issue 26 - week of march 4, 2024

Editor’s Note

One of the best life lessons I’ve learned in my career is that you have to do more than just manage the work, the budgets, and the schedules to have true impact.

Gaining Product Understanding took my career to a whole new level and tbh it made my day-to-day work a lot more interesting.

Today, I’m giving you guys advice on how to embark on product understanding as an agilist or program manager.

In this issue we also have:

• A reminder from Google on how we learn from failure

• Lots of free templates

• A five-step process to empowering your team

Special shoutout to those of y’all who checked on me post concussion. I’m on the mend. About 80% there.

I appreciate this community so much.

Stay Blessed Fam!

Until next Wednesday,

Phedra, Founder at HCPM

this week’s picks

recs for your delivery goals - uncommon sources with nuggets of wisdom

1. 📺 Watching: This webinar. If you’re unsure where to start in the conversation of measuring success as a program manager, this presentation is a great intro to product thinking as a program/project manager. So many of us are used to the plan, the tickets, the deadline, the cost. Understanding the market problem, the outcome, the lifecycle, and the value will improve your program success rate a million times over.

2. 🎧 Listening: How do you empower your team? This podcast gives you a five-step process for folks who feel like they’re on an island in a state of SOS (stressed out, overwhelmed, and stuck) to shift to having more courage, confidence, and freedom. It’s targeted at biz owners, but let’s be honest - if you’re doing your job right, you’re program is pretty intrapreneurial. 😉

3. 📚 Reading: I had to dig this resource out recently and it’s a great reminder of how to learn from failure. Years ago, Google dropped a free book on SRE, and even if you’re not an engineer - my goodness there are so many good lessons in here. If you’re a person who works on production systems or launches frequently, this book gives tons of insight into all the things. Did I mention it’s FREE!

4. Following: Pawel Huryn! I like anyone who gives me free templates. He’s on the product spectrum, but I’ve found many of these templates useful in my role as well.

Have a recommendation? Send it to: [email protected].

feature: product understanding

Every single project/program in the world has:

• A market problem it’s trying to solve.

• A thing (typically a product or service) that needs to get into the hands of some type of user/customer.

• The need to change quickly based on market signals.

• The need to add value to a user’s life

Yet, I’m surprised at how often I ask project/program managers these questions regarding their own hard work and they are pressed to give a sufficient amount of detail.

Why is that?

Many of us are trained (through no fault of our own) to double down on planning, resources, scope, and cost.

Agile was supposed to help us with this, but for most of us, we traded Schedule, Scope, Budget for Program Increments, Story Points, & Velocity.

We’re still talking about the wrong things. (Y’all know me, I’m always going to say it.)

You have to have real-world context if you’re going to deliver value to your customer, your business unit, or your executives.

So what’s a gal or guy to do?

Let’s give a hypothetical example. Let’s say you’re company is going to follow the crowd and wants to unlock the power of AI to do something big and important for the world.

Where do you start?

Most of us will start with an AI project lifecycle. Simplified it’s some version of:

• Problem Scoping

• Data collection and prep

• Model development

• Model deployment

• Model Evaluation

And if you’re not into data science and machine learning, this probably means a whole lot of nothing, but it won’t stop most of you guys from making a plan and working with a team to start estimating stories. 😇

Instead of being this person - look around. Do you see evidence of this technology in your everyday life?

What about Amazon’s product recommendations?

Netflix’s streaming recommendations?

ChatGPT lol?

You guys get the point.

Every tech company has a blog - try to understand what they did. Does it make sense? Could you apply some of that thinking to what you’re trying to accomplish? There’s too much open information to start these planning conversations from scratch.

My favorites are when Amazon is like “it took us 6 years to do this”, but your executives want it in 1 year LOL. I digress.

And then, go through some set of exercises to answer the questions:

• Who is your customer?

• What is the desired experience of interacting with this product or service?

• What problem are you solving?

• How do you know when you solved it?

Only after you’ve answered these questions should you start planning and scoping work. But real talk - your team members will appreciate you so much more when you come to the program table with this level of context to help guide conversations around the plan.

Be a hero. Gain product understanding.

so much wow like

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