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Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

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Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#101

Post by DrScientist »

caminante wrote: post #42
JohnMakin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On climate change, are we somewhere between step 3 and 4? It sure looks a lot that way to me. Maybe closer to 4 soon. That conversation is exhausting, or kind of the inverse of this, overwhelming confidence in the success of future technologies that do not really exist yet.

Re: climate change, what can the US and other actors do for "support" when China's still at Yes Minister step 1? China's the biggest emitter and doesn't care. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

When comparing countries of different sizes - the fairest way to do so is on a per capita basis [1] and the US is still way ahead of China.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

[1] As somebody has pointed out below - a lot of those Chinese emissions are ultimately produced for use in other countries. Places like the UK have simply shipped their emissions overseas - then complain about these countries rising emissions.

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#102

Post by JohnMakin »

briandear wrote: post #92
forgotoldacc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love when people like you post with no concept of "per capita". Then there's always frustration at the people who do understand the concept and realize the "point" is simply a result of ignorance. China is at 30% renewable energy. The US is at 21%. And the president of the dirtiest country in the world, lots of smart people are saying it, that's just what they call the US these days, they say, passed an executive o…

They say they are at 30% renewable. Much different than actually being 30%.

except that these things are measurable and quite trivially

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#103

Post by kstrauser »

sfn42 wrote: post #86
3vidence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned the value of this. Some people don't realize the value of something unless you show it to them. It's a risk for sure but honestly it keeps me sane vs trying to get 10 people aligned before starting something and then running out of time. People will happily take credit for your work after it works.

I once worked on an application that integrated with a third party api. The way it did this was with a large and horrible client library that used a separate db to cache the data. The data was then fetched from the main application and used to rebuild the pages (in the main db) based on this data once a day. The library had lots of problems, and one day it stopped working. I was tasked with fixing it - we had the sou…

Sigh. I worked at a shop that was spending months waterfalling a frontend to some background API calls. I finally got annoyed enough to spend a weekend actually implementing the thing as a Django app. There. Done.

I got my ass handed to me by management for not going through the proper processes.

I learned something that day: I never want to work somewhere that engineers serve the processes and not the reverse. There are some that are good and necessary: like “thou shalt deploy via CD and not SSH into prod to edit code”. There are others that only exist to serve bureaucracy, and those try my patience.

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#104

Post by caminante »

JohnMakin wrote: post #102
briandear wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say they are at 30% renewable. Much different than actually being 30%.

except that these things are measurable and quite trivially

Not when actors report false numbers. China's track record is terrible on honest environmental reporting [0] and their power consumption has been greenwashed with electrification that makes a minor portion of their GHG growth [1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/world/asia/china-asks-emb...

[1] https://dialogue.earth/en/climate/chinas-manufacturing-pushe...

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#105

Post by caminante »

DrScientist wrote: post #101
caminante wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: climate change, what can the US and other actors do for "support" when China's still at Yes Minister step 1? China's the biggest emitter and doesn't care. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

When comparing countries of different sizes - the fairest way to do so is on a per capita basis [1] and the US is still way ahead of China. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita [1] As somebody has pointed out below - a lot of those Chinese emissions are ultimately produced for use in other countries. Places like the UK have simply shipped their emissions overseas - then complain about these coun…

China has been responsible for 90% of the global growth in emissions since 2015. [0] Their population didn't change more than ~2%.

[0] https://dialogue.earth/en/climate/chinas-manufacturing-pushe...

> As somebody has pointed out below - a lot of those Chinese emissions are ultimately produced for use in other countries.

Not really. See domestic power demand growth for non-green applications. [0]

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#106

Post by tsunamifury »

usehackernews wrote: post #68
dyarosla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, but rarely: Some engineer wants it bad enough that they just build it -or some version of it- and then some executive gives the go-ahead to invest more into it. At the end of the day, ideas are just ideas. Execution is everything.

As a PM, I factor this into prioritization. An engineer passionate for a product will lead to better engineering output, increased morale, and feeling of being heard. A motivated, bought-in engineer team is important when it comes to building the ‘high impact’ products. Prioritization isn’t always black and white. These qualitative factors matter and shouldn’t be ignored. As always, you weight it against other trade…

I’ve been a pm Eng and designer and this sort of patronizing attitude sucks.

Look at the end of the day you should be cultivating fellow thought leaders because when you grow up you learn your priorities are more often than not just your own egotistical nonsense and wrong. But you have a lot of phrases to cut others down.

Try something different.

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#107

Post by tsunamifury »

roenxi wrote: post #10
gopalv wrote: post #3

This sort of advice is parodied in "Yes, Prime Minister" as the 4 step strategy for "crisis management" 1: Don't worry, nothing's going to happen. 2: Something may be happen but we should wait and see 3: Maybe we should do something about it, but there is no clear action 4: Maybe there was something we could've done, but it's too late now Stringing along a bunch of people who think they are being heard and listened t…

The Yes, Prime Minister advice is different. That 4-stage formula is for ignoring a crisis. The PM's No is advocating for working on tickets in priority order which will result in following the plan under a remarkably large number of situations. The two major differences are firstly that the YPM steps don't involve priorities at any stage. And secondly, the PM's No is a straightforward but a polite way of pointing ou…

You haven’t worked in tech long enough have you. PMs priority more often than not is based on their perf and their ego.

Rarely have I met one that can define actual priorities outside of this.

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#108

Post by psunavy03 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #84
idopmstuff wrote: post #7

"Please fill out the feature request form - that will create a ticket." Mark ticket P4. In all seriousness, the best thing is to have management that clearly communicates what the high level company goals are on a quarterly (or whatever cadence is appropriate for your business) basis. People don't like to hear no, but they understand "the main objective for the quarter is to close $X in new deals in Y market segment,…

This is what we do at my current job, they follow "safe" (scaled agile framework - don't look it up if the scrum inforgraphic already gives you shivers), but it boils down to two weeks of tidying, innovation and learning (in practice it's just more regular work) and two days of intensive planning, where from top the main priorities for the quarter are outlined and all the teams figure out what they are going to do an…

The most abused concept in SAFe, because people fail to use it as intended (get a snapshot of the next quarter and be ready to pivot if things change) and use it to "lock down the plan," have teams refuse any new requests, and have management judge your "predictability score."

It's a great idea in theory until you see how much two full days of timeboxed planning every quarter beats down dev morale in practice. It's great for teams that literally don't know what they're doing and don't know their dependencies, because it forces them to confront their mediocrity. But you have to move beyond it eventually.

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#109

Post by staunton »

JohnMakin wrote: post #88
staunton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> northern alaska could become pretty temperate If you're worried about wildfires, I'd look it up and reconsider Alaska...

You know alaska is massive and geographically diverse right?

Are there there parts of Alaska where people live and where you will not have wildfires (this century) close enough to at least significantly impact air quality?

(I guess one could also consider parts where people don't live yet...)

Re: Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

#110

Post by darknavi »

dyarosla wrote: post #57
ryandrake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most companies I've worked, in order to actually implement an idea, you need to prove a few things, whether the person proposing it is the PM, an engineer, or any other person involved in the product: 1. The idea is technically feasible 2. The idea aligns with company's business goals 3. The idea is our team's responsibility and cannot be done by another team 4. The idea is more important than the other things our…

Also, but rarely: Some engineer wants it bad enough that they just build it -or some version of it- and then some executive gives the go-ahead to invest more into it. At the end of the day, ideas are just ideas. Execution is everything.

I am very thankful that over the last few years I've built out the headroom on our team to chase "shiny" things that we know customers will want and that we (engineering) want but aren't exactly cookie cutter for our usual planning flow.
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