Product Newsletter #2
Welcome to this week’s edition of our Product Newsletter - a weekly edition highlighting top community discussions, and learning resources for product managers.
We will cover
Top Discussions
Question 1) What’s your favorite lightweight roadmapping tool?
- Amy
Discussion
A] Productboard has some real benefits for smallish teams:
- Dave Kim
B] I can’t say it’s my favorite because I haven’t been able to test this hypothesis… but if I was thinking really REALLY lightweight, I would fashion the tool myself with Airtable + Miro. It’d be a means to an end, not a permanent solution, but I think this approach could help a team “form” its working plan quickly and organically (so you can get to “storming” next.)
- Risa Butler
C] I would say that it really depends on the problems you are trying to solve and how any tool might help you solve that. Best, lightweight, etc. really depends on your workflow, process, and what you’re trying to achieve. There are plenty of tools out there, all approach PM and road mapping from a different perspective. I can recommend Airfocus , since I have been using it and it is flexible in terms of integrations and adaptability with other project management tools such as Asana and JIRA .
- Mario
D] My two cents:
- Nathan
Which tool do you use to collect bugs from internal stakeholders?
I’ve seen some companies allowing everyone to access Jira and they would directly open a ticket there. In other companies they would text the PM on Slack, the PM then creates the ticket.
How do you make sure that the reported bugs are detailed?
Thanks!
- Anonymous
Discussion
A] JIRA Service Desk, create a Form for them to follow with some custom fields with key information to segment them across dev teams if necessary. You can also create Slack integrations with the dedicated channels to monitor them as they come in, it works well currently but we are not inundated with tickets at the moment.
- Karan
B] The main reason is to have ONE source of truth, in this case, Jira. The moment your tickets are tracked in multiple systems, you're doomed.
The second reason is discipline. No ticket - no work, sorry. My team can’t follow up on everything in chats.
The third reason is the update status. Instead of replying to every stakeholder on the status, I say, “read comments in the ticket. They, and the task status, are the latest updates on your request.”
When there’s an overflow of such tickets, I use a Triage board - a dedicated board with filtered tickets submitted by stakeholders.
- Risa
C] Agree not everyone knows, wants to learn, or should be allowed to use Jira, but then you need “dedicated loggers” of some kind, whether that’s frontline support, QA, PO, PM, or semi-trained minions. Also agreed that the more roles who are entering bugs, the lower the quality of the bug report will be (filled in, described well, or missing repro steps, images, data, etc). In general, ppl closer to the action, log better bugs (QAs, dev, po/m) because they know they will have to deal with it later.
Yes, you will always have to triage the bugs. Usually, there is a separate project for receiving bugs/tickets into (holding tank), they get triaged here and then moved to the appropriate backlog (if serious, worth fixing, etc). Who does the triage vary widely, QA, Dev, PO, PM, this will depend on who really calls the shots in Eng. Should be PO/Pm, IMO. Bugs that are deemed not worthy should be closed quickly with a note as to why (not a bug, can’t repro, won’t fix).
Enhancement/feature requests are not bugs and should go into a separate list as well and be prioritized differently.
- Angela
领英推荐
Has anyone held two PM jobs at the same time since WFH (over employment)?
I know that many PMs are super busy with meetings but currently at a job that doesn’t really have a meeting culture, I can get a lot of work done with extra cycles. Curious if anyone has done the over-employed thing as a PM.
- Dave
Discussion
A] I’m not sure how you do the job without 30 hours of meetings per week minimum. Ceremonies, discovery, interviews, readouts, stakeholders.
I did this for a month. My old company wanted to pay me for a month “just in case” they had questions. So, double salary for a month. IT WAS NOT WORTH IT.
- Rob
B] This isn’t a joke. I head product for an eCommerce firm with over 1 million users + have a 20 hours/week side gig with a VC + building my own product for the last 2 years with 3 full-time folks whose salary I pay.
TBH: I have every kind of social and mental issue, you could think of. This isn't healthy at all. I barely remember anything and I am unable to hold any conversation out of work at this point. I do that to keep my own product up and running until it sees some light of the day.
- Anonymous
C] I have! I went full-time with both as well. My schedule would run normal business hours (9-5) and then for the other job from 5-9 with 10 hours on each Saturday and Sunday. The developers in that second position were all overseas. So, all of our schedules aligned. I would eat and write up Jira stories and then head to bed. When I woke up, answer questions for job two, workout, then go back to job one.
It was cool! Honestly, I was actually trying to get more PM experience and needed the money to pay off my house. I recently left job two because of some life changes and I’ve met someone that is amazing and wanted to put time into the relationship. I appreciated the opportunity and experience.
- Nate
Top Learning Resources
What are webhooks?
The thing about APIs is that they’re passive - you need to send a request to get a response. APIs will never reach out to you, ask you how you’re doing, and why you’re behind on your car payments. Or maybe “responsive” is a better word. Webhooks, on the other hand, are active - instead of taking a request and returning a response, they send out data when something happens internally.
What is an API?
In practice, I’ve found that people use “API” in three different contexts, and they all mean different things. In theory, though, they’re all the same and fit the definition we worked through. They’re all the same, but different.
How to identify good design in 6 steps
Art is subjective, it’s like a game where there are almost no rules. Design is different, and the fact that someone can put together a list of principles should already tell you that there are some rules to the design game. If there are rules, then we can tell whether or not these rules are being followed, which means that design is not subjective. However, to be fair, I can’t really say that design is 100% objective, there are always things that come down to personal preference that is determined by your culture and experiences.
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