Jared Goralnick

Interesting thing I've learned about building a benchmarking tool is that what a lot of early adopters actually want is an influencing tool. Completely reframes product features. Example: Old feature: Auto generated board reports 1. Choose metrics 2. Generate Graphs 3. Download as pdf/ppt New feature: Show me the stories I could tell with my data. 1. Here are the stories you can tell 2. Choose story 3. Generate metric benchmark graphs that help tell that story 4. Suggest narrative 4. Download Excited to see where peoplemetrics.fyi goes :-)

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🔥Hot Take for PMs: Please don't hand me a solution to a problem. Instead, focus on detailing the problem and help me understand the why. We will ideate and find a solution together. Next week, in our first episode of ⚫️Bounce, Claire and I continue to unpack the PD + PM working relationship. Buckle up. Subscribe today - links in comments 👇

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As a product builder, one of my favorite concepts is Balaji Srinivasan's Idea maze (attached below). End users of a product only see the final decisions made. They don’t see every tradeoff the builders agonize over and the alternative universes that could’ve been. Great product are designed by builders that put an incredible amount of thought behind each decision. Steve jobs talks about a similar feeling in building the Mac. IMO this is the essence of finding product <> market fit, and makes a world of a difference in outcomes. For example, “video on the Internet” in the early 2000’s was an obvious emergent trend. But Youtube and Vimeo are very different products, and company outcomes. I think about this concept often for the market of “GTM signals” and "AI for Sales." It’s hot right now, many GTM teams are talking about using signals and AI, and there’s a wide diversity of products to choose from. Some tenured GTM operators gripe about how this is nothing new and it’s a renaming of age-old concepts like ABM, intent, B2B marketing, etc. There’s some truth to that and as a builder I’m always curious about the history of our space, but I also believe that AI (specifically LLMs) are unlocking new use cases that were previously not possible. So next time you see a new product in a confusing market, keep an open mind and see if it helps you accomplish something radically new. You could be looking at the next Youtube.

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🎙️Tonight is the night! Join Bosky and me for a deep dive into the importance of soft skills in product management. We’ll discuss how EQ can help you grow your career, enhance your products, and build better relationships. See you at 8:30 PM CET at this link 👉🏻 https://lnkd.in/e3RiyHjE

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There are a lot of newsletters out there, but the Product Leadership Essentials newsletter is your monthly guide to building up your product leadership skills. Subscribe and join and get the latest news and top tips sent straight to your inbox. 📩

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> you always have a strategy, even if it is implicit and not written down. Writing helps you sharpen it, have a shared understanding. > one of the simplest yet most powerful things you can do, is to write your strategy down.

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Lenny Rachitsky I listened to your amazing podcast with Todd Jackson about product market fit. The 4P framework ( persona, problem, is amazing. All the benchmarks, strategies, and tactics that Todd Jackson shared are spot on. Recently, Sequoia Capital put out a solid framework, the ARC Product Market Fit Framework for Hair On Fire, Hard Fact, and Future Vision. When I combine these two, 4P relates well with the Hair on Fire category of the products. I wonder how the 4P framework would work with the products' Hard Fact and Future Vision categories. Lenny Rachitsky Todd Jackson I wish I could hear more about PMF in the Hard Fact and Future Vision categories. For rest, These are amazing content about #productmanagement, #productmarket fit, #startups Here are links: 1. This is the link to the entire podcast: https://lnkd.in/eTX5tGtE 2. This is where the 4P description starts: https://lnkd.in/eTX5tGtE 3. This is the link to the ARC Product Market Fit podcast. https://lnkd.in/ezprPT-Q

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Simple, but really useful idea from Will Larson: Every company has engineers who complain, "There's no product strategy. Why don't we even have a product strategy?" Then, you talk to product managers, and they say, "There's no business strategy. How do we function without a business strategy?" When you go back to the engineers, they lament, "There's not even a technology strategy. What kind of company are we?" This pervasive belief that there's no strategy anywhere is common, but I've come to believe that strategy is everywhere—it's just rarely written down. The challenge is that unwritten strategy can be effective but difficult to use and refine. When strategies are updated, people have different understandings of the changes. It's tough to onboard new hires when there's no written strategy. You often have senior leaders who come in and just assume their last company strategy is your strategy because you don't have your strategy written down anywhere. Explaining confusing points becomes a series of one-on-one conversations or trying to interpret past decisions like case law. It's confusing and inefficient compared to just writing it down. One of the biggest improvements we can make in the quality of strategy across all areas—engineering, product, business—is to commit to documenting it. Once written, people can disagree, iterate, and revise the strategy. Unwritten strategies are hard to engage with, and writing things down, even imperfectly, can lead to significant improvements almost overnight. Without documentation, improving your strategy is incredibly challenging. Read the entire Review article featuring Will by following the link in the comments.

