Emily Rapp

A successful systems design and delivery strategy begins by assuming that change is likely the only constant. Be adaptable, or fail.

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Want to learn about innovation and customer obsession? Check out this podcast interview of Hannah Anokye, a PM on Intuit’s Futures team who recently took a mobility move from UX Research, as she discusses the role of qualitative research in innovation 🎧 https://dy.si/fawEZh

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Metrics come up all the time in talking about how to prove design systems value. The prevailing idea is that increasing adoption is the key to unlocking value. I disagree. I think it may be a part of success, but it is a bad way to express value. Here is why! Adoption is the kind of metric you get when you throw up your hands because you can't get the right data or you're more focused on building the design system than what you can build with it. It is the equivalent of "well, people seem to use it, so it must be great!" this can be fine if you're just starting out, but it doesn't tell you how your system is actually delivering value. Heck, NPS (which is also pretty imperfect), or a qualitative ask of product teams of "how valuable is the design system to your daily work?" or "what would change if the design system went away tomorrow?" is a better proxy for value than just "do people view some pages or login once a week?" Adoption can be pushed as a mandate. After seeing hundred of design systems up close, I can say definitively that high adoption doesn't differentiate between dream design systems and that 17 tool spaghetti monster that has documentation in Excel with hundreds of links to a private Git repo along with a 22 swim lane flowchart that you just... keep... scrolling... down. The only reason why adoption persists as a common metric is because even really bad design systems have the ability to generate significant value. So what's better? First, we need to hone in on the unit of repeatable value. This differs depending on the stated goal of the design system, but the vast majority of good design systems that operate at a significant scale are focused on how fast the organization can build products using the system (that's not the same as building components or designs in the system itself). At Knapsack, we tend to express this at this as cycle / iteration time from design to code across product teams that consume the design system -- either faster iterations or fewer iterations. We tend to focus on capacity because individual cycle velocity is often poorly understood and varies between product teams or disciplines. However, most teams have a fair handle on their capacity both for a single cycle and across a historical range of cycles. These can also be expressed easily as a relative percentage increase or decrease. It also accounts for a lot of secondary things (e.g. QA time) There is a goldilocks zone that consistently lands between 20 - 40% greater cycle capacity. For most of our customers, that's literally millions of dollars. If you're using adoption, you're not alone. We've heard time and again on the Design Systems Podcast that folks look at this metric ALL THE TIME as a measure of success, but it certainly doesn't paint the full picture, nor is it the north star for understanding value.

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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Here are my key takeaways from an amazing and insightful podcast on the future of product management by Marty Cagan and hosted by Lenny Rachitsky: - Understand your customers and users well by having "1st hand interactions" - There is a difference between developing a feature vs. solving a customer problem - Many-a-times PMs are doing more project management than product management - Product management is much more than just authoring stories at JIRA or administering backlog or conducting scrum ceremonies - Some key principles: -- Innovation is more important than predictability -- Learning is more important than failure -- Principles are more important than processes -- Demonstrating "real ownership" https://lnkd.in/g6TQSZp6 #productmanagement #products #customers #products #quality

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If you're running a data or AI-focused startup, connect with Stephan Goupille and his team! When three of the industry's brightest data minds join forces to back your venture, you get more than just funding – you gain invaluable operator expertise. They understand the challenges and opportunities you face because they've been there themselves.

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AI can be an incredibly powerful technology for creating valuable products. However the golden rule – “Do not delegate thinking” –becomes most critical than ever. AI can seriously hallucinate, lack the right context, and become a source of quality and originality regression. Great article by Itamar Gilad

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An executive criticized my management work by claiming I was "too nice" to my team and unwilling to make hard calls and reprimand employees. I acknowledged I wasn't sure, but declined to change my practice. It took years to realize the disconnect: I was aiming for a wildly more challenging standard that I didn't have the words to explain. I do now. Psychological safety is the most powerful productivity multiplier. Without it, no one can take ownership of their piece of the company and make it better. You won't get the honest feedback you need to succeed. You easily get trapped in feedback loops of management panic & overreaction reducing safety, which creates worse outcomes, which creates more panic. On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is perfect psychological safety), this is what I see: - Most companies are at 1 across the board. - "Top Workplaces" are in the 3-4 range. - I'm aiming for an 8 on my teams, maybe achieving 5 or 6 on my best days. If you're working for a company with a '2' for psychological safety and you see someone run their team with a goal of '8', I understand the criticism. The bar is at your feet and you see someone trying to pole vault over it, which looks like a waste of energy and a misalignment of goals. From the ground, it looks stupid and counterproductive. Practice pole vaulting for a while. It's incredibly challenging, but you'll see stuff you can't from the ground. Your internal standards will grow. Eventually, you'll ignore the bar too. #psychologicalsafety #management #leadership #productivity

