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Text Content

Need someone to lead product management at your software company? I create
software for people that create software and I'm looking for my next
opportunity. Check out my resume and get in touch.

Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body
with a hint of nutty earthiness.


MASTERY DOESN’T COME FROM PERFECT PLANNING

December 21, 2023

There was a ceramics class where half the class was told they had to create one
dish for the semester and the quality of that dish would be the basis of the
grade. The other half the class was told their grade would be based on how many
dishes they made, but quality didn’t matter.

The first group spent the semester designing the perfect dish. They spent weeks
picking out just the right material. They agonized over sketches of their
designs. They argued over colors and styles.

The second group just made dishes. They made 3 the first week. The second week,
they were able to move faster and made 8. Those 8 weren’t any better than the
first 3. But a few weeks in, they knew how to make dishes and their designs were
improving.

At the end of the semester,the first group had one pretty good dish. But the
second group had dozens of amazing dishes.

Because they got more reps in actually creating dishes, they started making
really nice ones. The others had a good theory of what would make a good dish,
but only had one shot at turning that theory into reality.

The first group’s dish was a cup. It was pretty good, but the teacher had hoped
for a bowl. The second group had cups, plates, bowls, and statues.

In product management, you’ll never plan your way to a perfect product. But by
running lots of reps, you’ll make lots of fantastic ones.


THE DARK SIDE OF INPUT METRICS

November 27, 2023

Input metrics can be helpful to track progress toward long-term goals, but they
can cause issues if not used carefully. They might make people act in ways you
didn’t expect, limit creativity, and lead to micromanaging.



Read more »


REFRAME HOW YOU THINK ABOUT USERS OF YOUR INTERNAL PLATFORM

November 13, 2023

Changing from "Customers" to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on
internal product development.



Companies are using internal product platforms to speed up development, make
user experiences consistent, reduce operational costs, and support various
environments, including mobile. One of the key differences in product management
of an internal platform is who your end users are. They adopt and use your
product for different reasons than an external customer would.

It’s tempting to view the product managers and engineers using the platform as
your customers. As product managers, we spend most of the time thinking about
customers, so it’s natural for an internal product to think of fellow employees
as their customers.

But the concept of a customer comes with assumptions and context that can slow
your success as a platform team There’s a huge difference between an actual
customer and these internal “customers.”

Read more »


MEASURING FEATURE SUCCESS

October 17, 2023

"You have launched a new feature in your product. How do you measure the success
of the feature?"

If you don’t know the answer to this before you build features, you’re probably
building the wrong things.

You’re building features to solve problems. If you don’t know what success looks
like, how did you decide on that feature at all?

Starting with features instead of problems is a tragically common problem among
product managers. They may be building capabilities for problems their customers
don’t have. They may be building the wrong solution for their customer problem.
Or they may be building small, insignificant things that don’t have large
impacts on their business or customers.

You have a hypothesis that creating this feature will generate a certain
outcome. Was that outcome created? Was the hypothesis correct? Trying to figure
out after the fact a way to measure success means that you weren’t focused on
the outcome when you were creating the feature. The shipping of the feature
itself was viewed as the goal. This isn’t a good way to build products.

Product teams should be discussing product outcomes. They should review their
releases to see if the feature worked. Did it create the expected outcome? Why
or why not? What experiments could you run (iterations) to learn if there are
better ways to solve that problem?

There are some signs that your product teams are feature-focused instead of
outcome-focused.

 * Their OKRs, bonuses, and celebrations are mostly about whether they shipped
   instead of achieving an outcome for the customer or the business
 * Discussion of outcomes and KPIs from the last release doesn’t happen during
   the planning process
 * They don’t iterate on previous feature releases. Or if they do, the
   iterations are known in advance, instead of based on what they learned about
   what just shipped
 * People talk about what feature is needed to increase sales instead of what
   problems you aren’t solving for customers


HOW I USE OKRS

October 13, 2023

I like to manage with OKRs. This post describes how I use them, how I think
about what’s important, and the tactics I use to execute using them. This isn’t
a complete primer on OKRs. There are plenty of those on the internet and in
books. I highly recommend Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus if you want a
detailed guide to OKRs. I’m writing this mostly so I can send it to my future
teams when we’re implementing OKRs.

