Kevin Yien

“And then from there, that's your foundation. That's the unique perspective that you bring and allows you then to actually take on a "role" of product manager in a good, unique, insightful way. That's ...”

“So it's that sort of relationship that I think is often missing in the discourse. I think it would alleviate a lot of the, "We don't want PMs. PM is useless" or, "PM's one of the best thing since [ina...”

“And I think that's just a good framing.”

“I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. You're not going to become a better writer by reading PRDs or whatever it is or support articles. It needs to be writing that compels. That...”

“So this description came from writing PRDs at Square. I think there was a lot of confusion from my team specifically when I joined them. For what it's worth, it was new product line, three engineers, ...”

“Yes, I was very lucky. Shout out to Bruce Bell, who was my manager at the time, who was an ex designer, at the time, GM, and declared that starting ratio.”

“But the key point I want to make is, I think it is tempting when we think about engineering product and design to draw these really clear swim lanes and say, "You do X. I do Y. Don't tread on my area....”

“And so even if the engineers are going to build a better product than you and the designers are going to design something better than you, you need to come with a strong opinion and you need to do the...”

“And so it's easy, I think, for a PM to say, "That's not my responsibility. I define the requirements. Have a menu group that goes to the next level, design or engineer, figure it out." No way. That's ...”

“Totally. The best word to describe the perimeter is just constraints. At the end of the day, you should be adding as many constraints as reasonable in order to let engineers and designers come up with...”

“So beyond customer segment/like-what-their-specific-role is, I think another one would be, we can loosely call it, jobs to be done, even though I know that's becoming an increasingly loaded term.”

“Although I would urge you to make them come to the meeting.”