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by
Marty Cagan
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October 1 - October 9, 2022
Her real teaching, though, was watching her empower and grow everyone who worked for her. She gave me the role model I needed: someone who was strong yet always kind. She taught me that you don't have to choose between empathy and authority.
I told Jeff he should try to find someone better. He said, “I know you can do this job.” He believed in me so hard I had to believe in myself.
Teams can make miracles happen when no individual can.
Most important, I have always tried to pay it forward by investing in the lives and careers of others.
Christina Wodtke, Radical Focus (San Francisco: Cucina Media LLC, 2015) and The Team That Managed Itself (San Francisco: Cucina Media LLC, 2019) are good examples.
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Objective 1: Continue to grow core business. Key Result 1: Grow core business revenue by at least 25%. Key Result 2: Reduce annual employer churn from 6% down to 5% or lower.
Key Result 3: Increase seeker success rate from 23% to at least 27%.
Objective 2: Establish company as a proven provider for enterprise‐class companies. Key Result 1: Demonstrate product/market fit by developing no fewer tha...
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analysis of the data shows that positions are filled the fastest, and hiring managers are happiest, when they receive a minimum of 8 but no more than 25 qualified applications.
Company Dashboard What follows is a subset of the company's dashboard, containing the KPIs related to the product strategy. Employers: Improve success rate for employers (% of jobs that successfully fill during 60‐day posting cycle)
Job Seekers: Improve success rate for seekers (% of seekers that successfully find job in 60‐day job search period) Current seeker success rate: 23% (average)
Objective: Demonstrate product/market fit for enterprise. KR: Get at least 8 customer discovery program customers to sign letter of intent to buy.5
Objective: Improve success rate for seekers via recommendations. KR: Increase seeker success from 23% to 25%. KR: Increase first application in first 48 hours from 27% to 30%.
Objective: Improve success rate for seekers via search. KR: Increase seeker success from 23% to 25%.
Uncertainty is messy, and there are never guarantees. But smart leaders usually find a way to make it work because they trust their teams, accept the uncertainty, and manage the risks appropriately.
“The company believes the best results come when you get the right people, trust them, give them freedom to find the best path to achieve objectives, and let them share in the rewards their work makes possible.”
Great things can happen when you give creative, passionate people the freedom to explore ideas.
leaders must establish new ways of working which break down silos and enable and support effective cross‐functional collaboration.
it's much easier to get an executive to put their trust in a peer rather than in a much lower‐level subordinate
top‐10 techniques: Use prototypes. For so many people, PowerPoint presentations just don't cut it. Show them a prototype.
Share the pain. Show the customer pain you are addressing. You can share quotes or even put together a video montage.
Share the vision. People don't just want to know what you're doing today—they want to know where you are heading. The product vision shows where you hope to be in 3–10 years.
Share the learnings. As discussed earlier, when your teams are doing product discovery work every week, you will have significant learnings and insights from the data and from users and customers, on a fairly frequent basis.
Be an expert on your users and customers, your data, your business, and your market.
Learn to show some enthusiasm.
Absolutely be sincere but let people see you're genuinely excited. Enthusiasm really is contagious. Spend time with the product teams. If you're not spending face time with every product manager, product designer, and developer on your team, then they can't see the enthusiasm in your eyes.
Experienced product leaders know that you can never evangelize too much. You can change up the technique, vary the customers you cite as examples, and keep updating the prototype, but evangelism needs to be a constant.
Leader Profile: Avid Larizadeh Duggan
My leadership philosophy in an innovation‐driven context can be simplified into three main components: (1) trust and safety (2) freedom and autonomy, and (3) culture and purpose.
Trust and Safety A leader is not supposed to have all the answers, but is supposed to ask the right questions, and more important, create an environment where the right questions are surfaced.
a leader needs to make her team feel safe. In this environment, no one is smarter than everyone else, trust is established, collaboration is natural, and conflicting ideas are frequent and comfortable because it is safe to be candid.
It is an environment which celebrates a growth mindset rather than success at a point in time, encourages continuous learning, and rejects the know‐it‐alls. By bringing out the best in your teammates, you find the best in yourself.
She will clarify the chaos in a world where change is a constant.
Culture and Purpose Good leaders focus on culture and purpose because culture drives innovation and performance. The greatest capital of an organization is its people.
To innovate, people need autonomy and meaning.
Great teams are made up of ordinary people who are inspired and empowered. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work—that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.
They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love, yet work for their business. Empowered teams that produce extraordinary results don't require exceptional hires.
The leader's behaviors can make or break the ability of an organization to transform to a true product culture.
Coaching You have developed and embraced a culture of coaching. Every single member of a product team has at least one manager that is committed to helping her reach her potential.
leadership style: Debby Meredith, Audrey Crane, Christina Wodtke, April Underwood, Judy Gibbons, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, Lisa Kavanaugh, and Shan‐Lyn Ma.
