Stupid Matters

– Kate Hopkins in “How to Spot a Partial Product Manager”

a great product manager understands customer feedback first and foremost. But an exceptional PM knows how to contextualize that customer need within the broader company vision and strategy, and then decide whether or not to implement what the customer is asking for.

– Andy Johns, from “What Makes for a Good Product Manager“

Engineering work is novel and intrinsically requires human judgment. It produces a permanent improvement in your service, and is guided by a strategy. It is frequently creative and innovative, taking a design-driven approach to solving a problem—the more generalized, the better. Engineering work helps your team or the SRE organization handle a larger service, or more services, with the same level of staffing.

Eliminating Toil, from Google’s SRE blog

Deciding how important a decision is, is the most important decision you can make.

Brandon Chu, in Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager

Design is an opinion on how others should experience the world.

A good product team needs a mix of design, tech, and business; a mix of genders, creeds, and backgrounds; a mix of industry experience and product management experience; a mix of skills, from the visionary to the detail-oriented, from the data-hungry to the user-research fanatics. This level of diversity not only is the best chance you have of representing your audience, but also ensures the best experience is brought to any product challenge the team will face, and is the best defense against any one individual’s confirmation bias.

– from Product Leadership

Resist the urge to narrow your research focus too quickly or you will miss opportunities to learn what you didn’t think to ask. Resist the temptation to ask your questions directly or you will be basing decisions on total fabrications.

Erika Hall, Research Questions are not Interview Questions

As a result, the scheduler only ever adds run-time to routes and never subtracts it, which costs the agency more money to run the same service. To make matters worse, passengers become upset because operators drag (drive unnecessarily slow) and hold (wait unnecessarily) at timepoints. This cycle has been going on for decades.

Andy Metz, in The Vicious Cycle of Timepoint Adherence

when deciding between functionality and simplicity, always choose value.

A fallacy is to have designers obsessed with the products and services they work on. Product and service features are just manifestations of a users’ relationship with a company. Instead, designers should be obsessed with their entire user experience. So, organize teams by types of users.

– excerpt from Org Design for Design Orgs