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Structured learning programs felt like real development. The team kept reaching for short courses and coaching instead, and they were mostly right. A note on the founder’s time horizon, and what AI changes about it.
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We thought our onboarding developed people. Mostly we hired self-starters and paid for external coaches. A note on misattribution.
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Generative AI was supposed to clear the fog inside organizations. It produced a new one: five layers of opacity that the old management tools cannot navigate.
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Over the past couple of years, I have had a few product people on my team, received coaching myself, and picked up a lot from conversations with other PMs, founders, and people who think deeply about building products. The contexts are always different. Different industries, team sizes, stages. But two patterns keep coming up with…
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Most people who work in product development agree that it is essential to understand key problems in order to build good solutions. This often involves understanding the customer or finding new products. It has also become common for engineers, who are responsible for building the product, to be involved from the start. This is explained…
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In my last blog post, “The Framework Trap,” I talked about all the problems we ran into when engineers, designers, and product team members were working together. I’ve come to see that Scrum, with its strong emphasis on the right processes, has actually been more of a hindrance than a help to our team. While…
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When we started working on our products, especially our software, we had a pretty inexperienced team. Some of us had already worked on software projects at other companies or participated in research projects at universities or research institutions. The team’s most experienced member, in terms of years of professional experience, was a software engineer with…
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Over the past 12-18 months, we have established the initial structures for a middle management level within our company. The reason for this was that the number of employees had increased significantly from just under 10 to over 30, which would have resulted in a management depth of around 15 people with only two founders.…
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When newcomers join the team, there are often significant differences in how quickly and how well they perform their assigned tasks. Basically, I have identified the following types, which I would like to link to learning curves: In the following, I would like to outline the possible reasons for the increasing returns pattern and what…
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Each company offers at least one product/service that provides added value for other market participants. Early-stage start-ups often only have one product that can be offered, as resources are extremely limited, and the current market may not yet be fully understood. The fact that the founding team’s resources are largely allocated to one product means…