Shape Up reflections: Volume 1

28 Sep 2020

Below you’ll find a lightly edited version of an internal update I sent to everyone at CareerPlug after the completing our first product cycle, modeled on Basecamp’s Shape Up method.

Since the target audience for these updates is the company first, I’ll add inline commentary and footnotes as needed to add context for readers that aren’t intimately familiar with CareerPlug’s internal workings.

My intent in sharing these kinds of internal documents is to help demystify the inner workings of product organizations — or at least the one product organization I can demystify.

As an introduction to our org, CareerPlug has ~50 employees in total, with a product team of 13 people. Today, our product team is made of up two UX designers, eight engineers, and two QA engineers, plus me.

Our core product, launched in 2012, is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) used by more than 12,000 businesses in the United States and Canada. Our core clients are brick-and-mortar businesses (think retail, restaurants, and home services) with limited professional HR resources. Our ATS covers everything from distributing job postings to a variety of online job boards (think Indeed) through pre-hire assessments, interviews, offer letters, and background checks. It is a big, fairly complex piece of software, but we do our best to make the end user experience simple.

Let’s dig in. -David

Read the rest 13-minute read

Product managers: your job is not to say no

13 Jul 2020

One of the most damaging pieces of advice you can receive as a new product manager is that your job is to say no. This advice, well-meaning and oft-repeated, isn’t wrong but when taken at face value it is incredibly damaging.

Your job as a product manager is not saying no; your job is saying yes to the right things.

This might seem like a silly distinction — in either case, you’re saying no a lot, right? — but your mindset makes all the difference.

Read the rest Four-minute read

Do less: A strategy for building better products

05 Jul 2020

Product managers love building new things. It is a driving force behind why many of us decide on this career path; we get to spend all day figuring out what cool new thing to build next.

This love of building stuff serves us well in the early days of a product. Everything is new, you don’t have many users, and you are missing core components of your product’s value proposition. Delivering new features quickly helps you find problems that your users want you to solve before you run out of cash.

Eventually, if you build the right things and all of the pieces fall into place, you get past the early stage of searching for product-market fit and find that you have a growing base of happy users.

Reaching this point is a wonderful achievement — and a signal that your product strategy needs to change.

Read the rest Seven-minute read