Building-Products-and-Startups-OKRs.md

Building Products and Startups

As a leader of a product development team you might have a PM that you’re working with, but some of your role will involve deciding how/when product is built, who builds what, etc. So you’ll need to level up your product skills.

• Aligning Projects with Business Goals - by Anthony Eden. Provides a simple project management spreadsheet of six questions: 1) What is the problem we are trying to solve?; 2) What does success look like, and how does it fit in the big picture?; 3) What are the MUST DO and the MUST NOT DO items?; 4) What is the deadline?; 5) Who should I talk to for help and get feedback?; 6) Have we done this before? Something we already have to get started?

• The Art of Project Management - notes by Joe Golberg about Scott Berkun's book.

• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything - by Joe Goldberg. Notes about the book by Guy Kawasaki.

• Blue Ocean Strategy - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

• The Bootstrapper’s Bible - Joe Goldberg's notes about the book by Seth Godin.

• Designing Workshops that Work: Getting Better at Brainstorming - by Cindy Chang. Takeaway: Start with an overview, work backwards and think in chunks to start a plan as well as about outcomes, detail, delegate.

• Do the Simple Thing First: The Engineering Behind Instagram - by Harry McCracken. Takeaway: Instagram founders made technical decisions using a principle which favored practicality over perfection. "If it solves a problem and gets us closer to launch, let’s do it."

• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - by Charity Majors. Takeaway: "Fuck the whole idea that only managers get career progression. And fuckkkk the idea you have to choose a “lane” and grow old there. I completely reject this kind of slotting."

• Everyone Forgets Technical Research - by Product Habits. Takeaway: Offers a step-by-step template for creating a 1-3 page technical research outline that will enable product leads to communicate plans more effectively with developers, who can then better do the research on their side required to build a product successfully. "The outline should be a short summary of what you’re looking to create, including required features and functionality. You should also provide guidance on what matters most to you (and customers). What’s the core problem you’re looking to solve, and how do you plan to solve it? What are the most important parts of what you’re building?"

• Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No - by Jessica Kerr. Takeaway: An exploration of what tools are Low-Risk (local developer utilities), Moderate Risk 1 (deployment infrastructure), Moderate Risk 2 (programming language), and serious risk (database). “When you do accept a technology into your stack, make sure it has an owner. Spread knowledge through pairing, documentation, and communication. Make responsibility explicit and set aside time for maintenance, upgrades, and reassessment. The right technology today will be the wrong technology at some point.”

• Growth Hacking Notebook - notes by Joe Goldberg.

• How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes (slides) - by Teresa Torres. Takeaway: A detailed look at how to bring focus to product decisions, including suggested tools like the "opportunity solution tree."

• How to Sell the Problem Before Selling the Solution - by David Bailey. Takeaway: Tactical ways to express customer needs and "lead with the need."

• In Praise of SWARMing - by Dan North. Takeaway: "I am offering a new acronym, SWARMing: Scaling Without A Religious Methodology. My argument isn’t that packaged scaling methods are unhelpful per se, rather that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for successful transformation. They can be anything from a useful starting point to an expensive distraction, but one thing they are not is a solution."

• Informal Doesn't Scale - by Jim Grey. Takeaway: "People sometimes fetishize startup smallness. It feels so good! But clinging to it will limit your growth trajectory. Like the overgrown fly, lack of process will crush your company. You need to change your ways of working to fit the company’s size. But this doesn’t have to be terrible. It totally can be terrible, if you do it wrong. Even if you do it right, it will change and even get rid of some of your company’s original goodness. But it enables new levels of goodness that you can’t imagine yet."

• Key Learnings in My First Year as a PM at Amazon - by Venkatraman Prabhu. Takeaway: Lessons learned after a year at the global retailer. Choose the right manager, always measure the product's impact, keep experimenting, have weekly 1:1's with key stakeholders, and get advice.

• Knowns vs Unknowns — Are You Building a Successful Company or Just Typing? - by Aaron Batalion. Takeaway: “You’re probably not the only one in the world with your idea, but if you focus the best people in the room on only the known unknowns, you’ll have a much better shot at winning.”

• Lean-Agile Product Management - by Jez Humble. Takeaway: the course website from Humble's class at UC Berkeley, with syllabus and resources that cover the product lifecycle, team-building, and other key topics. Includes lots of links to talks/articles/etc. that you might also find linked to here.

• Lean Startup - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Eric Ries.

• LeanStartup.com - based on the book. Offers an e-newsletter.

• Little Red Book Of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Jeffrey Gitomer.

• The MVP is dead. Long live the RAT. - by Rik Higham. Takeaway: "There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it. Replacing your MVP with a RAT will save you a lot of pain."

• On Writing Product Roadmaps - by Gaurav Oberoi. Takeaway: "Roadmaps are a tool to think about your product beyond the next couple of sprints. They force you to plan, communicate, and get buy in. The win is that your team is aligned, can focus on execution, and reliably achieve long term goals." Includes some useful examples of roadmap docs, and proposed schedules for planning and creating your roadmaps.

• The Only Metric That Matters — Now With Fancy Slides! - by Josh Elman at Greylock Partners. Takeaway: "[T]he only thing founders need to think about is: Are people using your product? Are they using it how you expect (i.e performing the core action)? And, are they performing the core action at the frequency you expect?"

• Paul Graham’s Startup Advice for the Lazy - by Stelios Constantinides. All of Paul Graham’s startup advice summarized in one article.

