Rock Teams

Every organization has projects that they just don't seem to be able to make progress on because no one team or department is responsible. When they become critically urgent, a 'rock team' is a way to make significant progress inside a quarter.

Capacity Planning

With a large organization, you can't walk each PM through a quarter's prioritization tradeoffs. Use capacity planning to do this with many PMs at once.

The Planning Game

If I am working closely with an experienced team, this is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get a sense for how long it might take to build something new.

Sober Evaluation

What happens when your strategy becomes disconnected from reality? Do you hold an urgent workshop? Or is there a better way?

Dueling Goals

There are always competing demands on PMs. We expect PMs to prioritize. It's their job. But many CPOs don't bother to discuss the prioritization algorithm with their PMs.

Pull Planning

When we assign work, the leader who made the plan is the one who owns the plan. Everyone else is just 'helping', but not responsible for the whole. How can we get better engagement?

Jobs to be Done: Give Your Agents the Right Problem

Assumptions about feature value get upended once you understand the customer’s job. Agents need that same context to build the right thing.

Get Out of the Building (Your Agents Can’t Do This for You)

Customer empathy has a half-life of 30 days. Agents can speed up delivery, but they can’t have the conversations that tell you what to build.

Coaching PMs for Growth

Unlock intrinsic motivation by asking PMs to create development plans that drive their own career goals.

Spot the cashflow

If a PM doesn't understand, deeply, how cash is flowing in the company, they're going to waste time on features that make no difference.

Soft Promotion

What to do if you can't give promotions or hire senior leaders, but you need more leadership capacity

One Roadmap

When there are many different product roadmaps, scattered across many decks, and nobody is sure which one to trust, this one trick will help.