Don’t get hit by Goodhart’s Law — Before the advent of SaaS and ubiquitous internet access, software companies had very little information about how end users actually used their products. They had to painstakingly conduct research trying to understand their customers’ behavior, and due to the long lead times to ship software in physical form, could not…

Evaluating “hard” product skills — I’ve been involved in interview panels for a lot of PMs, and have set up hiring processes for product managers in two different startups. One of the critical components of the interview loop should be what I call the “Product Sense” interview, in which the candidate’s “hard” product management skills…

The pros and cons of requiring written homework — I’ve recently gone through the process of designing a product management interview process for RevenueCat. This is not the first interview process I’ve set up from scratch, but one of the questions that comes up every single time is whether a written take-home assignment should be a part of the…

Four interesting ideas about product org design Recently I’ve been again thinking a lot about setting up product development teams, since we are working on growing the product and engineering orgs at RevenueCat. I’ve written before about what I consider the best in class principles to follow for the product development organization and empowered product teams. In this article, I want to get a bit more practical: how do you decide how to size teams, where…

Don’t attempt to be an engineer, but work with them effectively — This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills. What it means Technology domain skills include understanding and making correct trade-off decisions about the tech stack, key dependencies, and drivers of feasibility and complexity. Technology skills are helpful to communicate with the engineering team…

For product-related homework tasks, companies won’t just steal your responses — Many companies require candidates for product-related positions, such as product managers, product designers, UX researchers, analysts, content strategists, or data scientists to complete a written take-home assignment. I am planning to write a longer article about the pros and cons of homework assignments for product managers specifically, but I wanted…

And here I was thinking I was reading for fun — When I am not working in product management or reading, thinking, and writing about it, I read quite a bit of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. As I was reflecting on what makes a good science fiction story, I realized that some of the ingredients apply to aspects of product…

Knowing your customer and industry, inside out — This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills. What it means Customer & industry domain skills cover the understanding and making correct trade-off decisions about the needs and use cases of the customers, as well as constraints and trends of the industry you…

If at first you don’t succeed, … — This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills. What it means High Agency is a personality trait that means not getting discouraged by adversities and obstacles. It means determination and resourcefulness and finding a way to achieve your objectives, even in the face…