Michael Hablich

In April 2020 I received an invitation I didn't expect. Sivan Hermon, a senior engineering manager at Google, asked me to teach the GIST model (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks) to her product group. This request kicked my impostor syndrome into hyperdrive. As a former Googler, I knew Google had strong product people and a firm belief in its product culture and practices. Would anyone benefit from my approach to building high-impact products? With some apprehension we launched the training in June 2020 (online as this was the height of the pandemic). I expected pushback in the form of "we don't have these problems", but almost immediately I noticed this was not the case. The same questions and challenges that people raise in other companies came up at Google as well. People were bothered by unclear strategies and definitions of success. They worried they didn’t understand their customers well enough, and that they were picking the wrong ideas to work on. They had stakeholders to gratify and dependencies to manage. Some things are just universal it seems. I also feared that the solutions I offer would be rejected with "nothing new here". For example, as part of the Goals layer of GIST I teach Objectives and Key Results (OKR), but of course Google has been using OKR for decades. Indeed, When we prepared  for the workshop some people asked if we should skip this module entirely. However during the course we observed that what was being practiced isn’t the most effective (more on this in the linked article). Generally, throughout the workshop  the participants were engaged and receptive, and that the methods we practiced seemed to resonate strongly with them. The workshop (based on participant feedback) ended up being a success. But holding a training is the easy part. The hard part is changing the way you work, which some companies struggle with. But that wasn't the case with this group. They embraced the principles and methodology  and made them their own. They revamped their prioritization approach and got developers involved in discovery. As a result they were able to launch multiple successful products in rapid succession. Sivan attributes this success to these factors: - People being open minded - Supportive leadership team - Redesigning processes with the new information gained in the workshop I would add a fourth factor: Sivan as a leader is a strong believer in “realizing I can do better and being open to exploring new approaches” and she teaches this growth mindset to her reports. This mentality is key for a successful transformation.  Sivan regularly publishes beautiful articles about product development and culture. In her last article she recounts this GIST story from her perspective. This article is is packed with useful real-world insights and is also a great introduction to the GIST system. I highly recommend reading it:

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Just a few days ago, #Microsoft had their #keynote where #AI was the main focus, surprise surprise. You can watch and read summaries about the #announcements made almost everywhere where people did a much better job than I can do covering things left and right. This post, however, is to highlight a few interesting parts that haven’t been covered much. For example, the statement made by #Satya about how AI is going to be changing computers, the way graphic interfaces did when introduced to terminal-based devices. Microsoft was keen to show the statement in action by showing how #Copilot has been integrated almost everywhere in #Windows. No longer limited to writing #code or text-based tasks — with the vision ability in place, Copilot can do much more. Satya made sure that these abilities are not only targeted to compete with #designers and #developers, but also #project #managers. There was also an interesting demo where the latest #Surface device put into tests against the #Mac #M3, which it aced. Though IMHO, the comparison is not fair, as the Surface has a standalone #NPU (Neural Processing Unit) that’s designed to run all the AI processes while leaving the #CPU and #GPU free to do the rest. This NPU enables the user to run the AI models locally, completely #offline. Which is something that seems to be missed by some who were complaining about #privacy when Microsoft showed some of the features that can only be achieved by giving the AI an access to watch your screen. These features can be, of course, disabled if you don’t feel like an AI watching over your shoulders.

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ICYMI, Google Cloud Platform and Technical Infrastructure Director, Jennifer Petoff, gave the opening keynote at DevOpsDays Zurich this year. You can check out the video here if you want to learn more about the importance of education in driving an SRE or DevOps culture.

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Me in 2019: “Hiring top product talent is hard” Me in 2024: “Keeping top talent is even harder” After five years of leading PMs, I can say that mastering managing high-performers yields the highest ROI. Nevertheless, taking high performers for granted will shutter your ‘house of cards’ in no time. In this post, I will dive into the ‘Promotion’ topic; the ‘Sacred cow’ leaders consciously try to keep vague. 1️⃣ 𝐓𝐨𝐩 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐝. - Promotion is the ultimate recognition (financial, social, and brand). - Misalignment around promotion can kill performance. - Dangling the promotion carrot quarter after quarter will break trust. 2️⃣ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬. - You hire top talent ( = High Performance) to do job X - Ensure the talent does job X for a long time ( = Duration) - Formula: (High Performance) X (Duration) = (Company Success). - Promotion means they no longer do job X. 3️⃣ 𝐑𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠-𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬. - Reward performance peaks (take care of your team). - Promote a long-term performance upward trend. - Invest in building your team members’ long-term defensible careers. 4️⃣ 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐚𝐩. - Communicate promotion criteria early, starting with interviews. - Hire only those happy to do job X for at least three years. - Never use empty promotion promises as a hiring tactic. 🟢 Wrapping up with a few 𝐛𝐨𝐧𝐮𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐌𝐬: 1. Ensuring that your work materializes in building a successful company has a higher long-term impact than a premature promotion. 2. The statement ‘Join at level Y and you will get promoted in no time’ indicates a questionable/toxic culture. Don’t take the job. 3. And a counter-argument: As a PM, avoid taking a role you are uncomfortable doing for at least three years. *** What do you love/hate about my ‘promotion’ philosophy? Share in the comments. 👉 P.S. The link to the full write-up is in the comments. #productmanagement #productleadership #productmanagers #product #promotion #leadingdown