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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Reflecting on some recent advising sessions, something I don't see talked about as much is how critical it is to have an incredibly strong, unified* Design leadership team in order to build an even stronger design team and product. Why this is so critical 👇 What I’ve seen happen when you DON’T have that unified Design leadership team: 1. Massive gaps in the user experience – Let’s start with the obvious one. When Design leaders are staying neatly in their corners and not communicating, the experience degrades pretty quickly. Especially where the "seams" of their teams/org are. We've all seen (and let's be real…probably have been guilty of at times) the navigation structure that clearly shows the org chart vs. what users actually need. This can happen way too quickly without that unified team. 2. A lack of Design’s ability to influence product direction — The best Design leadership teams work together, pushing each other, to have a unified perspective of what the big things are to tackle in the user experience that leverages the unique expertise of the Design functions, all the way from it being grounded in research, to it having a compelling narrative. When they have that unified perspective and are all consistently sharing that perspective, it is so much easier for cross-functional partners to understand and buy-in on it. 3. Design works against Design — When Design leaders don't have a shared perspective on what is important (both in the user experience and the culture), don't have the right level of visibility into each other's work, or even worse, when they don't have mutual respect for each other, it leads to the leaders (mostly) inadvertently working against the progress of the other leaders/teams vs. together toward a unified vision. 4. A limit to the flexibility and scalability of the Design team – To build great experiences at scale, having the flexibility of shifting people to focus on different parts of the product is critical. When the culture and processes are dramatically, instead of it being exciting for that person to focus on a new space, it is incredibly disorienting, slows everything down, and can quickly lead to burnout. *A note on when I say "unified". I don't mean at all that they agree on everything. In fact, the opposite. They push each other the most, early and often. However, they have shared respect, cultivated by their leader, and shared responsibility around aligning within a timely manner. THEN they support each other in any way they can with hurdles they may each face (e.g. cross-functional buy-in or team-wide communication). ——— Is this interesting? Let me know if you want me to share more on how exactly you can cultivate this strong design leadership team –OR– if you want more personalized advice around this, set up some time with me here: https://lnkd.in/g-vyymtW

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🎙️ Have Burning Product Management Questions? Ask away! Ever found yourself grappling with product strategy, navigating user research, or juggling stakeholder demands? Maybe you're just curious about the ins and outs of product leadership? Well, you're in luck! Join me on the Dear Melissa segment of my podcast, where I'm diving deep into YOUR burning questions about Product Management. Here's the scoop: ✅ You can keep your questions broad or specific, but give me enough context so I can answer as accurately as a I can. ✅ Your privacy matters—rest assured, your name will stay anonymous. ✅ Don't hold back! Feel free to submit as many questions as you like! From revamping company strategies to mastering the art of product leadership and even picking the perfect tools and frameworks, we're covering it all! Head over to DearMelissa.com and share your questions. Yours could be featured on an upcoming episode! (P.S. Need a quick response? Drop me a voicemail—I'll give your questions top priority!) 🚀

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Product and design have often had lively debates around the term "MVP"—both what it stands for and its role in product development. I'm a bit old-school here; I prefer "Minimum Viable Product." Viable—as in usable. It might not be pretty, but it gets the job done. Here's why I believe in this approach👇 The single most important thing we can be looking for in the early days of a product is data. Most specifically, customer data. We’re looking for some signal that tells us whether users find the product useful, which parts of it they use, where they get stuck, how often they come back 📈 The quicker we gather this data, the faster we can evolve. Hence, launching something as soon as possible—while we still have plenty of runway to learn and adjust—is critical 🛠️ One piece of wisdom that I lean on again & again came from Jeff Gothelf at Mind The Product in 2015 (https://lnkd.in/gNP8dGw3). Speaking to both product and design teams, Jeff emphasized the need to de-risk product decision making by asking, "What is the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?" It's often challenging to decide when your rough first draft is ready for launch. What if customers dislike it? What if it doesn’t add value? Remember, this is the beauty of being nimble and agile—especially in SaaS. We aim for perfection through iteration 🔄 You can't start iterating until you have data. So, ship the smallest measurable thing; launch a Minimum Viable Product and watch closely how your customers interact with it! 🔎 - - - - (MVP sports jersey image generated using ChatGPT 4 & DALL-E 2)

