Writing
The Black Box of Product Management
Everything I’ve written about product management: prioritization, decisions, leverage, and how to build and lead product teams. Most of it first went up on Medium. Press / to search all of it.
2021
- David Hariri on co-founding Ada, the pivot that created a unicorn, and what product-market fit… In this episode I speak with David Hariri, co-founder of Ada, an AI powered customer support platform that raised at a 1.2B valuation in…
- Craig Miller on being Shopify’s CPO, Marketing by an Engineer, Leadership, and Scale Black box of PM Podcast: Season 01, Episode 01
2018
- Product Management Mental Models for Everyone Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and…
- Managing and Developing Product Managers If the craft of Product Management is often mired in ambiguity, managing product managers is ambiguity².
- The First Principles of Product Management Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles. A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or…
2017
- Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager While product managers may not build the actual product, they do produce something very tangible for a team: decisions.
- Deadlines For as long as I’ve been working in tech I’ve heard this oscillating debate about the use of deadlines in projects, with particularly…
- Ruthless Prioritization All high functioning teams must prioritize. Not once a month, not once a week — but rigorously, and ruthlessly.
2016
- Applying Leverage as a Product Manager I get every new PM I manage to read (or re-read) High Output Management by Andy Grove within the first month of joining my team. It’s a…
- Scaling Conversational Commerce We just enabled 325,000 merchants to sell in messaging, without building a bot.
- Why Hey and Thanks still matter Hey,
- A Bad Product Decision I often wonder if I should have been fired for it
- MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager You’ve probably seen this diagram before. It elegantly shows that product management is the intersection of a diverse skill set.
- Product Partnerships (pt. 2/2) — Executing a Partnership as a PM This is a continuation of Part 1: The Making of a Partnership
2015
- Product Partnerships (pt. 1/2)— The Making of a Partnership I realized the other day that I’ve spent a lot of the last few years building products in partnership with other companies. I’ve led teams…
- The Black Box of Product Management PMs get sad when you ask them why they exist
- 7 Heuristics for being a Product Director I’m a big believer in developing heuristics over the course of your life. These are rules of thumb you internalize so that you don’t have…
- Canadian Startup People: you might want to exercise those options early Short post here.
- What stories have you never finished? That’s it, I’m shipping these unfinished thoughts.
- Start with Lunch The simplest, most delicious way to become a great team
- The #1 cold email I get “How can I get into product management?”
- Product Managers are Forged in the Crucibles of Launches Come spend a day in the fire