The time of senior leadership on a team is precious and expensive but so is the cost of poor decision making and inefficient execution due to misalignment between teams. The Engineering organization I support runs a 50 minute sync every two weeks to provide status updates, escalate issues, and review business updates that may impact […]
John Cutler’s “Data-Informed Product Cycle” resonates with me as a depiction of a strong product development process. In the post, he says, The most successful teams 1. Have a strategy 2. Translate that into models 3. Add minimally viable measurement 4. Identify leverage points 5. Explore options 6. Run experiments He provides the image below […]
Modern product management experience is highly influenced by and optimized for purely software based products. While core principals translate well to products involving a combination of hardware and software, there are some unique considerations to be aware of when managing robotics products.
I recently watched the session, “Reality Check: Getting to Scale” presented by John Simmons, Head of Product, InOrbit at the Robot Operations Conference. The talk was focused on John’s experiences in Operations at Bossa Nova and the lessons they learned as they scaled the robot fleet from 5-350 units. Bossa Nova manufactures inventory control robots […]
I was in a meeting with several of my peers today and someone was looking for feedback regarding gantt chart tools. They were frustrated that the current tooling they were using was fairly rigid and not easy to manipulate live during a working meeting. They wanted to be able to add and remove items, adjust […]
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Escaping The Build Trap, by Melissa Perri. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Thinking in Systems, by Donella H. Meadows. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
In 2020, I was given the opportunity to lead the Product team at Ouster. This post details the process and framework I used to define the core functions of the team and figure out where to start. Ouster’s core business is the design and manufacture of high-resolution lidar sensors supporting a wide variety of robotics […]
I was reading the section in the book, “Thinking in Systems” about the tragedy of the commons and thought some of the recommendations might apply to software teams trying to manage their cloud infrastructure spending. When companies are young, they may optimize for development speed and flexibility and not focus on financial efficiency, This prioritization […]
The planning fallacy, first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, describes a bias that causes people to underestimate how long something will take and overestimate its impact. As a Product Manager, this is disheartening to read, but also not surprising. Features take longer to release than anticipated and they rarely deliver the […]