• The Product Dartboard - by Janet Brunckhorst at Carbon Five. Takeaway: offers a deep dive/description of a tool that assesses a team or individual against attributes associated with project success.

• Product Discovery Anti-Patterns Leading to Failure - by Stefan Wolpers. Takeaway: "The main contributing variables to various product discovery anti-patterns are: * Existing organizational dysfunctions, for example, the organization is structured in functional silos; * A substantial degree of ego issues among individual players—the what-is-in-for-me-syndrome—resulting in personal agendas being pursued; * A complex, multi-layered reporting structure within organizations that filters as well as delays the flow of information, thus impeding communication and decision-making."

• Product Manager vs. Product Owner - by Melissa Perri. Takeaway: "A good Product Manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear outcome oriented goals, how to discover and validate real customer and business value, and what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty that the product will succeed in market. Without this background in Product Management, someone can effectively go through the motions of Product Owner role in Scrum, but they can never be successful in making sure they are building the right thing."

• The Product Manager Superpower: User Science - by Brent Tworetzky. Takeaway: "While finding the perfect user-product fit is rarely easy, trained product managers can find great fits consistently with User Science–the field of deeply understanding people interacting with products through rigorous toolings and process. User science involves understanding both user needs (identifying which problem to solve) and user behaviors (understanding how and why users react to products). This distinction is important: winning products need both a meaningful problem to solve and strong execution."

• Reminder: Your “Product” Company is Just an Implementation Detail - by Jeremy Baker. Takeaway: The progress our customer wants to make is the most important thing. We think about our features and what they can do, and present them that way. When we do this, we’re "forcing our customer to do the hard work. They have to map features to their process and figure out if it helps them make progress ... Instead, talk about the progress our customer wants to make, and build tools that enable that progress."

• Scaling Airbnb with Brian Chesky — Class 18 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C - by Chris McCann. Takeaway: about Airbnb’s “10 star service” thought experiment, in which they transcended the usual five-star review by adding five more measurements for success.

• The Scrum Product Owner Theses - by Stefan Wolpers. Not necessarily tied to the Scrum agile framework, this list of 56 "theses" addresses the PO's role; examines product discovery and stakeholder management; roadmap planning, and more.

• To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO - by First Round. Takeaway: "There’s a list of questions companies should ask themselves as they head into rapid growth — ideally in that relatively brief moment right after clinching product-market fit." The post provides these questions, to help you become less reactive and more proactive in managing your growth.

• The Ultimate Question - notes by Joe Goldberg about the book by Fred Reichheld, which focuses on measurements like the net promoter score (NPS).

• Veteran CTO (with Multiple Successful Exits) Answers Your Top Startup-Building Questions - by FirstRound. Takeaway: an interview with/profile of Adil Ajmal, CTO of LendingHome, who has scaled up teams at seven tech organizations. He covers topics ranging from interviewing to hiring a VP Product.

• What Happens When Startups Turn from Their Innovation Stage to Operational Excellence? - by Mark Suster. Takeaway: "Startups are fun and exhilarating and filled with challenging problems to solve. To the neophyte it seems like startup challenges are strictly product or technical in nature but to innovate, systematize and scale a billion dollar company it involves way more decisions about strategy, economics, resource allocations and team composition."

• When, Which...Design Thinking, Lean, Design Sprint, Agile? - by Geert Claes. Takeaway: “It probably makes more sense to just look at Design Thinking, Lean, Design Sprint & Agile as a bunch of tools and techniques in one’s toolbox, rather than argue for one over the other, because they can all add value somewhere on the innovation spectrum.”

• Why Software Sucks - by Scott Berkun. Good ways to think about why it happens and what you can do to make it happen less.

OKRs

• All About OKRs: How To Set Them, Achieve Them, And Track Them In Trello - by Kevan Lee. Takeaway: A concise and clear description of what OKRs are and how to create them (i.e., for both productivity as well as agile/cultural reasons).

• Applying OKRs - by Dan North. Takeaway: Insights from Dan about working with companies applying Objectives and Key Results; do's and dont's.

• Awesome-OKR - by Domenico Solazzo. Takeaway: an Awesome List of OKR-related decks, articles and videos.

• Beyond OKRs: The Formula for High Performing Teams (video) - by Christina Wodtke. Takeaway: the creator of Radical Focus talks about different kinds of teams, team-building, experiential learning, and more.

• Learn OKR - by Felipe Castro. Takeaway: A comprehensive resource of information on how to create and plan to OKRs. Includes a link to a free, downloadable book.

• OKRs - by Eleganthack. Takeaway: articles on personal OKRs, "one objective to rule them all," and miscellaneous resources.

• OKRs.com - by Ben Lamorte. Takeaway: a resource for anyone using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or considering using OKRs to make measurable progress on their most important goals at work.

• Set Goals with OKRs - by re:Work. Takeaway: a step-by-step guide to creating, developing and grading OKRs.

• Why OKRs Are Not Delivering the Result Executive Managers Expect - by Veronika Goncalves. Takeaway: "In many cases, when organizations apply OKRs, they apply the process the in the same format as Management by Objectives: using a Top-Down Approach. But this format does not create value for the organization because the top managers do not understand what the customer’s real problems are. When defining the objectives, they are usually not in alignment with the company’s current reality." Also, OKRs might not be the right framework for every company; consider options like agile portfolio management.