Directional Clarity for Product Managers

The most important thing is to start refining a clear perspective on your area of responsibility. Even if you currently have little time to work on it extensively, this is still a critical step. And even if you feel that your organization lacks clarity on a higher level and you can’t for instance base your work on a nicely connected cascade of Vision, Strategy & Objectives as described in Martin Eriksson’s great mental model Decision Stack: You can still can create more clarity in your area and it’s your job to do so!

Product operating model assessment at Sadapay

At SadaPay, after a few top-down feature "suggestions" didn't achieve the desired outcomes, we recognized the need to improve our product practices. However, this goal was quite vague. Based on Marty Cagan's Transformed, I created a checklist of what good practices look like. I then worked with stakeholders to assess our current state so we could build an improvement plan.

Why It's Finally Time for the Individual Contributor PM to Shine

Why hasn’t there been an IC PM career track? Candidly, I think it's because product leaders haven’t introduced the right incentives. In my org, we have an IC PM track that goes all the way up to the C-suite. For example, an IC PM reports directly to me as our Chief Product Innovation Officer. PM orgs are naturally smaller than engineering orgs. So forcing all great PMs to aspire to be managers isn’t sustainable. It’s common to have an IC career track in engineering. We need the same for PMs.

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