Airbnb has just announced that all of its employees can remain remote forever, keeping their cushy San Francisco salaries even if they move to the boondocks. What do product people think of this? As a consultant who works from home in my slippers, it doesn't affect me direly. What is lost from a team when everyone is remote? Is in-person the solution? Hybrid? Or does remote give you the ability to recruit the distant talent you need? Tell me a story.

Nobody on your team is tasked with a crucial job? Product person, you are elected! In my product career, I have done partnership, UX, design, agile coaching, sales, etc. Lots of hats. I generally like the breadth of the product role. What's the oddest job you had to do as a product person?

The structure of OKRs is simple: You set a high-level inspiring goal like “Get real traction for our app.” This is your Objective. You then define three or so measures that will tell you if you have succeeded. “Traction” might be measured in terms of users, revenue, or conversion. These are your Key Results and they will depend on your particular company and your product.

The biggest study so far on meetings and productivity finds that most companies should eradicate them almost entirely.

“Prospects do sometimes ask for things in the contract, but we’ve never done it. We might learn things that would trump that request in importance. We sometimes lose deals based on customer asks we cannot guarantee, but we have lots of customers, and I need to do what’s best for most of them, not just a few of them.”

What’s your confidence that an item 12 months out on your roadmap will actually ship that month? How about 18 months? Less so, right? But some people assume that if they see it on a roadmap in a particular quarter it’s a commitment.

Oh, there are so many bad ways to prioritize! The CEO's gut, for instance. A very common way is to prioritize based on what will help close the deals in the pipeline this quarter. This is short-term thinking; it may help the numbers once or twice, but successful product people are focused on a market, rather than individual customers.

A roadmap presentation can leave stakeholders anxious. Sounds good, they are thinking, but can you deliver? Will it be as great as you say? Will it all ship on time?

Personas are a big, hairy, controversial topic. Many people swear by them; others think they are a waste of time and potentially quite misleading.

Consensus, in theory, means a group of people reaching a decision. In practice, it often means hours of discussion leading to decisions that everyone supposedly agrees to, but that no individual can be held accountable for (“I didn’t vote for that!”).

I really enjoyed the fireside chat “OKRs vs. Roadmaps Deathmatch” I did a few weeks back with my friend Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad. It can be a bloody fight! I have met lots of product people who are taken by one and hate the other

I received numerous messages about my Product Ops Nano a few weeks ago. For one, it "is about PM'ing the PM experience." Another sees it "encompasses everything from system configuration and admin, to process creation and audits, to training, to OKR management, to data collation and reporting."

Well-known Harvard Business Review blogger Deb Mills-Scofield distinguishes output from outcome well: “Let’s define outputs as the stuff we produce, be it physical or virtual, for a specific type of customer — say, car seats for babies. And let’s define outcomes as the difference our stuff makes — keeping your child safe in the car.” Her summary is the best way to keep these terms straight: “Outcomes are the difference made by the outputs.”

A Product Ops team can ease the burden of busy product managers by making research and product performance analysis easier. This centralized team acts as an enabler, providing tooling or even scheduling an ongoing series of customer interviews.

How do you convince customers to chat with you? At one company I worked at, customer interviews were as easy as asking. They were flattered I wanted their input. At another company, emails and voicemails went unanswered. My pitch was the same, but the customers were different. How do you recruit for key research if your customers and prospects don’t engage?

How do you learn to be a leader? Product is the sort of leadership role that can pull the right team together and get them moving in the right direction. But how do you get those skills? Is it mentorship? Making tons of mistakes? Reading brilliant books? A Product Culture Manifesto? Or just innate ability?

After high-level themes were agreed upon by stakeholders, “we wanted as much autonomy down at the engineering and product team level as possible. Of course, there were some of what we call guardrails and goalposts. Within those guardrails, they could decide what that product looked like or how we were going to go to market.”

This time of year, I tend to pause for a bit of reflection: One lesson of the pandemic for me is that we all have to get out of a reactive mode (as we all were in the beginning of the pandemic) and pragmatically work our problems to get to our desired outcomes, given actual conditions. We have to learn to win races in the rain.

There are numerous ways to come up with a product vision. Hopes and Fears is a simple exercise where each individual writes their hopes for the product’s future on one color of Post-it note or index card and then writes their fears on another color. The objective here is to draw out everyone’s emotional aspirations and fears and see how they align with each other and with the established business objectives.

A feature factory is a team that continuously adds new features to their product without assessing whether those features add to value to the customer or the business. This leads to bloated products that are unusable and often don’t sell well either. Such products are often disrupted by simpler, nimbler products — the kind that they used to be.