# Philosophies Published articles for Philosophies. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## Guidance for Scaling - Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions DevFeed: [Guidance for Scaling - Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2021-12-29T21:30:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [scaling](), [Product Management]() Tags: [founders](), [growth](), [hiring](), [leadership](), [philosophies](), [scaling]() ### AI overview The article advises founders to empower newly hired functional leaders instead of micromanaging them. It recommends clearly communicating priorities and distinguishing reversible decisions from irreversible ones while scaling a business. ### Source excerpt Was having a conversation with a founder earlier today and the topic of hiring functional leaders came up. I offered one of my common pieces of advice which was don't hold the reins too tightly once you hire them. It's something I see happen over and over to first time founders. You hire a new VP of Product and then still continue to oversee so much of the product process yourself. It is understandable, it's your baby, you've spent years building it to this point, they don't love it the same way you do. The likely outcome is your new VP of product won't find success. They'll feel they're not able to execute on a vision of their own. They'll feel micromanaged. Even the smallest decisions they'll feel aren't fully theirs and get second guessed. Perhaps you could do it better, that's not necessarily the question. What you're focused on is growing and scaling, this is the reason you hired them. So how do you do this without the business careening off tracks? Well first, empower them to make decisions, but beyond that there are a few things you can do so you feel more comfortable entrusting them with their functional area. Communication is key First, clearly communicate your priorities and thought process. This doesn't mean tell them what to do, but priorities... Bob Iger states it as "You have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it's what separates great managers from the rest". I couldn't immediately find the reference, but recall reading that he started each week with his execs communicating his top 5 priorities across the company. This gives you a line of sight into the leadership's thinking. This could be as simple as: I'm worried about our pipeline for next year I'm worried about retention and how it affects long term growth I'm worried that we have the tech stack to scale for next 3 years Something similar to that last one came up in the conversation, which led us down a brief conversation of reversibles and irreversibles. In product ## Top 5 Product and Management skills: SQL, Excel, Clear Communication, Story, Prioritization DevFeed: [Top 5 Product and Management skills: SQL, Excel, Clear Communication, Story, Prioritization]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2021-04-27T21:30:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [Product Management](), [SQL]() Tags: [analysis](), [communication](), [philosophies](), [product-management](), [sql]() ### AI overview This opinion article discusses five skills the author associates with product and management work: SQL, Excel, clear communication, storytelling, and prioritization. It particularly emphasizes SQL for analyzing customer and cohort data, and Excel for examining information and supporting decisions. ### Source excerpt A few months ago there was a tweet from @jasoncwarner about leadership skills/super powers: SQL Excel Concise writing Story telling Prioritization. I've spent quite a bit of time in product management roles, and in recent years more in leadership. I've found a lot of the skills in product to translate into good leadership skills as well, but maybe I'm bluring the lines there. Regardless, with his 5 skills I found myself nodding and have written about each of these some on my blog and then at times on twitter. He long since deleted the tweet, and while I wait for him to republish I thought I'd reprise a few of these with my own view point. SQL Yeah, I'm a "database" person. But not really, I'm a product person. But if I want to answer a question about what our customers are doing 9 times out of 10 the answer to that question is hiding inside a SQL database. If it's not in a SQL database they've made a SQL like interface to access that data. If you want to feel like you have some magical super power that probably none of your peers posses pick up SQL. How many people working in React know SQL? Know many people that write Go know SQL? Same question if you know Ruby. The insights into how many users created their freemium account 3 months ago, but then converted to paying within 30 days, vs converted to paying after 30 days for a cohort analysis of fast converters vs. slow converters I can probably write in SQL before you've parsed what I'm trying to get at and started to write in any other language. That type of insight is powerful. Now if you think of how many people on a product team, or a management team know SQL-you're in a unique position. It really is a super power Excel This one is more common with MBAs and business types, but nonetheless is still valuable. While I love SQL, a pivot table in SQL isn't quite the same. There are absolutely people that can spin circles around me in Excel (looking at you @rstephensme). But Excel is way more broad reaching a programm ## How Product Managers and Engineering Managers Can Stay Aligned DevFeed: [How Product Managers and Engineering Managers Can Stay Aligned]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2019-06-30T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [Product Management](), [meetings]() Tags: [engineering](), [engineering-manager](), [manager](), [philosophies](), [product-management]() ### AI overview The article argues that product managers and engineering managers should present a unified position to their teams. It recommends explicit communication, regular one-on-ones, advance review of team communications, and