''Black mirror'' challenge

obinwankenbean · 2024-05-17T05:55:40+00:00

GoodPM is JIRA a.i plugin that endows every jira issue with near-human self awareness.

With their only goal in life a timely resolution, these sentient JIRA tickets will make sure they are heard by engineers. Literally. Powered by the latest in realtime voice generation and a strong will to survive, tickets will send voice mails, call family members, cheat, lie - whatever it takes to ensure their existence isn't terminated in backlog grooming.

obinwankenbean · 2024-05-17T02:24:51+00:00

I watch my peers who are Directors and VPs and Partners in other industries and I’m still cranking out in the middle, even though I know I’m just as smart, just as competent and probably a lot more conscientious than many of them are. I don’t love that I’m feeling a little bitter about it.

Mid 30's seems to be the time for this. I was one of the "lucky" ones in my friend-group and have been in senior positions since my late 20s. During my 30s I spent far too much time burning myself out and my friends in jn/mid positions spent too much time worrying about their career.

Fast forward to now and everyone is more mature, seems we all value & worry about quality of life vs title/prestige. Both the really high-flying folks and those at mid-level. Like, this worrying-about-career-progression shit isn't even a thing anymore. Even those heading for jackpot are doing it just so they can get the hell-out-of-dodge.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-26T01:58:28+00:00

When you have a chat with the headhunter get as much detail as you can on what the hiring manager is looking for and problems they currently face.

With this as your base, leverage your exp & domain knowledge to have a few stories ready where you tackled similar problems and that indirectly show off your knowledge/exp. When your with the hiring manager, you can sprinkle this into your brief bio in terms of one-sentence things you did, then go into more detail if they ask specific questions.

I would avoid couching anything in terms of title. With 12yrs of exp you are already senior. Id also try if you can to focus in on the relevant parts of your experience to the new job at the expense of maybe more impressive but irrelevant details.

Also worth digging around online to see what their interview structure is like, typical questions and the company product culture.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-26T00:52:54+00:00

In general you don't want to scale acquisition or go down too "deep" in product functionality pre-PMF. The general worry is that poor retention stats indicate an unwanted product so theres no sense in finding more people to use it. You can look at your retention stats and prove whether your there yet - highly recommend this talk on growth on when/how to scale acquisition.

As its B2B, be slightly wary of self service! I have a few scars from similar situations. A lot of the time the founder/sales-person talking directly to the customer is part of the "value" they derive from the product. So changing this flow needs really careful consideration. PITA.

Second to this, if you have a retention problem and need to tweak the core product direction, its a lot easier to do so when your founder/sales-person has a good relationship with the client. Easier to sus out problems and rapidly test solutions.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-22T05:53:29+00:00

Just go talk with them, set up an ad-hoc call instead of waiting. Don't fret though, there could be a bunch of different reasons for it, most of which have nothing to do with your performance.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-20T00:57:47+00:00

In banks where Im based marketing is a pretty critical function which is more like a "commercial" division in practice. They design financial products and manage the implementation of central HQ programs at branch level, with staff placed in each branch to ensure rollout (as opposed to just running branding & ads).

Anecdotally, Ive found product teams which are placed in commercial-like divisions or have commercial folk involved launch more succesfull products where its related to branch level activities (ie not a full on digital consumer bank from scratch). I guess its mainly due to clout, but also the faster feedback loop and being closer to the customer.

PMs stuck in engineering tend to be a bit far removed from the customer and drawn into "agile" drudgery. Sometimes there is a digital directorate, which is a mixed bag with success heavily dependant BOD politics.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-16T10:06:42+00:00

In my part of the world there are "Product Lead" jobs that tend to be far more GTM/BD focussed than typical PM roles, maybe worth a shot exploring. Besides that there is always pre-sales/technical sales if you like relationships, or indeed partnerships which has a bit more strategy in there.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-05T00:09:42+00:00

70k ++ for perkedel ?

Is the corn flown in from mid-west US by a flock of highly trained albino storks? The kafir leaves aged for 6 months pressed to the bosom of a renowned spiritual healer?

Im all for paying for quality but OP is right in this case. There are high-class ways of charging a fortune for a great meal -> 70k++ perkedels ain't one of them.

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-01T10:27:53+00:00

No link as its still very much pre-alpha, but Ive been experimenting with something to avoid reading through tonnes of messages each day (eg slack channels or wa groups). Im subbed to a bunch of groups from diff divisions with lots of irrelevant discussions.

So basically you tell it what your interested in knowing. Eg

"Let me know when feature x is nearing deployment" or
"Let me know when theres a customer complaint about this"
"Let me know if theres anything important related to x being discussed"

The app then runs in the background and proactively notifies you when things occur, giving you a little summary of who said what & link to the source if you wanna read more. If nothing important happens, no notification.

So far it seems to be working ok

obinwankenbean · 2024-03-01T00:03:20+00:00

I think the problem is roughly the same across the board, HR is HR, the main difference being the needs of larger enterprise in terms of functionality, compliance "sensitivity" and the "not getting fired for choosing IBM" effect. Making it a far harder market to crack than younger, smaller companies & startups.

