What will make you better than 99% of Product Managers today.

There are many ways to answer this question - I will try to keep it simple: Most of the top 1% of Product Managers are folks who get their team to focus on work that produces the maximum impact. In order to do this, top product managers gather data and interview enough users to have a clear understanding of the following questions:

Who - Who is your user? What do they care about in their day to day life? What kind of business are they involved in? How they think about themselves?

Why - Why do they need your product? Why can't they find a solution? Why do they find existing solutions frustrating? Why will they go through the trouble of learning/installing/deploying something new?

What - What will happen if the product is brought to market? How will the world of your customers change? How will the world of their customers change? How will the world in general change?

Relentless data mining, interviewing, focus groups and other methods will ultimately help provide a clear understanding of these questions. Once you can articulate these three questions, you will be ahead of 99% of Product Managers in the field.

-mb

PS: The question was originally answered on Quora here.

PPS: If you liked this post you might also like Zombie Products article as well.

SDET / QA Engineer Interview Checklist

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

SDE/T or QA Engineer interview checklist from Mike Borozdin
If you like this checklist you might want to check out these posts:
Emotional Intelligence in Software Teams and Good-bye manual tester, hello crowdsourcing!

Chief Collaboration Officer

When you search for the word “collaboration” on the Internet, the top hits are mostly software packages you can buy. Software can facilitate collaboration, but it doesn’t make people collaborate on its own.

One of the key functions of a technical leader is to bring a team together, help people share ideas, and facilitate team members helping each other. When a software leader overlooks this key function, you end up with a group of individual contributing engineers instead of a cohesive team.
Before we get into tactics, we should ask “Why is collaboration important for an engineering team?”
It’s critical to examine your assumptions, so here are my reasons for why a group of engineers working on their own are worse than a team working together: Smart people learn from each other.Getting your plans and designs reviewed by other people allows you to leverage their experience and check your assumptions.Collaboration produces artifacts that stay after collaboration has taken place (such…

Hire Fast, Fire Fast? Not so Fast.

Silicon Valley is full of advice and it frequently comes from people who have little experience on the subject matter. A popular topic surrounds hiring and terminations with the king catch phrase being: “Hire Fast, Fire Fast.” To me, what that usually means is lack of diligence, thought, communication and courage.

When hiring people love going with their gut feel, often with disastrous results. There is an obvious subject of diversity of thought, appearance and background. When thinking “fast” you are probably hiring people like yourself because humans quickly react to people who they believe are in their tribe.

A startup that lacks the resources of a big company often becomes so desperate to get technical staff that when a decent candidate comes along, excitement ensues and the employer doesn't slow down to put them through a more rigorous hiring process.

I highly encourage technical founders and engineering executives to write out their precise hiring process. Of course, y…

Software + Management // by Mike Borozdin

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