Internal Release Notes

As product managers, we work with many stakeholders from many different departments within our organization. Our stakeholders rely on us to inform them on what’s happening with the product, as it impacts their operations and their capabilities. I’ve found that one of the most effective ways to keep stakeholders in the loop is to use internal release notes.

Most of us are familiar with release notes in general. Check out Slack’s release notes as a fantastic example.

Here’s one from March 2018:

The release notes clearly describe what was released and why it was released. These external-facing release notes are targeting external users (and also injects a bit of brand personality and fun). Continue Reading

Task Management 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!

“Any tips on how to get started with your day when you have an overwhelming amount of tasks to complete? I practice Inbox Zero and I’m well organized, so that isn’t the issue here.“

– Russell Christensen, Senior Business Analyst at Bankers Healthcare Group

Our community of product leaders had lots of great insights to share on managing overwhelming lists of tasks! Below is the summary of their task management best practices. Continue Reading

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

Product Q&A with Hunter Walk

Hunter Walk

About:

Hunter Walk is a Co-founder and Partner at Homebrew, a seed-stage venture fund investing in mission-driven founders seeking to enable the bottoms up economy – helping businesses, developers, and individuals drive economic growth and innovation through simpler, cheaper and more direct access to technology, information and customers.

Before venture, Hunter was a Director of Product at Google, where he led consumer product management at YouTube, starting when it was acquired by Google. At YouTube, he led the product team to work on monetization, mobile, international, and content identification strategies that helped build YouTube into one of the world’s largest websites. In his last year, he worked to evolve Youtube as a platform for social causes, education, and change. He originally joined Google in 2003, managing product and sales efforts for Google’s contextual advertising business. Continue Reading