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🚀 Exciting News! TÜV SÜD and Zühlke have formed a formal cooperation to enhance AI quality and safety. This collaboration leverages TÜV SÜD's expertise in safety and Zühlke's innovation in AI, ensuring high standards in AI development. Together, we're setting new benchmarks for trust and reliability in AI technologies. #Innovation #AI #Safety

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According to Marty Cagan European companies are "addicted to process", which is a big barrier for doing proper product work. Here are some key points from Marty's talk that I personally found important: (1) Marty believes that real product work is about solving customer problems. The main negative character in Marty's world is feature teams—teams that just implement features following a roadmap someone else wrote, instead of engaging in product discovery. – You don’t want to be a feature team, do you? – Marty asks. According to him, teams should be actively searching for answers to questions like: → What problem should we be trying to solve? → How can we solve this problem? If you're just developing something, you’re not a product manager but a project manager at best, and you don't belong in the profession. In delivery, Marty values speed (in the spirit of CI/CD); he doesn’t see anything else as valuable or interesting. "Think about time to money, not time to market." (2) Marty strongly advocates for autonomous cross-functional teams that can quickly experiment with solutions to discovered problems. He believes that everyone on the team, including engineers, should be involved in product work. "We don’t hire great engineers to tell them what to do, we hire great engineers so they can show us what’s possible". (3) Marty views processes and frameworks as the main enemies of product thinking because they replace analysis and critical thinking. This is especially true for Agile; while the original principles are good, the way they're often implemented in practice tends to be just mindlessly following a prescribed process. (4) Instead of frameworks, Marty suggests a set of "first principles of product model", which you can interpret and practice to the extent of your understanding and talent. These principles are shown in a picture. (5) Lead with context, not control. To elaborate on this point, Marty shares a story of a product leader at Netflix. When his team started doing something weird, his first instinct was to fire everyone. But then he remembered that Netflix fires anyone whose performance is even slightly below "exceptional" every year. Then he realised that if a smart product person does something strange, it means he, as a leader, dropped the ball and didn't provide some crucial part of the context. So, he went to figure out what critical piece of knowledge the team was missing.

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"Product sense" - an intuition for how to create high craft products that customers love - can be learned. It is not some innate skill done solo, but rather a capability you can refine in yourself with lots of hands on product time and an understanding of how to influence your team. ✍️ JUST PUBLISHED: My thought on your role in raising the bar as a UX PM. #mindthebeet #product #productmanagement #userexperience

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Going from a product idea to a company and scalable business is all about closing the product-company gap. Here an very interesting insight.

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Does Engineering tech debt need input from Product Management? How does Enterprise Architecture even begin to map out massive corporate infrastructures? Are Elon's recent Twitter (ugh... X) changes blowing up in his face? And why are Twitter and Facebook still so dominant after so many missteps? It's another week of User Stories and Market Factors where we try and help some Redditors with their questions and look at some recent news. https://lnkd.in/gQn4nHBa #ElonMusk #Twitter #Apple #engineering #productmanagement #podcast

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𝐃𝐨 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬, 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞: 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐐&𝐀 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐠𝐥𝐞'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭 ✅ Yesterday, at #WomenInProduct, I had the pleasure of facilitating a Q&A session with Laura Mae Martin, author of "Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing". The discussion focused on a powerful concept: do less, yet accomplish more. We explored practical strategies to maximize focus, minimize distractions, and leverage small productivity hacks for peak performance: * Create an end-to-end 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 and never drop the ball again * Find your 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫 and plan your day to make the most of it * Understand how to 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐨 and where to cut on your schedule * Other practical tips on 𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐥, 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 work and home and 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥 If you missed the live session, don't worry! I recommend checking out Laura's insightful book "𝐔𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞" for a deep dive. https://lnkd.in/eA5GBQBz Thank you for making this happen Judy Chang, Alyssa Watts, Jan Jedrzejowicz #WIP24 #productivity #worklifebalance #uptime #google #efficiency 

