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.
There’s so much to build, and the CEO often has 10 new ideas a day. To safeguard your team’s focus, you need to say no. What are some of your best tips on answering to yet another feature request?
Investing more time "upfront" in the clarification of your strategy, goals (e.g. using OKR) and mission briefings for upcoming projects. The important aspect is to collaborate on these using clear language and avoid jargon. This way, you will have a clear reference to point to when it's time to debate (potential) pet project ideas. If your boss is more of a numbers guy, I recommend embracing an objective scoring criterion like the ICE score to rank ideas in a clear order.
You’re drowning in feature requests and “genius ideas” flooding you from all corners? There is an easy fix!
Ok, no, there isn’t. This is just another day in the life of a Product Manager. You can’t stop the flood, but you can learn to deal with it. How? By learning to say "no". And this is a tricky dance.
Establish a clear system of assigning value to feature requests. For example, count the number of users who mention a particular idea or problem. You can even assign values to people's opinion based on, for example, the length of interaction with your product. This will enable you to fend off team's requests without getting personal: “Your idea has an user impact score of 15. We have three others with a score of over 35.”
We're not talking about git commits, but rather setting your mind on something. Create a culture where when you commit to an idea, you hold off measuring its impact until it’s executed. This gives you a guilt-free period of time to work on something, and a clear reason to say "no" to other requests. When someone excitedly suggests a new idea, say you’ll add it to the backlog. By the time the next ideas’ review comes up, there is a high chance passions will have dissipated.
This is perhaps just an extra factor in the scoring process. You can commit to work on a feature that will take five full months to complete. But, consider it might prevent you from working on potential emergencies. It will also mean you won’t ship anything else during that time. Beyoncé, can you handle this? How about your users or investors? Highlight the time and opportunity cost to the idea giver to explain why their suggestion goes on the (never ending?) backlog.
The company needs to operate with a shared vision in mind. The vision dictates the long term goal, which is built from smaller steps — daily decisions. If the steps don’t contribute to the vision, they are steps to a wrong dance. As a PM you lead the way.