Managing Product Managers

Curated Learning Resources

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  Managing and Developing Product Managers

  Brandon Chu, GM, Platform, Shopify

  Brandon covers 3 frameworks for managing product managers: 1) A mental model for managing PMs that adopts an investor's mindset. Give PMs the freedom to make decisions, but hold them accountable and coach them toward the end result. 2) Developing PMs by constructing the appropriate scope for them 3) Assessing PM performance in a balanced and repeatable way

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  Developing Strong Product Managers

  Marty Cagan, Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group

  Marty provides a skills assessment tool for product managers that involves rating their importance and current capability on various dimensions like Product Knowledge, process skills, and people skills. It uses a gap analysis to identify areas for Coaching. The skills are rated on a 1-10 scale to determine where more development is needed. The manager then focuses a Coaching plan on closing the top 3 gaps. Regular weekly check-ins are recommended to track progress. Interestingly, Marty argues that the "associate product manager" level is unnecessary and that people should quickly be brought to full competence or helped to find a more suitable role. Overall, the tool aims to develop product managers through identifying and addressing skills gaps.

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  Minimum Viable Control: A Framework for Product Leadership

  Daniel Schmidt, VP of Product Management, MDsave

  Dan discusses how to empower the PMs that report to you with "minimum viable control": 1) Develop a robust learning process 2) Create bidirectional communication pipes throughout the org for PMs to push communications through 3) Communicate top-level business metrics down to PMs, and collect learnings from PMs to analyze with the exec team

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