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I have to say that #Google's CAPTCHA is becoming more and more annoying. It is not only that we train the AI for free but I had to spend a whole minute+ clicking over more than 30 images and classify them (and it seems the number is growing by the day). For every company that is using that approach to "verify" that I am a human, please consider the horrible user-experience you are offering to your customers. If I had the option, I would NOT use that company's web site after such an experience. #userexperience

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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Great talk where Roman Boiko and 💻 Daniele Frasca dive deep on how ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE use Kafka and EventBridge Pipes. They will guide you through the journey of optimizing Kafka, why they went with Confluent Kafka instead of Amazon MSK and how they integrated Kafka with Amazon EventBridge Pipes. They will discuss the benefits as well as the limitations and issues. They also discuss the specific architectural patterns such as the Claim-check and Point-to-point fan-out to enhance resilience and efficiency. https://lnkd.in/eDrX9TPh

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Product leaders are always facing the tradeoff between speed and flexibility. It’s always faster to ship a product that has tightly integrated components, because the team is optimizing for a small set of v1 use cases. However, that strategy flies in the face of the one certainty of any product plan: Your product plan is wrong, the only question is to what degree. If you believe that (trust me on this 😎), then you realize that taking the time to compose your product from a set of decoupled “primitives” will materially increase your ability to iterate based off of customer feedback after your initial launch. I appreciate that Andy Jassy outlined how Amazon thinks about primitives in his 2024 Shareholder Letter last week. He wrote about how Amazon’s logistics primitives like inbounding, warehousing, and delivery have unlocked new opportunities. And how Buy with Prime and Multi-Channel Fulfillment are examples of composing these primitives into powerful services for sellers. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read our Shareholder Letter -- it's a good reminder that the possibilities are endless when you have the right primitives. https://lnkd.in/gGEkh8pV #amazon #buywithprime #multichannelfulfillment

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When making product investments I often note a tension between focusing on a few features - depth first - versus broad and shallow - breadth first. There are pros and cons to both approaches, oftentimes both can be used together. https://lnkd.in/gG6rG-2x

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We all run out of ideas. Don’t feel bad for your lack of creativity in what seems today’s abundance of information. We often feel blocked in the middle of a torrent of content around us. We struggle to find the best way to contribute - but every option seems meaningless. I personally face this situation often. The lack of inspiration brings back the self-doubt of my skills. I start questioning everything and if what I’m doing worth the effort. We might just need one more step forward. When I feel like this, I like to remember that we might be closer to the next connecting dot. I just don’t see it, yet. If I just give one step forward… Try your next sketch (even if it's not inspiring) Write the next sentence (even if doesn’t make sense) Share your next contribution (even if is not as disruptive as others) Read through the next page (even if you think you are not a good reader) Move forward. You might be closer than you think to your next big idea. You just don’t see it. Yet. https://lnkd.in/dT4NUF98

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Scaling culture through 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 and 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 with minimal friction. "People are not behaving as we expect" A common observation from execs in scaling companies. Let's stop for a moment. Has anyone explicitly shared the current culture? Culture, simply put, is the "way things work around here" If culture is not explicitly defined. People pick up on culture through observation: → Who gets acclaim and promotions? → Leadership values and behaviour → Who gets fired → Process However, as companies scale, observation alone breaks down: → Rapid influx of people from differing cultures can cause friction → Company leaders are less visible day to day → Opaque staffing decisions → Process misunderstood 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 Culture becomes diluted or misaligned to the original intent. Frustration all around 𝗦𝗼 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀? 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘵 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘴 and 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 - beliefs that are deemed important 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 - rules of thumb that guide decision making A quick example from Apple. Value        → Design Principle  → Attention to detail 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 Don't be tempted to directly copy from a successful company. You are not Apple. Think carefully about your own beliefs and principles as a leadership team. What has driven your success so far? 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Several years ago the company I was working for got acquired. New CEO comes in and makes the culture we can expect explicit. This is how I run the business: • 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 and why • 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 and how they have been helpful   Furthermore they had some additional performance principals that outlined valued behaviours. The result? 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 People understood the rules. Are your cultural ideals explicit or implicit?

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I am one of the direct beneficiary of AIDOPE framework. Adopting and Implementing AI DOPE framework promotes consistent reflection, enhances leadership communication, and ensures structured oversight across various levels of management. These are some of the benifits I have experienced in my last more than 6 months using this framework. 1. Provides clear focus areas. 2. Encourages regular tracking and reflection. 3. Enhances managerial effectiveness. 4. Supports structured leadership evaluation. 5. Facilitates better coordination across levels. 6. Aids in setting clear expectations. 7. Promotes striving for excellence. 8. Offers a systematic approach to leadership. 9. Allows adaptable implementation. 10. Improves overall leadership performance. I highly recommend you to use this.

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