Essays

The most career limiting thing you can do is to fail to grow. The skills and behaviors that lead to promotion and success early in your career are rarely, if ever, the ones that lead to success later in your career. Yet successfully developing over time can be incredibly difficult as it requires undoing old behaviors and bedding down unfamiliar ones.

In this post I lay out why it’s so important to develop different behaviors to grow your career, why it’s so hard to do so and a couple of tools that I’ve found incredibly effective to achieve real change.

Even though Product Management has been a widely practiced discipline for decades now, it’s still frustratingly hard to find people who are really good at it. Worse, it’s easy to be deceived: people who have worked with product managers for long enough or who have executed the most well known product management processes can sound like decent operators but be missing the key foundations.

During a recent Y-Combinator Product Council, Chris Yeh (ex SVP Product @ Box), Charles Zedlewski (GM of Strategic Businesses @ Cloudera), Adrian McDermott (President of Products @ Zendesk) and I offered some advice on picking good product people from bad. Here are the insights.

The iron triangle of project management is a useful tool for pushing back on unrealistic deadlines, but other than that it pretty much misses the point. When a project team pushes back on resources, scope or time they’re generally pushing back on the point of the work