Sarah Crisp

I want to hear a product story you're passionate about. (Edit for the Monday morning crew: the reaction to this post has been incredible. If you have PMs in your network who have amazing stories, I would appreciate a repost to reach them!) As a product manager, I know it can be hard to describe what we do to those around us. Our work often involves mountains of coded language, company and industry vernacular, and a variety of tasks and processes that can make it hard to describe. Yet, I love telling stories about products I've worked on. I can't be the only one, so I want to create a space for others to tell their stories in their own words. Let me be your audience. Any aspect of PMing is welcome. Your story could be prepared and practiced, or it could be the first time you've spoken it out loud. It could be about how you broke into product after years of trying, or accidentally stumbled your way in. Tell me about the thing you worked really hard on and you're proud to have launched. Give me way too much detail about how your users surprised you once your work was out in the world. I will listen to you vent about the nightmare stakeholder who almost torpedoed the entire thing, or lament the feature you've always wanted to launch, but have never successfully made the case for. I want to be clear: I'm doing this for fun. This is not an interview. I'm not going to come in with a set of prepared questions. Once you get going, I won't interrupt you. This is 30 free minutes to tell your story to someone who understands. And since it's just me on the receiving end, it's more talking to a friend than public speaking. I'm planning to record the audio of these sessions, but feel free to ask me not to. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but I promise I won't start a podcast. PMs in my network: feel free to book a time (or, you know, text me, you probably have my number). I would also appreciate if you could share or repost this to widen its reach. Click the link below to book a time to tell me your story. https://lnkd.in/d6hwuQJ6

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We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩‍🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!

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And it is so easy to do — after a cutoff, new ideas are fine, but they belong in the NEXT release, not the one committed and in dev/QA execution. Why are the folks paid the big bucks always missing the obvious? Well, usually they are paid to. Meaning they have to strive for more (“raise the bar”). HOW they raise the bar is what differentiates the great c-suite genius from the incompetent dingbat.

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“If there is no clear owner, then it’s the PM that owns it.” I sat down with Esteban Contreras from #ProductState to discuss Product leadership, or Prioritization process at Productboard. We also dug into the concept of Extreme Ownership, which is a principle I firmly believe in. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eVN47mWn #productmanagement #productexcellence #ownership

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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⛔ Product Leaders are NOT problem solvers. ✅ They ask questions to identify the right problem to solve. ✅ They bring the right people together who can solve it. What is your take on this topic? Let me know in the comments👇

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The reactions vary wildly when stakeholders hear the acronym, "PRD." Some folks dread them in companies with rigid ways of working. Those are our traumatized Product Managers in the crowd. The phrase, "That's not in the PRD!" rings loud on loop for them. (Poor one out for the jaded PMs out there). Other folks hate them because they represent planning work. Planning? Ugh. Defining scope? Eww. Timelines? Not very sexy. Especially when UX has "the Figmas" ...and Engineering has live demos. Some folks ask, "PR-what?" Product. Requirement. Docs. The thing that maintains alignment. It keeps your 4itB, 3itB, or maybe (but not hopefully) your 40itB on the same page. For the Fortune 1? PRDs are great for CYA. For the Fortune None? They're for tracking of your ever-changing scope (and maturing your fledgling org via forcing tough decisions). Oh yeah. And it rolls up into your roadmap. They are as flexible and adaptable as your Product leader needs them to be. And your company's SDLC maturity needs them to be. Ideally, the former drives the latter (but that's for another day). DM any questions you have on PRDs and how they could drive value for your org.

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"Why doesn't my boss notice the work I'm doing?" Recognition is a keystone for product managers looking to move forward in their career. Today, we help someone who's feeling overlooked by their manager. If you have a question about product management, shoot me a DM. ✉️ I'm here to help! #productmanagement #productmanagers #careeradvice #askaquestion #askmeanything

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Startups are hard. Like really hard. Constant change management? If you're even able to plan for it. Best practices? If you're lucky. Key stakeholder deficiencies? Hopefully you can mitigate them. Clear direction? Maybe for this week. Your dad probably told you, "nothing in life worth having is easy." My dad was right. Yours probably was, too. Just remember: startups are hard. The folks best cutout for them recognize the above (along with a laundry list of other querks) and roll with the punches all the way to delivery.

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*A shortcut for building confidence in my product opinion* As someone who often gets pulled into very different problems, one of the hardest parts of my job is to build confidence in my product opinion fast. Without conviction that I’m making the right decision, how can I lead? So it’s been key to learn how I learn — how I can quickly understand a domain and build confidence about what to build next. My personal hypothesis: everyone has different triggers that help them feel confident in their decisions. So figuring out what specific methods work for me gives me a shortcut to build confidence in a new space. We can all name a bunch of different ways that people tend to learn. I’ve seen people be successful by going deep into: 1. Qualitative customer info 2. Product experience 3. Internal data 4. External market trends 5. Financial modeling 6. Creating mocks or prototypes The key is that for most of us, *finding the one or two of these methods that match our strengths is a shortcut for learning fast*, rather than trying to go deep on all of them at once. There’s an overwhelming amount of information out there — enough that I can convince myself that I constantly need to do more research in order to find the perfect answer. But as I wrote in “Execution beats strategy every time” earlier in this series, we usually don’t need a perfect answer immediately. We need a good-enough answer that we can iterate quickly on over time. Getting to that good-enough answer gives me a little island of knowledge to stand on as I build a more complete map of the world. What normally unlocks my confidence? Feeling like I have unique insight on the customer. Maybe it’s through talking with enough customers that I can hear patterns in their stories, maybe it’s by using the product every day in the way a customer does, or maybe it’s by sitting in a customer’s store and just observing how they spend their day.  Your shortcut might be deeply understanding the dashboards, or analyzing industry trends to foresee the future. But I always notice that I can build a lot more conviction fast when I feel like I have a customer on my shoulder, whispering in my ear — and so I’ve learned to optimize for building that intuition as quickly as possible. Then I can fill out my perspective with more data and market trends to make sure everything fits together. Figuring out my own typical personalized learning plan has been a great time-saver, and has given me a lot more confidence in approaching new problems. (This is part of an ongoing series about product, leadership, and scaling! For regular updates, subscribe to amivora.substack.com)

