Music
I make a lot of music. Please check it out on my Soundcloud.
The first songs I can remember loving are “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Louis and the News (pre American psycho, thank you very much), “A Message to Rudy” by Dandy Livingstone (made famous by The Specials), and The He-Man theme song by Shuki Levy Haim Saban (did not know the composer until recently).
I started playing clarinet at age 10 and saxophone soon followed. Taught myself guitar, bass guitar, ukulele, and flute as well.
Decluttering
Prioritization
I have a home organization and decluttering business called Clarified Clutter.
This type of work is a passion of mine. It’s incredibly satisfying and always has been. Not sure why; I don’t overthink it. If you’d like to hire me for that, I would be thrilled!
I tend to think about how to declutter a product as well. It’s inescapable for me. Looking at the UI and seeing ways to streamline, thinking about the architecture and trying to deprecate extraneous systems, simplifying flows: these things all come to me frequently.
It all comes from restaurant work
I learned pretty much everything I know about prioritization from the twelve years I worked in restaurants. I've done almost every job you can in a restaurant and everything during service needs to be done in order of priority. There are four factors to determine priority:
When did someone ask for it?
How long does it take to make?
How important is it?
Who asked for it?
At any given time, you look at the tasks, run a quick calculation, and take action according to those four factors.
Product management is no different, but you do have the luxury of things happening less in real time. I usually look at everything that's planned and in play at the beginning of each day, and set priorities based on my four factors.
There is one exception in product management: sometimes I allow myself to do a task I know I can complete in a day, regardless of priority. It's good for the mind and spirit to actually finish something quickly now and again. Some tech work extends a long time.
A Framework
The main variables I look at when prioritizing items for a product roadmap:
User Impact - Do users want this? How badly do they want it? Will it actually help users, or do they only think it will help? Is there a better solution to achieve what the user wants?
Business Value -How does this impact our main goals? Does it drive revenue? Grow our user base? Secure renewals?
Effort - Developer effort is of primary concern here, but also design effort, product management effort, research efforts, training, marketing. Anything required to ship the feature
A feature with high user impact, high business value, and low effort is definitely worthy of strong consideration.
Gherkin Syntax
Enthusiastic support of Gherkin Syntax!
A very eye-opening exercise is to sit with a developer as they work through a user story you wrote. Oftentimes, what they code will not align with your expectations as the product manager.
One excellent way to solve this is adopting a pseudo code syntax like Gherkin to standardise user story and test scenario writing. Some Gherkin ressources to get started:
https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-start-writing-gherkin-test-scenarios
https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/