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Calm meets Code - Zen Spinner UX Visit my blog for an illuminating side by side demo comparing Copilot's elevated spinner UX to traditional ones. https://lnkd.in/dqer-mk6 Last week, I immersed myself in Copilot and noticed something fascinating—I felt surprisingly refreshed after hours of intense work. This led me to explore further. It turns out, Microsoft's design ethos for Copilot is all about creating a low cognitive load and infusing relaxation into a mesmerizing user experience Delve into the serenity of Copilot's Zen Loading UX, crafted with Microsoft's ethos for minimal cognitive load. Sharing a Zen Page Loading approach that caught my attention and more on Copilots UX design philosophy in my blog. Enjoy!! #copilot #microsft #paypal #fintech #UX #generativeai #aiml

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Lying to customers is not a good strategy. Focusing on building a better product is.

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What can we learn from Apple calculator and other announcements? Product and Marketing matters - a well designed and built product, demoed in the proper way is like magic. https://lnkd.in/gHbqxc26  https://lnkd.in/gieg3btq https://lnkd.in/g8JDkTku There is no new AI.  Handwriting recognition has been good and around for a while. This a creative use of it. We have also been able to have formulas and smart inference for a long time. It never gets old to mix the right fundamentals in computer science, product and marketing to build great products.

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I rarely post on LinkedIn, but I'm curious to find some folks to chat with about some ideas for an Enterprise Product Management product. My thesis is that the current suite of tools do not do a sufficient job providing features for managing sprawling, complex suites of products + product lines that mature tech organizations maintain. Most PM products are geared toward startups and smaller companies with simpler products, but few tools help PMs and other leaders manage the sprawling complexity of a situation like 30 products over 6 product lines, 14 industry solutions, and components from a dozen acquisitions. Let me know if you'd be down to chat for 20 minutes one day about it!

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Happy Friday! I have recently been doing a fair amount of work in the AI space at Atlassian. One area I have been grappling with is quickly validating whether an idea is a good fit for GenAI to solve. I've settled on an approach that reliably allows me to test an idea in 30-60 minutes by quickly generating and iterating on prompts with an LLM. Check out my blog post (in the comments) if you want to know more!

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Good stuff must share EDIT: I’ve witnessed and worked with both empowered product teams and feature teams. My very strong conviction is that if you have talented people AND a strong+clear strategic direction, then empowered product teams can do incredible things and are clearly the better way. This book shows you how to get there.

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Hey LinkedIn Team & LinkedIn PMs fam! Hope you're all doing well as H2'24 kicks off, bringing in the season of festivity and higher revenue. 🎉 As a Product Leader, I love exploring premiumness or loyalty driving products myself to refine my Product thinking nuggets for user retention. In that context, I had subscribed to LinkedIn Business Premium couple of years back, which renews every year. I have been and am still a LinkedIn Premium Subscriber (as I write this). Interestingly, despite being a Premium member, I continue to receive a barrage of ads and messages prompting me to upgrade... to Premium. 🤔 It makes me wonder if there's a disconnect somewhere within the system - perhaps a hiccup in the CDP or Sales pipelines not syncing with the CRM or DMP? I'm curious to learn from fellow LinkedIn PMs about the best practices they follow to ensure real-time data consistency across different platforms. Specifically for ads or growth campaigns! Additionally, I wonder if there's a possibility, dear LinkedIn PMs fam, to introduce a "Don't show me ads" toggle for dedicated Premium customers? 🤔 This is not a rant, just a request :) Edge cases exist, and I understand your roadmap might be full! Let's keep building great features :) #ProductManagement #DataConsistency #UserExperience #Product

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Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

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