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Product peeps - who are you using for incentive payments based on product feedback? As in take a survey, get paid cash. Or, agree to an interview with our Pm and get cash. Or, provide a product review and get cash?

There are so many sources of information out there for product managers on their job hunt that it can be overwhelming. One of the best that I've found is Ari Janover's page over at: https://lnkd.in/g_-8kuVg Ari is about as thoughtful and genuine person that you'll talk with and he knows how to cut to the chase and provide you with solid information whether you're a seasoned pro, looking to give new life to your search and an apiring product manager who is looking for that first opportunity. Check out his page and newsletter. I'm using his thoughts about creating a Bespoke Resume to help facilitate the conversations that I'm having with companies. Thanks, Ari! #productmanagement

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Great perspective and reminder on fundamentals of successful teams, thanks Sam Wettling, Keith Swiderski at Zilker Trail Consulting Disclaimer: Sam's been my "part therapist" since 2010 through guitar jam sessions 🎸🤘 Fifteen years into my career, I'm still astonished by how leaders in groups, big and small, are rowing in different 👈😕👉 directions despite best intentions. We're always missing out when product and marketing efforts are misaligned. Analytics, Partnerships, BizDev, Sales, CS, they're all part of the same unit from the customer's perspective. Just like a kid asking both parents and getting different answers 🤷‍♂️, customers can smell dissent a mile away as soon as more than one team engages with them. I particularly liked the simplicity of your GPS (goals, problems, solutions) workshop model and the safe space provided to openly discuss challenges. More often than acceptable, solutions don't solve problems that matter and problems being solved don't support the goals. Even more common in my experience is the absence of clear goals ⛳ Most companies I've engaged with or joined have needed a major upgrade in: 📐 Defining metrics that matter in their problem space (value vs. vanity) 📈 Setting and tracking goals that support desired outcomes (funding, profitability, growth, talent retention, ...) 📢 Communicating, evaluating and adapting to progress toward goals "Aren't we already aligned to our goals?" I often hear when asking the simplest questions. "No, seemingly not. Here's how it's manifesting... frustrated/overworked staff, mediocre NPS, limited internal and external feedback, the list of symptoms goes on. True leaders take the bull by the horns, roll up their sleeves and fight complacency in those situations. Then, you have a working team and system that can honestly achieve whatever they put their efforts to. Although, I suggest rolling up sleeves first 🐂🤕

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When launching a new product I see alot of product managers wait until they're asked "how it's going", before thinking about what their metrics of success are. This is something that I learned as a new product manager when trying to get funding for my first product. Think about the metrics that are important both your company, as well as what is going delight the customer to the point that they're publicly championing your products and organization. #productmanagement #GTM #productlaunch #launchstrategy

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For much of my career in product management, I wasn’t nearly aggressive enough about getting myself in front of customers to do problem discovery, even as a founder highly vested in building the right things. Here’s the simple realization that shifted my mindset (which should have been obvious to me as a New Yorker): *People love talking about their problems, including their work problems.* I know a lot of people who pay very good money for the privilege of having someone listen to them talk about their problems for an hour. In retrospect, there were three things holding me back: 1. assuming it was an imposition to ask customers/users to spend time educating me on their problems 2. thinking I needed to be ready to share a compelling solution to earn and optimize my time with them 3. and if I’m honest, being afraid I’d hear that people didn’t care enough about the problems we planned on solving. But that’s for another post :) People are especially happy to talk about their problems when they believe there’s a chance you might help solve those problems AND they know you’re not selling them anything (at least not yet). It's simple to clarify these intentions upfront when you're recruiting discovery interview prospects. Doing so will not only set the right context but dramatically increase the number of people who agree to spend time with you. If you find yourself feeling tentative about problem discovery, remember: 1. Problem discovery is all about getting people to talk about their problems 2. People love talking about their problems (especially New Yorkers 😉)

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Strategic alignment across product and field is complex and not easy to get right, but it's a pleasure to work alongside Brett Crane, Trevor Jett (Childers), and Jarod Greene. It's wonderful to be in conversation with them, sharing what we have learned, in this webinar: https://lnkd.in/gc-qp7Hk

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This March I was talking about retention in New York at Product-Led Alliance's Product Summit We went deep into the retention game and the ways to create habits in order to increase the retention over time. So the key is to realize that Retention is the outcome of how well you onboard and engage your users So if you want to increase retention First you need to look at your onboarding flow And make sure that the users are set up and activated Then you have to look at the lifecycle to ensure that The users are getting value in every engagement over time #productmanagement #startups

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