. @eladgil wrote the High Growth Handbook, regarding the challenges startups weather after product-market fit. Spoiler: great problems to have are still problems and can still kill you.
We excerpted a chapter on product management: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/building-a-great-pm-org …
Thoughts:
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Partly it's about earning mutual trust over time. Partly it's about being able to hear opinions regarding e.g. "We need X amount of time to refactor or we bite a Y% productivity hit until we do" and balance against recent cadence, near objectives, etc.
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Partly it's being an advocate for your team internally because there will *always* be someone saying "Duct tape it and move faster!" and, in those times where that someone is not you, you should be able to zealously advocate for giving team the space needed to produce great work.
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Elad mentions that most high-performing software companies don't need *project* managers. I would caveat this with "Does your company have something it does which is operationally intensive?" In which case it probably will have project managers, too, sometimes supporting ProdMs.
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"Operationally intensive" is a term of art for humans-touching-atoms which underpins a lot of the great software companies coming up right now, which are no less software companies for the fact that they do do material work, at scale, on messy interactions with nature.
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There's an entire rest of the book where that came from. You can find it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil-ebook/dp/B07DRPGGQ7/ … I don't normally enjoy business books, because they're typically business blog posts with 300 pages of filler. This one isn't that, happily.
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I'd encourage you to read the interviews in the book. Picasso once said something about how art critics talk about majestic trends and soaring emotions while artists talk about where to find cheap turpentine. My review: "This book smells of turpentine."
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(Incidentally, if you're an author of a turpentine-y persuasion, my colleague
@zebriez would love to make your acquaintance. She's busy trying to build a publishing house within our software company, and is brilliant to work with.)Show this thread
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