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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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As a product leader, navigating change is inevitable, especially in these uncertain times. That's why I am offering 1:1 coaching that will equip you with the resilience and adaptability needed to lead through uncertainty and drive positive outcomes. As product people, we can't always know what lurks behind each corner, but as leaders, we can prepare and build on our skills to face any challenges. My coaching methodology is high-touch, with generous ongoing support between sessions. If you're interested, DM me and tell me about yourself and what brings you to coaching. We’ll find a time to schedule an introductory call and go from there. I've also added a link to find out more in the comments.

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Question for those of you ML/AI leaders who engage with UX design or research teams/vendors/contractors/colleagues: Is there 1 thing you wish UX professionals knew or understood more about ML/AI such that they could add more value to the team or the resulting products that were created? What's been hard in the past? Ex: constraints or opportunities with leveraging AI, working effectively with a data science or product team/leaders, all the data governance/quality/privacy issues that exist beyond adding an “AI feature”, or whatever.

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Truly mature design systems are almost always looking to have fewer components and less complexity at their core. Let composability and inheritance (systems of systems) build on top of a core foundation. There is a budding "ecosystem" model for design systems that have a maturity / adoption curve we should be able to model.

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🔥 I want to hear your hot takes 🔥 Running a podcast has been great but, after 201 episodes and counting (and up-and-coming upstarts like Lenny getting better all the time), you start to think about different formats. I started the podcast up in 2020 and wanted to speak to the little people and tell diverse stories. I still want to do that, but I've tended towards big names and authors over the last few months. I'll still talk to big names and authors, of course! But I also want to talk to YOU. So, if you have a hot take you want to get off your chest, why not book a slot? The best hot takes will get featured in some "hot take" episodes and sent out to my adoring fans and listeners (surgeon general's note: adoration is not guaranteed - the value of your investment may go up or down). Let's have some heat! https://lnkd.in/eQqhW7u3

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Struggling to drive org-wide adoption for your research repository? If I could go back in time, this is what I would tell myself about scaling repositories and driving adoption… When it comes to onboarding teammates and stakeholders for any type of research repository, it's helpful to think of your users as 'Contributors' or 'Viewers'. Contributors are people who are conducting research. Viewers are the individuals who consume insights to help with decision making – but won't be adding knowledge to your repository. For Contributors, focus your onboarding around getting these users to the 'aha moment' realised by adding knowledge into your repository and discovering how their work fits into the bigger picture. In my experience, the faster a contributor experiences first-hand the added clarity (alongside efficiency) that a repository can bring, the more likely they are to adopt it. Don't force users to add all their research from day one. Instead, focus on helping them experience the system's benefits first, making them more likely to add more over time. For Viewers, focus your onboarding around enabling these users to discover insights that are relevant to the problems and challenges they're looking to solve today. Instead of asking Viewer users to perform irrelevant searches to ‘test the search function,’ inquire about their current focus. Use this information to search and query the repository for relevant insights. Again, focus on helping users experience the benefits of the system. Focus is key when it comes to onboarding and adoption for any research repository, and I’ve seen so many repository launches fall flat without it. By concentrating on the core value each user type experiences, you can design an effective onboarding process that maximises success and encourages organic growth through user invitations to your repository. Regardless of user type, I’ve found it’s best to start somewhat unscalable. For example with 1-1 / group calls (you’ll learn ton of insights about the onboarding process, as well as the repository itself). Next, consider building a simple onboarding guide or help centre, Loom videos and Slack channels are also super helpful. Time-box your effort, get something out there, reflect on the feedback, then iterate and launch the next version. Done is better than perfect. Keep pushing, keep iterating, and the adoption will follow 💪

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📣 Product Folks: 😡 Have you and your team hit the wall with trying to focus on value? That *could* look like: ▶ No steady stream of data to inform strategy, prioritization + roadmaps ▶ Stakeholder misalignment ▶ Competing priorities ▶ Duplicative or overlapping work streams 🤓 Are you ready to put Product Operations into practice at your company? Join me for Produx Labs' Product Operations June 5 Masterclass! Snag your seat today. https://lnkd.in/ephFvTwf #productmanagement #productops

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