resolving disagreements privately rather than in team meetings. ### Source excerpt I've worked as a PM at a number of size companies for a few years now. At a startup and then as a part of a larger company once startups were acquired. I've been the first PM for a team as well as first for a company. I've written at times about product management, and today I'd like to drill into one aspect that doesn't seem to get talked about enough and that is the pairing of product manager and engineering manager. Mom vs. Dad As parents my partner and I have learned very quickly that we need to have a consistent voice and unified view of things. I care that our son watches less power rangers otherwise he's going to use his megazord powers on our TV and we'll be watching a lot more of nothing. My partner cares that when we're visiting family in the south they drink enough water so they don't get dehydrated. Meanwhile my kids are experts at leveraging us to get what they want. My daughter came to me last night asking if she could play on her iPad some. Not knowing if she had or if she'd already given an answer my safest question was have you asked your mom? In the absense of knowing my default isn't a yes or no, it's a "let me learn more." and then potentially discuss it. EM vs. PM As a PM I want us to build a rich and powerful product, but there is a strong balance to doing too little vs. too much. It isn't always a question of doing more, we need to make sure the product is well built. In order to do that we need to say no at times. Saying no, as well as yes, needs to come from a unified front, both engineering and product. If one side is agreeing without being aligned with the other half you're going to wind up with a confused and frustrated team. There are a number of ways engineering managers and product managers can stay aligned. The first starts with being explicit with each other, so if you're struggling with one side communicating things the other don't agree with... sit down and have a conversation about it. From an ongoing perspective you can get to a be ## Come over for dinner DevFeed: [Come over for dinner]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2019-05-01T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [hosting](), [trust](), [scheduling]() Tags: [hosting](), [philosophies](), [remote](), [scheduling](), [trust](), [work]() ### AI overview The author describes regularly inviting coworkers, former colleagues, and friends to dinner as an alternative to going out. They argue that shared meals build rapport and trust, support more effective teamwork, and can include remote workers and team members through planned scheduling and rotation. ### Source excerpt When I first moved to the Bay area I was fresh out of grad school. I was frequently heading out to dinner or to happy hour after work with colleagues. I was young and single, so why not of course. As time passed, marriage, kids, etc. the ability to go out for a quick drink or dinner was competing with various priorities. Dinner and drinks with co-workers was always a great time. It wasn't just about hanging out, it built rapport and trust which I found made me a more effective teammate and product manager. It was about 8 years ago that I started to implement a variation of heading out for dinner and drinks. I started inviting people over for dinner. I still do this regularly. Roughly once a week we end up hosting someone for dinner. Sometimes it is a single person, sometimes it is a group of people. Sometimes it is co-workers, sometimes former colleagues, often friends that don't work in tech. Growing up in the south it was common to have people over, I'd said we did that just as much as going out to dinner with folks. You'd get an invite to go to someone elses place and you'd show up with a bottle of wine or flowers in hand. Initially when I asked people in the Bay area over for dinner I'd get weird looks. Over? Like to your house? The reaction from folks at the end of the night was very often... that was really fun. Thanks for the invite, I can't remember the last time I just sat down at someones place, had a good meal, and conversation. Once I found early success with this I started implementing it pretty methodically. When remote workers were in town I'd make sure to place them at thet top of the list to come if the scheduling worked. Same when friends visit from out of town. I'd also try to regularly rotate through my teams and those that report to me. At one point when I had 22 engineers that I was leading product for I had to do a bit of juggling and stagger things a bit, groups of 4 folks or so at a time and each would be over about once every 6 months. I made ## Using email as an effective tool DevFeed: [Using email as an effective tool]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2019-04-16T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [email]() Tags: [effective](), [email](), [philosophies](), [tips](), [tool](), [work]() ### AI overview A product manager shares practical ways to use email for cross-functional communication and engagement. The article recommends including meeting notes and action items directly in emails, recirculating substantially revised documents, using personalized mail merge for feedback requests, and encouraging timely discussion on team emails. It presents the author's reported response-rate experiment while noting that the supplied text is incomplete. ### Source excerpt I send way too many emails in a day. My inbox is very intermingled with my to do list and often represents some form of it. More relevant though is that email is a primary means of how I accomplish work. Being a PM I work cross functionally with other teams (from marketing, to engineering, to sales, to BD, to other product teams) and of course customers. Having to work so cross functionality I've found a lot of hacks I use to be able to better accomplish your goals with email, here is a collection of some of those. Let me be clear, this is not another post about inbox 0, how I swapped to slack. This instead is how I use email to more