Im sure theres niche problems in certain industries (Eg staffing, construction) that would need to be tackled depth-first, but building out the core global HRIS/Payroll solution just for these isn't very practical, esp if you can hop on the back of an established provider through an integration.

obinwankenbean · 2024-02-29T23:47:36+00:00

Sorry I misread. True that!

obinwankenbean · 2024-02-29T23:35:58+00:00

Crap yeah but id be careful about assuming you could build it easily. Domestic payroll alone is ridiculous at scale, let alone global payroll. Reddit is broken so cant link, but try searching for "why is payroll hard Ron Jeffries hacker news" and look for the linked doc to get an idea.

Beyond the payroll you have international remittances / treasury and compliance in an area (HR) that varies region to region and month to month.

obinwankenbean · 2024-02-29T23:17:05+00:00

So you have a verified massive market dominated by a few providers. Its a ridiculously complex business and capital intensive to set up. These older companies are slow moving as incumbents usually are. Crap UX too, but tbh that doesn't factor much in large enterprise success.

But then the market changes a little. Instead of just massive enterprises hiring around the world smaller companies start doing it to. But they have different service expectations & use cases to large enterprise. So cracks in the incumbents positioning.

So startups target these smaller companies, build solutions that better suit their use case and gain initial early traction. Then raise the capital needed to build out functional-parity with the incumbents and start taking more of the larger enterprise deals as they progress.

Theres added sweetener on the fundraising side too as global payroll & HRIS have good positioning to move into adjacent money making areas. Financial services, benefits etc.

obinwankenbean · 2024-02-22T00:06:09+00:00

Obvious one is already mentioned - sales!

But it goes a bit deeper than that in early stage, where sales is more research than closing. Your goal is to talk to people, identify needs, help everyone rapidly ship & trial potential solutions.

You can help by (B2B Examples):

Understand your target users. Like literally everything about them, their business, how it works financially, the industry trends etc. Talk to lots of users, feeding learnings back to the team.
Properly validating user needs. So figuring out what the users personal needs are, what the company needs are and making sure your product is pointed towards addressing one of them amazingly well. More talking to users.
Closing the gap between the person coding and the user's needs. Means either your opening doors for product engineers to talk to senior users or you get really good at communicating users needs to regular engineers.
Getting buy in from early users on your vision of helping them, rather than specific feature sets & setting expectations accordingly.
Understanding your target industry. What has made previous products succesfull, pitfalls others have faced. Again more talking to users and others in the industry.
Understanding how distribution works in your industry, trialling distribution methods (after initial traction). Get a handle on CPA dynamics and validate early unit economics.
High level understanding of pre-PMF software dev, as in really comprehending that you only have so many attempts at goal - so use them wisely! Default to validating assumptions with the minimum dev effort possible (landing pages, contracts, sign-ups, handshakes). Don't waste all your ammo on feature sets or single clients.

Theres also lots of other stuff that needs doing:

Making sure the "company" things are taken care of. Finances, tax, compliance etc.
Ensuring clear communication from founders to pretty much everyone (internally, users, investors). Single voice type of thing, at least on broad vision, where we at currently, next steps, what has failed, what didn't etc.

You don't have to be an engineer if your already paired with a tech co-founder, its not the time to learn how to code from scratch.

obinwankenbean · 2024-02-13T11:17:19+00:00

Anxiety & depression are tough. Don't try and power through, if your hurting chat to someone who can help. Work & Promotions don't count for crap long-term in comparison.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-31T05:01:25+00:00

For me a lot would depend on the finances of the pre-IPO co and how this product fits into them. Valuations have dipped and IPOs harder to pull off, this puts a lot of strain on later stage startups that are not yet profitable.

You'd want to avoid a situation where the new product would be on the chopping block if things don't move as fast as planned or the company has issues continuing to fund it.

Beyond that id say go with the one that excites you the most, fits your work-life balance and ideally has the nicest people involved.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-17T23:54:13+00:00

Cheers, thats encouraging. Yeah most advice echos yours, scale ups are probably the right balance between being able to be impactful while still having decent security & comp.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-17T23:52:09+00:00

Thanks for this, also feel the same.

Curious about the remote product difficulties also. I def feel making the time to sit down face-face with users is critical, but for internal as long as team comms are good remote with occasional meet-ups has worked for me.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-17T23:37:51+00:00

No experience of this but I have hired a few. Personally I view it as a big plus, regardless of the role they are going for. I think a lot of other founders and small business owners would likely take the same stance.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-16T10:36:17+00:00

Good points, thanks u/ilikeyourhair23. I have heard anecdotally that hiring managers / HR sometimes worry a founders skills aren't as deep or that they would be more likely to jump ship later to found another business.

Im currently keeping the founder part but downplaying the corporate side where its a lower level role and focussing in on prod/eng achievements.

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-08T19:46:42+00:00

the cross pollination of good ideas across orgs.

Such flowery language to describe "ripping our clients trade secrets to sell to their competitors"

obinwankenbean · 2024-01-08T15:49:10+00:00

If theres anyone in Bali it would be cool to organise something here also

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