This is my new home for long-form writing. I’ll be sharing ideas here and syndicating shorter versions to LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and my newsletter. What to Expect Original essays and articles Thoughts on technology, business, and building things The occasional deep dive Stay tuned.
We’re all familiar with the popularly adopted RICE framework which teams, product managers use to prioritize quarterly and annual roadmaps. While a handy and easy to understand tool the application of the tool often misses key contextual aspects and the required depth to make high quality prioritization decisions. I’ll call out a few gaps that might arise from RICE: #1 Time horizons Impact should be framed in terms of time horizons. Initiatives can take time to mature, show sustained and long lasting benefits. Imagine an initiative that requires improvements to retention, loyalty or a new business line. Keeping an artificially short time frame can over emphasize the value from incremental improvements because those could potentially materialize impact sooner. ...
One of my favorite management techniques is delegation poker. Delegation poker is a technique to arrive at how decisions are to be made. The decision makers can be two individuals (manager and report) or entire teams and their team leaders. The 7 delegation levels are: Level 1: Tell Level 2: Sell Level 3: Consult Level 4: Agree Level 5: Advise Level 6: Inquire Level 7: Delegate There is a ton of material out there but one article I frequently share is by Miquel Rodríguez which gives good detail and examples. Specifically love the non work examples with kids and restaurants: ...
I frequently get asked how non technical product managers can become more technical. I compiled a list of a few things that can help, but before get to it a little bit of rationale is warranted… Firstly, I think most people make a mistake of trying to become a software developer themselves and start with a coding 101 course. Coding is hard and will be futile for most practical situations where you need to be more “technical”. ...
As a product owner deciding what to do or not to do for your product can be tricky. Most often the number of opportunities in front of you are more than what you, your team and company can focus on. Between the qualitative and quantitative data from your customers, competitors, stakeholders and your own team this decision making can become over whelming. Getting to key focus areas is definitely an exercise that involves both art (intuition) and science (frameworks). Intuition as I define it is judgement, insight borne out of observation and possibly experience. There are probably better words to describe intuition but I’ll leave that for a different post. Let’s talk about frameworks… ...
Welcome to The Lift by me, Vamsi Narla. Engineering and Product Leader. This is where I share my thoughts on building products, leading teams, and the lessons learned along the way.
Learning is a lifelong endeavor — whatever roles we might assume (student, working professional, parent, boss, entrepreneur) there are always new things for us to learn and excel at. Willingness to learn is highly valued value and obviously without internal motivation learning becomes an arduous process. Assuming you do have the willingness there are 3 foundational pillars for learning. Putting all these together are essential for success. So what are the 3 pillars of learning? ...
As lots of us are working from home (my whole company is remote right now) during this time of social distancing, staying connected with each other becomes even more important. If you’re thinking of ways to connect with your team here’s an idea we’ve been trying out for the past few days that everyone found fun and engaging. Emoji lunch descriptions The idea is simple: At 1PM everyone on team describes their lunch through emojis on our team group chat. People can be as direct or indirect as they want. Others guess and fun conversations happen. ...
Most of us have either heard of or used A/B testing which is a widely employed technique across industries from medicine to software development to measure one version of the product against the other. It’s a method to validate if your beliefs about a new feature or an improvement are actually true and if so to what extent. The reason I’m writing this is two-fold — to collect information about the statistics and math behind the process in one place and also solidify my own understanding of these concepts. I am by no means a statistics, probability or math expert so happy to hear feedback or corrections. ...
Often times during interviews and social conversations I get asked by people what a day in the life of a Product Manager looks like. The first time someone asked me that I was actually taken aback on how difficult it was to answer that question. Any given Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is different from the day before and the Thursday will be very different. Perhaps it’s the very nature of being at a startup but the variability in the type of work is what personally excites me. ...