Product management isn't dead 🚫☠️, The Power of eating your own sh*t 🧠, Inconvenient truth about AI & jobs 🤖, Workplace finesse 💼, and more
Weekly Roundup 23 - November 17, 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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Hey Everyone,
Good morning and happy Sunday 😎. I can’t believe Q4 is almost over. Just when you think everyone is cooling down their publishing game, you stumble on some good reads. So let’s just jump straight into the good stuff 🤌.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
The difference between product management and project management.
Product management isn't dead and it's not AI that's going to kill it.
How PMs can 10x quality with dogfooding - Simple approach, Impressive results.
The inconvenient truth about AI and jobs.
Reducing complexity.
The art of workplace finesse.
When and why to use an interactive demo.
The difference between product management and project management (6 min read)
Product management is about crafting products that deliver value, whereas project management deals with organizing and scheduling tasks. In startups, these roles often blur, causing confusion and inefficiencies. Overemphasizing process can stifle a product manager's creativity, reducing them to mere project managers.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Clearly define and communicate the distinct roles of product and project management to ensure alignment and efficiency within your team.
Product management isn't dead and it's not AI that's going to kill it (7 min read)
The rise of AI has sparked debates about the future of product management. While AI can automate certain tasks, the core responsibilities of product managers—such as understanding customer needs, strategic planning, and cross-functional collaboration—remain irreplaceable. AI serves as a tool to enhance efficiency, but it cannot replicate the human insights and leadership essential to product management.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Embrace AI to streamline routine tasks, allowing more focus on strategic initiatives and customer engagement.
How PMs can 10x quality with dogfooding - Simple approach, Impressive results (5 min read)
Dogfooding is the practice of becoming your product's customer to deeply understand its usefulness and shortcomings. It reveals insights that can help refine features, improve usability, and accelerate value creation. While invaluable, it doesn't replace contact with real customers but complements it. Teams using dogfooding often discover why customers may leave or find value gaps. For B2B products, applying this approach can be challenging, but finding ways to experience your product firsthand is critical. Combining dogfooding with testing practices like smoke, regression, and sanity testing ensures a well-rounded strategy for delivering high-quality software.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Act as your product's customer to gain perspective on its value. Supplement dogfooding with customer interactions and rigorous testing to enhance quality and usability.
The inconvenient truth about AI and jobs (5 min read)
The popular quote "AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will" misrepresents the deeper reality of AI's impact. AI isn't just a productivity tool; it can scale output to levels that replace entire teams. This creates "technological unemployment," where roles vanish faster than markets adapt, risking significant social upheaval. Reskilling is not a universal solution, as many roles require shifts incompatible with workers' core skills or natures. Like manufacturing automation displaced manual labour, AI threatens to reduce knowledge worker demand. Addressing this requires comprehensive policies and support systems to manage the transition intentionally and equitably.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Understand AI's potential to reshape work at scale. Focus on collaboration between individuals, organizations, and policymakers to build adaptive systems for displaced workers.
Reducing complexity (4 min read)
Complexity in product work is unavoidable, driven by its adaptive, collaborative nature and systemic interdependencies. Leaders shouldn't aim to reduce complexity itself but should focus on minimizing friction, setting clear boundaries, and fostering environments where teams can manage complexity effectively. Blaming teams or adding pressure risks pushing real challenges into the shadows, making them harder to address.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Don't aim to reduce complexity itself; instead, address friction by improving processes, setting boundaries, and enabling autonomy for teams to manage complexity effectively.
The art of workplace finesse (7 min read)
Workplace finesse means knowing when to ask for forgiveness vs permission, managing perceptions, and tailoring actions to your personality. Recognize the importance of discretion in sensitive matters, adapt advice to your situation, and understand that incentives drive decisions. Effective finesse is judgment-based, not rule-following, and requires navigating unspoken dynamics.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build workplace finesse by reading situations, tailoring strategies to your style, and understanding unspoken rules and incentives.
When and why to use an interactive demo (5 min read)
Interactive demos are guided simulations that showcase key product use cases tailored to audience needs, making them an ideal tool for B2B companies. Their ease of setup, low risk, and ability to target specific buyer intents make them valuable for both sales-led and product-led businesses. They simplify complex products, enhance the buyer experience, and empower sales teams by reducing traditional demo friction. By addressing customer needs effectively, they create wins for companies, sales teams, and prospects alike.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Use interactive demos to target high-intent prospects, simplify the buyer journey, and reduce friction in sales processes. Test them with tailored use cases for a quick and impactful start.
👋 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 ✌️