Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career)

Keep a leaderboard of how many bugs each person fixes and have a variety of small prizes: most bugs fixed, oldest bug fixed, bug with the highest number of customer reports fixed, etc. You can also consider bringing in snacks, playing music, or having fun activities to get people excited.

The tasks or stories usually have cost estimates—for example, in the format of story points. Story points are an abstract unit of cost; 1 point is the easiest possible work, 2 points is work that should take twice as long as a 1-point task, and it increases from there. Engineers (not PMs) set the cost estimates.

By length of engagement: Start by building things people need in the first week, and then build things that are needed later on if the usage is high enough.

Every Friday afternoon, the product management team and other interested folks from the design, research and analytics teams sit together for an hour and "tear down" an interesting mobile or web app. By "tear down," we don't mean "criticize", but rather investigate and reverse engineer the thinking and experience under

Engineering doesn't start until the Discovery and Design phases have gotten a large enough head start.

The design phase is not just about putting your ideas into pictures; it also includes expansive thinking and validating your ideas with real people. This includes both the user experience (e.g., mock-ups and visual prototypes) and the technical solution (design docs and technical prototypes).

The "Key Trade-Offs & Decisions" section highlights the places where the PM considered alternatives to help readers understand the reasoning. Problems Companies often build terrible products that could have been much better with improved PMing. PMs don't always know what it takes to PM well. The best PMs aren't always effective at man

As you talk to people, focus on the insights—both expected and unexpected—so you can form a mental model of your users. Try to predict what people will say, and keep track of where your intuition is right and wrong.

This depends on the team, but there are two main approaches—each with their pros and cons: Designers work one sprint ahead of engineering.