Test-n-Tell - tiny apps, Big ideas

  A mistake many companies make when hiring Product Managers is that they overvalue industry knowledge.

  Spreadsheets are among the most powerful tools in modern organisations. They clarify plans. They align teams. They make trade-offs visible. They help leaders reason about complexity. But they also create one of the most dangerous illusions in product development: the illusion of certainty. 

“Vibe coding”, building software by describing intent and letting AI generate, refactor, and orchestrate code, is quickly evolving into something more powerful: agentic coding. Systems that don’t just autocomplete code, but reason across files, plan changes, run tests, deploy, monitor, and iterate. If this trajectory continues, we are not just accelerating engineering. We are reshaping the entire product value chain.

  Is it only me, or have we stopped talking about frameworks? Long gone debates about Agile vs Waterfall, we stopped fighting over TDD vs BDD or KANO vs effort/value... it's KANO by the way, KANO is way superior.

  Every dedicated product professional who has been lucky to work in a growing organisation will eventually need to choose: either to remain an individual contributor or move to manage people. This might be a tough choice for some. What if you're not sure what path is better for you?

  Product-market fit is not something you get once and maintain forever. You can lose it, regain it and lose again. As a PM, you need to have a good understanding of where you are with product-market fit and have signals set up to inform you of a possible change.

  The end of the year is approaching and don't know about you, but for me this year felt like five years. I can barely remember the end of last year but I remember the feeling - it was challenging enough. What did I know...

  The product ops process is a high-level framework that could help you identify how your product teams work, introduce changes in a controlled way, improve things and optimise your organisation for higher productivity and job satisfaction.  In the last post , I suggested what the first stage of the process might be - surveying . It's when you aim to understand how your product teams work, how your entire organisation works, discover problems, turn them into products and make those products successful on the market. In this post, I'll cover the central phase of the product ops process - experimentation. 

  Product operations, or product ops , is an emerging field of product management focused on empowering and increasing the effectiveness of product organisations. As with any establishing functions, the product ops process is not yet decisively defined. Every org does product ops differently at the moment. 

  Managing products is not easy. Especially in a growing company. When you need to deliver value to your customers, plan strategically, onboard new colleagues, and do customer research - it could be overwhelming and often could lead to chaos. Hence the role of product ops emerged to take on those challenges and empower product teams.

  You don't see this bit of product management being covered extensively. We like to talk about building things, growing things and making things better. However, the word focus is a singular word and sometimes to make something great you need to let something else go. 

  Product management is a diverse role that attracts people from different backgrounds. It's fair to say that anyone could be a product manager. In the series of articles, I've described the most common transitions and offered a few tips for aspiring PMs. 

People are coming to product management from all sorts of roles, sales and marketing not being the exceptions. Coming from strictly business roles such as marketing or sales, people usually bring their unique perspectives into the new role. 

  Oh, project managers, how often are we mixed up? We even share the shortcut - PM. When a few years ago many project managers jumped on the Agile bandwagon to become coaches, scrum masters and delivery managers - I thought it will help to solve the confusion. No luck, people still often use project and product manager terms interchangeably. 

  The transition from the business analyst role to a PM is probably the easiest and the most natural. We share the majority of skills and often work hand in hand to make our businesses successful. However, BA roles, similarly to PM roles, could differ significantly depending on the company. Some BAs I know are more technical, others work closely with Sales to close deals. Your background as a BA would influence the transition to a PM role. 

  Good news first - a designer is already a PM, a bit. Designers are driven by very much the same forces as PMs - find and solve customers' problems. Unsurprising that many designs are interested in switching to product management to have a greater influence on the overall product lifecycle. This switch, easier than from most other roles , still comes with several challenges, especially when it comes to business aspects of product management. 

  Making my career roadmap I had time to reflect on how I got into product management. It happened almost ten years ago and at the time there was very little information about the role and what one needs to succeed at it. I was super lucky to receive mentorship that helped me to transition from my engineering mindset to a product one. Now I'd like to help future product people who are considering getting into the profession.

  How do we decide to leave a job? Say it's a particularly bad Monday. You spill a coffee onto yourself, there were no seats on the train, you've been called out for being late, your boss is a jerk and your last evaluation went wrong so you'll not get promoted or get a raise.  - Enough is enough, - you think, - it's time to move on.  And maybe it is the time, but most likely not. It's highly possible you're making an important decision at the worst time. Odds are not in your favour. 

When a teacher gets slightly tipsy on Prosecco, you might hear those words. “We have no clue what to teach”. Education is a vital area of human existence. That’s how we succeeded as species - by passing knowledge from one another. And doing it faster than any individual can learn on their own. We’ve built amazing tools to educate, such as language, books, the internet. We’ve built specialised institutions for education. They served us so well, but perhaps it’s time to reconsider. 

Any crisis produces victims and survivors. The difference between the two at least partly depends on their decisions and actions. Same story with businesses.