Elena Leonova 🇺🇦

A few days ago, one of my friends was facing challenges in implementing OKRs. In fact, he was confused about the concepts. I provided him with an example that I had previously found useful from Reza Pourmohamadi. I told him to step away from business discussions and imagine that he wants to create a roadmap for personal growth and achieving a life goal, such as improving health over the next three months. This becomes your objective. Now, based on this objective, you identify a series of key results that define how you will achieve that goal. For instance, attending three one-hour gym sessions per week, or losing a specific amount of weight within a certain timeframe can be key results. To achieve these key results, it is necessary to establish performance indicators and measure them to understand your progress towards your goals. These indicators are the KPIs. For example, improving your BMI by 5% in 3 months, or decreasing blood cholesterol levels by 10% can serve as KPIs. Additionally, you might measure other metrics, such as sleep quality or stress levels, not necessarily as KPIs but as indicators of your overall progress. These KPIs and metrics help you monitor various aspects of your goal achievement and ensure that you are on track to reach your main objectives. Using this simple example helped him understand the basic definitions more accurately and in a practical manner. I hope this is useful for those who are new to the product field and facing challenges with these concepts. #Product_Management #OKR #KPI

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Product management in tech is going through an existential crisis. GTM - owned by someone else. Pricing - owned by someone else. Growth - owned by someone else. Packaging - owned by someone else. Product vision - given by someone else. Data crunching - owned by someone else. Product strategy - owned by someone else. Hypothesis testing - owned by someone else. Business modeling - owned by someone else. Research, discovery - owned by someone else. Voice of the customer - owned by someone else. Everything that's supposed to be product management in the past is been done by someone else. Last week I chatted with a CPO who said: "Product management won't exist anymore. I need General Managers who drive business results with the product. Someone who knows how to bring a product life and make it successful financially. PM as it is today doesn't work. PMs need to own the role of a GM." I answered: "What you describe is the Product Manager role that's been existing since the 1920s. Unfortunately in tech we're not living it the way the role was meant to be. So yes PMs need to become commercial again. But if you start calling them 'GM', they need the authority of a GM. Otherwise we end up in the 'CEO of the product without being a CEO' mess." 👉 She and many other product leaders I am talking is looking for an entrepreneurial role of a product manager who has the capability to direct the product end-to-end. And seeing that more and more roles and teams are formed that are taking care of the commercial duties that a PM would have prove her point. What happened: ❤️ Product Management was a commercial function. 💔 Got pulled too deep into technical delivery. 💔 This created a commercial vacuum. 💔 Which created roles and teams that took over Product Management's duties. 💔 Now that Product Management rightly wants to get back to its origins, the commercial seats are taken. That's one of the reasons why we have so many discussions about what PMs should do and what not. How to change it: A) PMs need to get "commercial savvy" (pun intended) again. B) Companies need to understand the role of PM and utilize their PMs better. PMs are not ticket monkeys responsible for delivery!!! C) ... what else? I don't know how to end this post so here's the pitch: "If you are a scale-up or SMB who wants your PMs to be more entrepreneurial, and need help with that -> ping me" ... ... and POST END 😅

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Why most developers don't ask "unnecessary" questions about goals or the impact of new functionality on the business during meetings? From my experience as a product manager, developers who ask the right questions about: - clarifying goals - user experience - share their non-technical ideas, receiving salary increases and promotions! The problem is that less than 10% of developers have asked product-related questions throughout my entire career! Developers, I'm curious, do you ask product-related questions during meetings? If not, why? #ProductManagement #SoftwareDevelopment #TechCareers #BusinessImpact #CareerGrowth #TeamCollaboration #DevQuestions

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According to Marty Cagan European companies are "addicted to process", which is a big barrier for doing proper product work. Here are some key points from Marty's talk that I personally found important: (1) Marty believes that real product work is about solving customer problems. The main negative character in Marty's world is feature teams—teams that just implement features following a roadmap someone else wrote, instead of engaging in product discovery. – You don’t want to be a feature team, do you? – Marty asks. According to him, teams should be actively searching for answers to questions like: → What problem should we be trying to solve? → How can we solve this problem? If you're just developing something, you’re not a product manager but a project manager at best, and you don't belong in the profession. In delivery, Marty values speed (in the spirit of CI/CD); he doesn’t see anything else as valuable or interesting. "Think about time to money, not time to market." (2) Marty strongly advocates for autonomous cross-functional teams that can quickly experiment with solutions to discovered problems. He believes that everyone on the team, including engineers, should be involved in product work. "We don’t hire great engineers to tell them what to do, we hire great engineers so they can show us what’s possible". (3) Marty views processes and frameworks as the main enemies of product thinking because they replace analysis and critical thinking. This is especially true for Agile; while the original principles are good, the way they're often implemented in practice tends to be just mindlessly following a prescribed process. (4) Instead of frameworks, Marty suggests a set of "first principles of product model", which you can interpret and practice to the extent of your understanding and talent. These principles are shown in a picture. (5) Lead with context, not control. To elaborate on this point, Marty shares a story of a product leader at Netflix. When his team started doing something weird, his first instinct was to fire everyone. But then he remembered that Netflix fires anyone whose performance is even slightly below "exceptional" every year. Then he realised that if a smart product person does something strange, it means he, as a leader, dropped the ball and didn't provide some crucial part of the context. So, he went to figure out what critical piece of knowledge the team was missing.

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Controversial take but in my experience of working in last 3 products (all B2B or B2B2C category), I realized that engineering is far too overrated in the organizations. —A lot of product intelligence for business rules, UX, engineering-viability, compliance, and for the product strategy itself is required in the *design* stage—a mix of research, designing, prototyping, stakeholder workshopping, and cross-team feedback sessions on how the design is aligned with the product vision (subject to iterations of course) —Most often, the job of engineering has been to implement the logic, the business rules, the user experience, the customer journey mapping, product positioning, the onboarding and the customer retention levers—and everything else that design has already taken care of. Engineering operationalizes the design and the vision, and of course their success is super important for the performance and efficiency, the DevOps and servers, and everything. But there is very little product intelligence or business intelligence required if the design already takes care of these aspects. Open to be corrected of course. :) PS: When I said design or UX, it includes product content and content design (or call it content strategy) as well.

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Reflecting on product leadership after 10+ years in the field: The best PMs I've worked with embody true product ownership – they're essentially CEOs of their product lines. They lead with market knowledge, clear communication, and unwavering accountability. Instead of getting caught in day-to-day firefighting, they focus on strategic positioning and customer value. They don't make excuses; they find solutions. Most importantly, they understand that success isn't about feature parity or technical prowess – it's about delivering superior market value and driving revenue. What's your take on modern product leadership? #ProductManagement #Leadership

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