Read more »


BUILD THE WHOLE PRODUCT

October 6, 2023

A team inside a large company spent a year building a new product from scratch.
They obsessed about every detail. They refined the giant vision down to a
reasonable v1. They slipped the release date a couple times, but then celebrated
shipping a working product.

Nine months later, they only had one customer. What went wrong?

One of the biggest oversights was that they were so focused on building the code
that. Made up the product, they forgot about the rest of what makes a product
work. Marketing first got involved when the product was almost done. Support
didn’t have any tools to help customers and didn’t really understand the
product.

But most importantly, this new product from a sales-driven company didn’t think
they needed sales. Sales didn’t see the product before it launched. They didn’t
have input into price models. No one told them what was different about the new
product.

So sales sabotaged the new product. Probably not on purpose. There might not
have been meetings where sales teams said, “let’s make sure no one buys the new
product.” But when a prospective customer asked a sales person how they could
buy the new product, sales always steered them away. Steered them toward the
products they understood. The ones where they knew how to price it, demo it,
where they knew the customer would be well supported.

“Why won’t sales let people buy this,” the product team lamented. But why would
they? Sales had a new product dropped in their lap with no input, no context,
and no warning. It’s not surprising they just kept doing what they normally did.

The product team thought they had a green field product. Build whatever you
want, however you want. But they failed to think about the context they were
operating in. They failed to keep the rest of the company involved while they
built the product.

The result was something that sales didn’t know what to do with, marketing
couldn’t explain to customers, support couldn’t operate, and finance couldn’t
bill for. The team had only built the code, not the whole product.

The product was a failure from the start, the team just didn’t realize it yet.


RECENTLY WRITTEN

Mastery doesn’t come from perfect planning (Dec 21) In a ceramics class, one
group focused on a single perfect dish, while another made many with no quality
focus. The result? A lesson in the value of practice over perfection. The Dark
Side of Input Metrics (Nov 27) Using input metrics in the wrong way can cause
unexpected behaviors, stifled creativity, and micromanagement. Reframe How You
Think About Users of your Internal Platform (Nov 13) Changing from "Customers"
to "Partners" will give you a better perspective on internal product
development. Measuring Feature success (Oct 17) You're building features to
solve problems. If you don't know what success looks like, how did you decide on
that feature at all? How I use OKRs (Oct 13) A description of how I use OKRs to
guide a team, written so I can send to future teams. Build the whole product
(Oct 6) Your code is only part of the product Input metrics lead to outcomes
(Sep 1) An easy to understand example of using input metrics to track progress
toward an outcome. Lagging Outcomes (Aug 22) Long-term things often end up off a
team's goals because they can't see how to define measurable outcomes for them.
Here's how to solve that.

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WHAT I'M READING

 * The Secret (Jack Reacher #28) by Lee Child
 * What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More
   Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
 * Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World by
   Todd Rogers
 * Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim
   Collins
 * The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and
   Results by Stephen Bungay
 * Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable
   Companies by Reid Hoffman
 * Lead!: How to Build a High-Performing Team by Dale Carnegie & Associates
 * Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell
 * Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey
 * Leading Through Inflation: And Recession and Stagflation by Ram Charan
 * Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
 * Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill
   Campbell by Eric Schmidt
 * Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing
   Urgency, and Elevating Intensity by Frank Slootman
 * Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir
   Eyal
 * Monty Hall, Storytelling, and Planning
 * Scaling Up is Hard to Do | Chasm Group
 * Crazy, Unloved but Potentially Transformational – What’s in your Loonshot
   nursery? - Rita McGrath
 * When terrible things happen to good innovation projects… - Rita McGrath
 * The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World’s Greatest
   Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary
   Breakers by Michael F. Schein
 * Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful
   Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman


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Adam Kalsey

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adam AT kalsey.com

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