Hot Tips is a constantly growing, curated collection of candid advice by and for product people.
Think of it as a precious piece of advice you wish you had received when you started building products. It’s a short snippet of wisdom that helps you do things differently.
Contributing a Hot Tip it the fastest way to reach 3,000+ makers from all over Europe. Your daily grind might be their ‘aha moment’!
1. Write your Tip following the guidelines below.👇
2. Submit the Tip through Typeform.
3. Wait patiently! The Tip will undergo some scrutiny by our Hot Tip Catcher, who will then decide whether to publish it (we may tweak the content for clarity).
4. Watch out! Every week we’ll pick the best Hot Tips and share them with the community in the JAM newsletter. Look out for yours! 👀
Your Tip can belong to one of the three categories.
📖 Be as open as you can: share insider knowledge, something people won’t have come across before. A Hot Tip reveals how you do things.
🎨 Show, don’t (just) tell: talking about your roadmapping process? How about including a screenshot of the tool you use? There’s nothing better than seeing your ‘behind-the-scenes’.
💌 Keep it short and personal: aim for 200 words max, and word it like you’re helping a friend out.
🔧 Share tools: offer readers an opportunity to explore the topic. Link to at least one helpful ebook or article that helped you in the past.
What would be your top priorities in the first week? And the first month? What are some of your DOs and DONTs and why?
Although it’s your first month in a new job and you’re desperate to prove that you were the right candidate to be hired, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.
Now’s not the time to be inspiring everyone with how much you know and how ‘your way’s the best way’. Now’s the time to meet as many people as you can, learn about how they operate and the challenges they’re facing and be as open as possible.
You can do this and still come across as confident and authoritative, but it’s critical that you position yourself as someone who’s here to find out what’s working and what’s not to ensure that when you do jump in you have identified the best place to start.
Be purposeful in how you do this. I always make a list of the things I need to know before I start a new role: What’s our vision and mission, who are our customers, who are our competitors, who are my team + key stakeholders, what’s worked and what hasn’t, and how do will we achieve — and measure — success. I’m also looking out for who might be my allies too ;-)
Your top priorities as a new product manager are:
On your first day, sit down with your hiring manager and talk through expectations, areas of ownership, and growth plans.
Speak with people in various roles and various experience levels. You’ll need the organizational context to make informed decisions.
Ask questions as soon as you have them. Don’t worry about “appearing uninformed” — people are forgiving when you’re new!
Within your first week, play with your product and note down areas of confusion.
Embed yourself in your development team and learn their working style. Understand what the current sprint priorities are, and clearly grasp the existing set of tickets being tackled in the sprint. You want to be operationally ready as soon as possible.
Within your first month, review existing documents (e.g. technical specifications, customer interview notes, presentations to the executive team, past roadmaps) at a high level. Aim for breadth and not for depth.
Your goal is to index where all of the critical information is, and figure out how to access them when you need them, as well as get a sense of how your broader organization operates.
Create onboarding documents for your own understanding. Customer flows, organizational charts, high-level product object models, and sales funnels are particularly helpful.
Just find out what's bugging them, what's broken. Don't provide any solutions, just empathise. Most dysfunctions in shipping software are related to how a team is working together.
See things from their end. You'll get it without the 'spin'.
They know where the bodies are buried.
You made it! Hope it was a big salary raise for you. You’ve been recognised as a PM expert and now can sit back and finally relax, right?
Wrooooong.
Switch on the mindset of mindful discovery. You have a lot to learn.
Do you know the concept of an OODA loop? It’s a decision making system devised by colonel John Boyd, and originally used in the context of military operations. The acronym stands for observe, orient, decide, act — four essential components of execution for you as a PM. How does it map on to your first month?
Depending on the initial expectations you set, month one might have to include elements of decision or action too. Show your initiative and buy that extra monitor.