Much has been written about the benefit of empowered product team (e.g. see Marty Cagan on dedicated product teams or Spotify on their squad model) but not as much about how organizations can create and thrive in this structure especially in small to medium sized companies.

This post documents one of my most shared tricks of the trade — the “Product Pitch” method to create engaged cross-functional product teams.

Every CTO and VP of Product wants an empowered and engaged team, firing on all cylinders, respected by the organization and delivering results. …

As part of my 2021 personal goals I’m planning to publish notes / resources related to tech, startups and product management that I’ve shared privately with my team or closed product communities to help share that knowledge more publicly and document it for the future.

While the best way to grow as a product manager is to doggedly focus on getting more reps building products customers love (through lots of experimentation, trial and error), it can be helpful to take a step back to learn. And if you are a product leader it can be a challenge to continuously find…

So you are a product manager who needs to learn fast to take on a machine learning project. When I started down this path about a year ago, I was tempted to join the engineers on my team in taking a machine learning course. The issue was 99% of the machine learning courses out were not designed for product managers. They were great for our engineers and data scientists to get the basics to get started, but they did not help me in my work.

Here’s what I suggest doing instead. In this article I will detail three steps specific…

When Gmail came out in 2004, I was a fanatic. I scoured the internet with my sister looking for invites. It was orders of magnitude better than Hotmail — I couldn’t imagine a world before it.

Today I felt the same excitement as I got an invite to Inbox, Gmail’s new email interface, from my one of old-coworkers, a Gmail engineer. I was lucky to get an insight into the long term Gmail vision while I worked there, and it is awesome to see some of these coming to life today.

As all the tech press right now seems to…

Yesterday I was sitting around the dinner table with nine of my family and friends eating amazing food, listening to Latin American music, drinking Colombian coffee and feeling very thankful. The best part — I barely lifted a finger.

The Setup

One thing that amazed me about the Kitchensurfing experience is how easy it was to book and customize the experience. I picked a Latin American chef, Samm Spice, and a few days later he sent me a sample menu. I was traveling in Colombia during the couple weeks before the dinner so I didn’t have a lot of time…