Kassen Qian

I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: those who need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it.

Somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics. Engineers, partnerships, PMs, everybody is producing documents.

2. Planning - Continually challenge product-market fit and keep the team aligned on a 3-6 month, mid-term vision, of the product. Requires more EQ and stakeholder management.

You’re a super user: Eat your own dog food and talk to people who do too.

3. Strategic - You have PMF and a 2-3 year runway. Your Strategic PM, usually director level or VP level, will take your company's overall long-term vision and lay out the pathways that pave your way towards that. These pathways involve major decisions that could alter the company's future.

At Stripe, we talk about product “shaping,” ... the process of creating a rough solution to a concrete user problem — it fills the space between the broad strategy and the detailed product specification, or the PRD.

Features work as a management control because they manifest in the final product, and their relationship to programmer-hours is about as close to linear as you’re going to get.