery. Effective prioritization requires alignment with the product vision, addressing genuine customer needs, understanding potential business impact (such as customer acquisition or retention), and thorough risk assessment. Frameworks like MoSCoW and KANO can support structured decision-making.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Prioritize features by aligning them with your product vision and strategy, ensuring they address genuine customer needs and have a clear business impact while considering associated risks.
What finesse looks like when reading people and situations (6 min read)
Finesse is an essential yet nuanced skill in handling people and complex situations effectively. It includes delivering bad news tactfully to maintain relationships, understanding power dynamics to avoid unintended arrogance, and strategically deciding when to call someone out. Prioritizing impact over intention underscores that execution matters more than motives. Finesse also means reading between the lines to recognize hidden questions, seeking win-win solutions for sustainable relationships, and applying popular advice thoughtfully to avoid missteps that could damage trust or rapport.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Approach situations with strategic thinking and adapt your communication to balance mutual benefits and nuanced interpretation.
👋 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 ✌️