6 ms·

> I’ve parachuted into companies as interim CPO, my first order of business has been to [...] A deeply opinionated subject expert with visible disdain for avera

> I’ve parachuted into companies as interim CPO, my first order of business has been to [...] A deeply opinionated subject expert with visible disdain for average users will focus on rarely used expert features and tend to ignore opinions from the bottom 95% of customers. [...] worth a frank talk about fit and attitudes. So he "parachutes" into a company from nowhere and is executing his "first order of business". And, at that point, rather than approaching it with humility and having discussions where one man's opinion (his own) stacks up against another man's opinion (evil "subject expert"), he already thinks of himself as the keeper of the oracle -- the oracle being that elusive "95% of users" for whom he apparently speaks, and everyone with views opposing his own as troublemakers who need to be alienated at best and shoved aside at worst. ...sounds more like a run-of-the-mill manager, than a particularly enlightened one.

tristor 3y ago
I think that's an especially uncharitable read of that, and taken out of context. He's saying you should assess the folks in your team and possible opportunities for them in their career path, because Product isn't a clear cut ladder like many other careers are. He didn't say this person was a troublemaker, he said that if they're really focused on the outside edge cases of expert users that they may be better suited focusing all of their time and energy on expert users in a role that allows for that, vs being expected to represent users that they don't care about. It's mostly about aligning people's passions and interests with the company. You put a very negative spin on something that seems to be written with an intent towards positivity.
- stakhanov 3y ago
  ...well, my "System 1" [1] judgment of this person is that he's a bit full of himself, so I thought I'd quickly jot down some impressions. Looking at it from this angle offers up a lot of interesting bullshit filter transforms of what he writes. Maybe it's taking too many liberties as an attempt to know this person's actual personality and/or the management philosophy he's trying to impart through this writing. But some of these thoughts are interesting in their own right and hagiography is boring. So, here are two more thoughts in a similar vein: The "umbrellas, not funnels" idea: I agree that, at the higher levels of management, there's a lot of politics and other crap where it would be nice if employees could be shielded from it. But how do you actually make assessments in individual cases? For example, when some order comes down from above and is countermanded the next day due to corporate politics, how do you decide which order is irrelevant noise that your subordinates need to be "shielded from", and which order to pass along? You can only make that determination if you assume you know the higher-up bosses' jobs better than they do. You're also withholding vital information from your subordinates that would empower them to become political entities in their own right. Or the "merchandize good work" idea: Let's use the word "credit grabbing" as a less flattering near synonym. Doing a lot of credit grabbing on behalf of your subordinates only sounds like a good idea in the head of a manager who assumes they can competently play the role of "assigner of credit" because they don't themselves suffer from the same blind spot problem. Say you're a middle manager and you delegate a task to an IC you manage. Unbeknownst to you, this is a task that requires coordination with another department, so your IC reaches out to an IC in that other department, and that latter person ends up having to do most of the work. You have a blind spot there: You can't see the work done by this other person who you don't manage, in a department you're not in, in relation to a task you may not know the particular mechanics of. Maybe your report even neglected to tell you about the contribution of this other person willfully, playing some politics of their own, and making you the instrument of their politics. Now you run around upper management doing credit grabbing on behalf of your report, and alienating the person who actually did most of the work. Maybe it would be better to institute a culture of no credit grabbing and no assigning blame? ...and maybe such a culture would have positive outcomes, even without making the assumption that managers are infallible (or need to be infallible to do their jobs)? ...just a thought. When I try to picture the specific behaviours of someone who acts on that advice, I can't help but see the pattern of behaviour of someone who engages in power struggle selfishly. And all the reasoning he offers up, surrounding that behaviour, just sounds like a rationalization of that behaviour as noble and power-to-the-people-esque. ...a "righteous crusader" narrative to provide the ends that justify the means. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow
  - tough 3y ago
    I liked reading your points so thanks for sharing
XorNot 3y ago
The best thing about 95% of the users is that potentially no one is actually in that group. Because product features don't exist in isolation. 95% of your users can share a pool of common features, but then every single one of them can have some divergent, extra feature as an utterly vital component of their workflow - without which the product does not fit. Leading to the paradox: you eliminate features which aren't used by 95% of the user-base when looked at in isolation...and at the end of the day, your product isn't still suitable for 95% of the users, it's potentially usable for 0% of them.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  Does anyone know what the appropriate type of statistical analysis would be if I wanted to try to discover groups of commonly used features? Say I have a spreadsheet where the rows are users and the columns are "has used feature X in the past 30 days". How do I go from that to "there are three clusters of users who tend to use these distinct subsets of features"?
  - xapata 3y ago
    Clusters make a nice story, but you're going about it backwards. What are you trying to predict? The scientific method suggests we create a hypothesis first, then design an experiment (or identify a natural experiment), then collect data, and finally perform a hypothesis test. Deviations from that process increase your risk of spurious results.
mdekkers 3y ago
“First order of business” should be to listen. I get parachuted into companies as an interim “technology problem solver” with a variety of different titles, whatever suits the business and task at hand. Spoiler alert: technology is rarely the problem. I always set the expectation that the first three months or so will be passive - lots of clients want results right now, since by the time they call me things have escalated, projects are out of time, budget, and some execs somewhere are out of patience - those first three months or so I spend time listening to everyone, understanding how they got to that point, understanding how the business works, understanding the project(s) and the reason for it, etc. Once we have that map we can work towards finding a way forward. This is usually something that has to come from the team and cannot be dictated by an “outsider”, and my role here is mostly to guide and mentor. We then identify any impediments and work to remove those. All of this is about process and approach, we are not really talking about technology. “A deeply opinionated SME” is still an SME, asshole or not, and their role can possibly be re-framed to accommodate their strengths and weaknesses. Of course, some (many) organisations are directly or indirectly institutionally toxic, and they demand immediate technology rip and replace approaches and firings to go along with that (“who was to blame for this mess?!?” Is often the ask in these places) - I don’t engage with those organisations as a rule.

