Testing Best Practices

In the PMHQ Slack community, we regularly get thought-provoking questions that we feel should be explored in-depth and documented for future reference. We’re starting a new set of Q&A posts called Highlights to dive into these kinds of questions, and enable everyone in the community to revisit the answers and contribute further!

“Should QA be part of the Dev or the Product team? At the moment I’m working for a startup that has a dev team with 8 developers and a product team of 5. Our current QA is part of the dev team.

The question is what team should have the ownership and accountability of QA, since product quality in the end comes back to product. I would love to learn how you’ve solved this in the past.” Continue Reading

How to Decide if You Need an MBA as a Product Manager

One of the most common questions I get asked is, “do you recommend that I get an MBA (Master’s of Business Administration) to become a product manager?”

My answer is, “it depends on context, just like any other product decision.” 

Too often, society tells us what we should be doing in absolute terms, and too often we seek absolute answers – either it should always be yes, or it should always be no.

Rather than provide a recommendation, I’d like to provide you a framework for deciding whether you need an MBA to become a product manager. That way, you are empowered to make your own recommendation that best suits your personal situation.

First, let’s discuss what makes a good product manager, and analyze how you line up against those requirements. Then, let’s discuss what an MBA provides you, and what the relevant tradeoffs are. Finally, let’s pull together a set of questions for you to ask yourself, so that you can make the most informed decision possible. Continue Reading

Sprint Best Practices

One of the main benefits of working in an Agile fashion is that you can shift your product priorities as the landscape around you changes.

While this benefit enables you to be flexible, it’s often difficult to keep sprints updated to reflect ever-changing priorities, and to seamlessly communicate these changes across the organization.

So, let’s talk about sprint best practices. I’m assuming that you’re using some of ticket management system, such as Jira, Asana, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, etc.

Ticket Ordering

First, ensure your sprint is loaded in absolute priority order.

You get no ties, and you get no buckets. Every ticket should be strictly prioritized. The order of the tickets in your sprint is exactly the order that your development team should execute against. Continue Reading

Implementing New Technologies

In our last post, we discussed how to select new technologies for your tech stack. As a reminder, this decision is critical to the long-term health of both the product and the organization, and usually appears at critical inflection points. So now that we’ve discussed how to select new technologies, in this post we’ll tackle implementing new technologies.

Before we get started, I want to emphasize that the frameworks that we’ll explore below are valid across many different kinds of product launches.

As product managers, we should strive to leverage reusable frameworks and guidelines rather than blindly memorizing formulas or processes. That way, our experiences build on top of one another and enable us to tackle broader and deeper challenges over time. Continue Reading

Selecting New Technologies

Every product manager builds their product on top of some set of technologies (commonly known as a tech stack).

As customer needs and organizational needs continue to change, product managers may find that they can no longer solve these needs through product iterations alone. In cases like these, PMs are faced with a difficult decision: whether to switch out parts of their tech stack.

This decision is critical to the long-term health of both the product and the organization, and usually appears at critical inflection points – such as when a startup has found product-market fit and is aggressively scaling, or when a company suddenly finds itself inefficient and unprofitable.

I’ve had the opportunity to witness a couple of these decisions firsthand, and I’ve had the privilege (and pain) of leading such a decision myself. Since the decision to change technologies is rare but high-impact, I’d like to share my frameworks and best practices for selecting and implementing new technologies. Continue Reading

Crisis Management as a Product Manager

As a product manager, you’re guaranteed to come across at least one large product-related crisis at work, if not multiple ones. Therefore, crisis management is a core skill for any product manager.

Through observing senior product leadership, learning from peers, and reflecting on my own experiences, I’ve found that the most productive way to tackle a crisis is to break it down into four stages: identification, mitigation, diagnosis, and prevention.

But before I dive into each of the four stages of crisis management, I want to highlight a particular mindset that you need to have as you resolve the issue.

The Golden Mindset

Never blame others.

Blame is counterproductive. When you blame someone, you place that person on the defensive, which means they are far less likely to cooperate with you to resolve the issue. Continue Reading