effectively communicate and get people to engage. In other words it is about making emails more useful, not just getting through them faster. And onto those tips. Don't leave a document in a document Often times I've found folks will collaborate in a document during a meeting or take notes there. After the meeting folks will email the document around, but few seldom actually open. Reasons may be they're not logged in on their phone or it may be they just don't care that much, I'm not really sure. What I do know is that by taking the notes and action items from the doc and including them in the email you will get more people paying attention to them. If you really want to get good at this when there is significant revisions of a work in progress document, re-circulate the updated version via email. Again not just a link to it, but the document itself. Mail merge isn't just for marketing Years ago I sent a company wide request for feedback (to about 120 people). I got less than 3 responses. I ran an experiment the next time I needed the same thing using a mail merge so my same email seemed personal and was from me to them instead of some large alias. I got a response rate of over 45%. Use this wisely... not every email you send needs a response. A broad update can absolutely be to team@, but when you need to get actual feedback and people d ## OKRs aren't going to fix your communication issues DevFeed: [OKRs aren't going to fix your communication issues]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2019-03-30T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [meetings]() Tags: [behavior](), [change](), [communication](), [distributed](), [early-stage](), [founders](), [management](), [meetings](), [notes](), [okrs](), [philosophies](), [priority](), [recap](), [results](), [team]() ### AI overview The article argues that OKRs do not by themselves resolve startup communication problems. Teams must first identify the problem they are trying to solve and explicitly communicate agreed goals, especially as organizations grow and people miss meetings. ### Source excerpt Talking with a startup a few days ago they asked for my opinions on OKRs. I have slightly mixed opinions on them overall and started to disclose some of those. Though in sharing some of this I had a few immediate realizations that might be broadly applicable. The crux of his question was, at what stage should we put them in place. I've seen a few companies try to put in some form of OKR, and most were met with pretty mixed results. The reason is that OKRs need to change something about your behavior otherwise why put them in place... either change something about the goals you would otherwise have or the methods at which you went about achieving them. Stepping back a bit, my first question and a very focusing question on almost any situation to ask is "What problem are we trying to solve?" In our conversation he actually paused a bit. As he paused a bit longer it was clear that question had not been fully asked or answered. The first and most common case I see with startups trying to put in place OKRs, v2moms, management by objectives is that the team is not aligned and focused on the same goals. But my follow-on question is consistently, have you communicated what you decided you goals were. Startups tend to go through some distinct growing phases. The early stages all the founders are in a room together building out the product. When you get the first few engineers you expand out a little, but still in a single co-working conference room easily. Eventually you need a real office. At the real office stage you start to have an all hands where, this is probably gathered around a large lunch table at first. At all hands no one takes meeting minutes and sends out a recap, instead people take some notes and you assume everyone was present. But, at about 20 people you have at least one person that misses the weekly team meeting and misses something key. In a 1:1 you catch it that it was talked about as a priority... but they weren't there. This very subtle change I've seen l ## Why I love building developer products DevFeed: [Why I love building developer products]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2019-03-12T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [Software](), [coding](), [systems](), [scaling](), [service]() Tags: [developer](), [developer-products](), [opinions](), [philosophies](), [product](), [scaling](), [software](), [systems]() ### AI overview An opinion piece explains why the author enjoys building developer-focused products. It highlights the potential for software and systems to improve life at scale, the challenge of serving skeptical developers, and the author's personal familiarity with developer-product work. ### Source excerpt For much of my career I've been focused on building out developer or data focused products with the customer in some form or fashion being a developer on the other end. I fully realize now that I'm destined to spend the rest of my career in that space, either that or trying my hand at wine making. There are a few things that I personally find rewarding about the space that I've shared with a number of people individually lately and thought I would share more broadly. First, software really is eating the world. Often developers and entrepeurs ask about what they could build that would be a good business. The reality is about anything that has not been modernized to as a service and improved with software could be. We have far less developers in the world than we need to execute on all the ways we could improve products and life. To me what is interesting is the last part of that last sentence. It is not that the market for developers is huge, which I do believe it is. It more that when we automate with systems we can get amazing economies of scale. I know folks that reminisce and talk about how we're more stressed being always connected and such and that in the old days people got out and worked the fields and enjoyed the sun. They also absolutely physically exhausted their bodies in