Sean Horgan

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Practice of Product

Leading PMs

Sean Horgan

Performance Reviews for PMs

Self Assessment for PMs

Hiring PMs (drafting)

Measuring the health of your PM org (drafting)

Process (drafting)

“It makes no sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do” — Steve Jobs

The leap from a product manager serving as an individual contributor to a Manager of PMs can be very challenging.

Fareed Mosavat⁠

and Casey Winters laid out the challenges in this great article:

Crossing the Canyon⁠

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In that article, they laid out four key transitions you need to make:

Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product work

Being good at your job → training others to be good at theirs

Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others

Gaining more personal scope → Creating more scope for the organization

Principles

A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”

A manager of PMs needs to focus on:

Clear objectives that are tightly aligned with the company’s business so everyone knows what success & failure looks like. Without clarity in objectives, you won’t know if your org structure and roles support or detract from achieving those objectives.

Clear roles & responsibilities across the team so you can divide & conquer your way through the objectives. Clarity doesn’t imply limited or static — a high functioning team should empower members of the team to cover down on each other and reorganize when the situation demands it.

Autonomy, mastery & purpose for everyone on the team (from

Drive⁠

Questions to constantly ask your team

Who are the customers, what are their problems, how are we solving them, what’s our unique value problem? Lean stack mindset.

Are the objectives clear? Does the impact matter?

What’s our secret? What makes us special/different? What moats with castles are we building?

How are we different?

How are we managing risks?

Viability - business success

Desirability - users will love it

Feasibility - developers can build it

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Brandon Chu’⁠

framing of Managing PMs as an Investor-Entrepreneur⁠

relationship strikes a chord:

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On Ownership (drafting)

DRAFTING

On Decisions

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Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager⁠

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On Growth

As a leader of PMs you need to think about a PM’s career beyond your team and the company. It’s rare for the product they onboarded to or created to continue to present exactly the challenges and opportunities necessary for their growth. You either help them find the next best thing or someone else will...and it’s better for it to be you.

You should have honest conversations with your team members about their career goals. This should be both 1:1 and as a team.

What is the perfect environment for them? Do they see themselves as a founder or a CPO at a 10K+ Fortune 100 company?

NewCo - start their own company

From scratch

Through an incubator

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https://www.c10labs.com/⁠

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SomeoneElseCo - finding the right startup

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https://www.joinprospect.com/⁠

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