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Wayne Duso's avatar

Nicely penned, complete and concise, description of a customer-first mechanism (topic for another post perhaps :)) for building a scalable culture. Keep them coming Joshua...

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Joshua Burgin's avatar

Thanks Wayne, high praise

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Simon Mosk-Aoyama's avatar

Thanks for the piece! Curious where you draw the lines so the exec team isn't micromanaging the product roadmap - do you just apply this for large/new rollouts/launches?

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Joshua Burgin's avatar

Good question. There's not a one-sized fits all answer, but to be successful I'd make sure a few things happen.

First, create a culture where everyone uses the same templates/this approach for nearly all of the roadmap. It's too easy for people to say "these features are minor, they don't require analysis" and then over time a significant percent of your product's experience hasn't really gotten any kind of scrutiny or deep thought. There are exceptions (bug fixes, minor UI tweaks, etc) where this is overkill - but if your PMs or Senior Devs/Eng Managers are good, writing these kind of product templates isn't an insurmountable task. It's a good process to create & review them as a team to hold yourself accountable, if nothing else.

Second, I'd err on the side of *starting* with most of the product roadmap being reviewed in-depth at the exec level, until you've built a culture where you're sure people below you are applying the same standards across the company. What feels like micro-management at the beginning is really about establishing culture & practices. Culture setting is a large part of what successful executives focus on in their job.

Between these two things, execs will/should naturally back off to only reviewing the larger rollouts/launches, because they can be confident the non-exec/team management is conducting similar reviews and making defensible, smart decisions. The execs then the use mechanisms I've described in other blog posts (weekly/quarterly business reviews) to dive into the business.

I will say that while I've seen micro-management at the exec team level, I've more often seen the opposite - where execs aren't diving deep enough and where un-reviewed product management decisions leads to diverging customer experiences across product lines, or wasted efforts that could have been avoided with earlier exec review.

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