tristor 3y ago

I think that's an especially uncharitable read of that, and taken out of context. He's saying you should assess the folks in your team and possible opportunities for them in their career path, because Product isn't a clear cut ladder like many other careers are. He didn't say this person was a troublemaker, he said that if they're really focused on the outside edge cases of expert users that they may be better suited focusing all of their time and energy on expert users in a role that allows for that, vs being expected to represent users that they don't care about. It's mostly about aligning people's passions and interests with the company. You put a very negative spin on something that seems to be written with an intent towards positivity.

stakhanov 3y ago
...well, my "System 1" [1] judgment of this person is that he's a bit full of himself, so I thought I'd quickly jot down some impressions. Looking at it from this angle offers up a lot of interesting bullshit filter transforms of what he writes. Maybe it's taking too many liberties as an attempt to know this person's actual personality and/or the management philosophy he's trying to impart through this writing. But some of these thoughts are interesting in their own right and hagiography is boring. So, here are two more thoughts in a similar vein: The "umbrellas, not funnels" idea: I agree that, at the higher levels of management, there's a lot of politics and other crap where it would be nice if employees could be shielded from it. But how do you actually make assessments in individual cases? For example, when some order comes down from above and is countermanded the next day due to corporate politics, how do you decide which order is irrelevant noise that your subordinates need to be "shielded from", and which order to pass along? You can only make that determination if you assume you know the higher-up bosses' jobs better than they do. You're also withholding vital information from your subordinates that would empower them to become political entities in their own right. Or the "merchandize good work" idea: Let's use the word "credit grabbing" as a less flattering near synonym. Doing a lot of credit grabbing on behalf of your subordinates only sounds like a good idea in the head of a manager who assumes they can competently play the role of "assigner of credit" because they don't themselves suffer from the same blind spot problem. Say you're a middle manager and you delegate a task to an IC you manage. Unbeknownst to you, this is a task that requires coordination with another department, so your IC reaches out to an IC in that other department, and that latter person ends up having to do most of the work. You have a blind spot there: You can't see the work done by this other person who you don't manage, in a department you're not in, in relation to a task you may not know the particular mechanics of. Maybe your report even neglected to tell you about the contribution of this other person willfully, playing some politics of their own, and making you the instrument of their politics. Now you run around upper management doing credit grabbing on behalf of your report, and alienating the person who actually did most of the work. Maybe it would be better to institute a culture of no credit grabbing and no assigning blame? ...and maybe such a culture would have positive outcomes, even without making the assumption that managers are infallible (or need to be infallible to do their jobs)? ...just a thought. When I try to picture the specific behaviours of someone who acts on that advice, I can't help but see the pattern of behaviour of someone who engages in power struggle selfishly. And all the reasoning he offers up, surrounding that behaviour, just sounds like a rationalization of that behaviour as noble and power-to-the-people-esque. ...a "righteous crusader" narrative to provide the ends that justify the means. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow
- tough 3y ago
  I liked reading your points so thanks for sharing

XorNot 3y ago

The best thing about 95% of the users is that potentially no one is actually in that group. Because product features don't exist in isolation. 95% of your users can share a pool of common features, but then every single one of them can have some divergent, extra feature as an utterly vital component of their workflow - without which the product does not fit. Leading to the paradox: you eliminate features which aren't used by 95% of the user-base when looked at in isolation...and at the end of the day, your product isn't still suitable for 95% of the users, it's potentially usable for 0% of them.

crabmusket 3y ago
Does anyone know what the appropriate type of statistical analysis would be if I wanted to try to discover groups of commonly used features? Say I have a spreadsheet where the rows are users and the columns are "has used feature X in the past 30 days". How do I go from that to "there are three clusters of users who tend to use these distinct subsets of features"?
- xapata 3y ago
  Clusters make a nice story, but you're going about it backwards. What are you trying to predict? The scientific method suggests we create a hypothesis first, then design an experiment (or identify a natural experiment), then collect data, and finally perform a hypothesis test. Deviations from that process increase your risk of spurious results.

mdekkers 3y ago

“First order of business” should be to listen. I get parachuted into companies as an interim “technology problem solver” with a variety of different titles, whatever suits the business and task at hand. Spoiler alert: technology is rarely the problem. I always set the expectation that the first three months or so will be passive - lots of clients want results right now, since by the time they call me things have escalated, projects are out of time, budget, and some execs somewhere are out of patience - those first three months or so I spend time listening to everyone, understanding how they got to that point, understanding how the business works, understanding the project(s) and the reason for it, etc. Once we have that map we can work towards finding a way forward. This is usually something that has to come from the team and cannot be dictated by an “outsider”, and my role here is mostly to guide and mentor. We then identify any impediments and work to remove those. All of this is about process and approach, we are not really talking about technology. “A deeply opinionated SME” is still an SME, asshole or not, and their role can possibly be re-framed to accommodate their strengths and weaknesses. Of course, some (many) organisations are directly or indirectly institutionally toxic, and they demand immediate technology rip and replace approaches and firings to go along with that (“who was to blame for this mess?!?” Is often the ask in these places) - I don’t engage with those organisations as a rule.