the process. The ability to make life better at scale is an interesting one and often done through systems we develop. The second reason is the challenge and the reward. Developers are notoriously tough critics. If it feels/smells like marketing then they have an allergic reaction, and that is probably because much of it is done poorly. If they experience really positive/great marketing they latch on more than the average person. Most developers are by nature a bit skeptical... for some reason this resonates with me. But, I've found they are the largest/biggest supporters once they're excited about something. Personally I'd rather folks more critical and then have a few diehard fans than a ## When to ship it, when to kill it DevFeed: [When to ship it, when to kill it]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2014-08-13T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [Heroku](), [Users](), [Testing]() Tags: [beta](), [feature](), [flag](), [heroku](), [philosophies](), [product](), [testing]() ### AI overview The article presents a product-shipping framework based on alpha or beta testing with users. It recommends gradually rolling out a feature, temporarily removing it or disabling its feature flag, and using immediate user feedback to decide whether to improve or kill the feature. ### Source excerpt A few weeks ago at lunch I had the opportunity to catch up with a company in the current YC batch, building something very similar to dataclips. While we talked about a lot of things from what we've learned from dataclips, marketing, and other areas. One area we talked about was product and when to ship vs. when to kill things and I realized I hadn't talked on my fairly simple but clear view on this publicly, so here it is. A large credit to Adam Wiggins for giving this model early on in Heroku and his approach to shipping product. A precursor to shipping First a little background on shipping, in shipping something I'm going to assume you have some process of alpha/beta testing with users. This is actually fairly key, if you're not testing it with users then well the rest of this is all moot. Alpha and beta testing is pretty simple, you need some early users. These can be friends, people within a network, or random users you select from. There's different value to how you select these but that's a topic for another time and place. On to shipping So how do you know it's ready. The basic idea is super simple. Give it to some users in alpha/beta testing. Or start to roll it out following a one -> some -> many all principle (maybe to 5% or 10% of your userbase). Then take that brand new feature away. There's a couple of ways to do this as far as mechanics. If you're in contact with users such as alpha/beta users that you were higher touch with just email them. Tell them you're removing the feature, or if you want to approach it more softly ask them how much they'd miss it if it were gone tomorrow. If you're rolling it out more broadly perhaps behind a feature flag, flip it off and watch for feedback. Once you take the feature away or threaten to if you don't have users with pitchforks almost immediately then it's not ready to ship. Go back to the drawing board and work more on it or simply kill it. As @james_heroku would say: "So you're saying the reason to ship the shi ## Scaling Organizations - Scribing DevFeed: [Scaling Organizations - Scribing]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Map Published: 2014-07-14T20:55:56Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Craig Kerstiens]() Topics: [scaling](), [meetings](), [Development]() Tags: [context](), [development](), [growth](), [meetings](), [organizations](), [philosophies](), [practical](), [process](), [scaling](), [team]() ### AI overview The article discusses how planning and meeting documentation need to evolve as organizations and development teams grow. It recommends concise but sufficiently detailed planning summaries, running meeting notes, attendance records, and explicitly communicating information to absent team members so context is not lost. ### Source excerpt In the process of growing a company there's several hurdles based on the size of the company. What worked at 5 doesn't work at 20, what works at 20 doesn't work at 50, and what worked at 50 doesn't work at 150. There's a lot of talk about two pizza teams and scaling development teams out there. One thing I haven't seen quite enough of is details around scribing and documenting things. Planning At teams of 2 and 3 you get everyone in a room. Perhaps 1 person says what you're going to do and you all rally around it, or maybe it's a day of debate and persuasion from all sides. In the end though you all leave, get heads down, but all know what goal you're working towards. At a larger company planning doesn't scale quite this way. I've seen roadmapping and planning done a variety of ways as companies scale, but most times the thing they miss for far too long is documenting what comes out of it. Many may produce some level of artifact, but a cohesive wrap-up is often missed. Such an artifact should be easily digestible within a couple minutes, but also deep enough to answer many of the initial questions raised by the high level pieces. Meetings Meetings are a smaller level item than broader planning, and tend to go without thorough note taking than higher level planning. With growth you'll have more meetings, trust me you will. The more meetings you have the more likely you may miss one or two you're interested in. Or perhaps its as simple as some team members being out. Summer is especially hard around this. For a team of 10 it's not uncommon that you may go all summer with at least 1 person not in the meeting and often two. Keeping those that miss the meeting well informed of what happened at it is critical as you scale. This is slightly less important at an extremely large company, though still valuable, but critical as you scale to larger. As you're scaling things are changing faster, and context can more easily get lost. So how do you improve this? Some practical tip