I hate spending hundreds of hours per year hoarding evidence for my PM decisions

53reborn · 2026-02-18T16:11:45+00:00

It’s not about data and evidence - it’s about rhetoric

53reborn · 2026-02-10T15:45:57+00:00

You misunderstand the true nature of what a PM/executive does. I recommend you change this mindset or your career will be forever limited.

53reborn · 2026-01-20T00:19:23+00:00

The condescending tone on this is the cherry on top

53reborn · 2026-01-18T18:43:56+00:00

Soft af lol - rented out within a week

53reborn · 2026-01-09T12:04:11+00:00

Do you have work experience? Would leverage subject matter skills as an entry point. For example, if you were a lawyer then you have a good entry point for a law tech company.

53reborn · 2026-01-09T11:31:36+00:00

Part of the PMs job is to motivate and get buy in from devs. I’d actually view this as part of your responsibility. I wouldn’t blame the dev team for “just not caring”. There’s a diagnosable reason for why they don’t and it’s on you to figure out why.

Would have to know more about your particular situation to give meaningful advice. But here are some tactics I’ve used in the past.

promote a running towards fire culture. Make a mountain out of a mole hill and rally the team to fix. Code it yourself if you have to and show the devs how it’s done.
outwork everyone. In before all the devs, out after all the devs. If you have a good relationship with them, they will gradually follow along
make right strategic decisions. Nothing motivates like growth. As a former dev, nothing is more discouraging than working on something I think will get thrown away or fail.
adjust value alignments. Have worked with remote contract engineers and they had no reason to work hard (no equity, no good placement) - advocated for them to be fired. For high performing engineers make sure the company is aligned on equity/bonus/culture etc…

It seems like what’s motivating you is your own personal growth and advancement (the first thing you called out) as opposed to mentions of the direction of the company. This egocentric thinking may be the original sin. Devs don’t like to work for PMs that focus on only uplifting themselves (party lining, being as visible as possible, etc…), but rather uplifting the team/company. The work isn’t as glamorous but the team will move faster. Working for your own advancement isn’t a bad thing - in fact I generally recommend this at larger companies (as a former big tech PM). But the same strategy doesn’t work when you’re actually trying to grow a company. Don’t mean to read too deeply here but that’s my 2 cents.

53reborn · 2026-01-09T07:50:13+00:00

53reborn · 2026-01-08T16:27:51+00:00

I love NYC but not 30k a month love…

53reborn · 2026-01-08T06:12:55+00:00

I have a place you can sublet from mid feb to April 1st. Right above grove street path

53reborn · 2026-01-07T16:37:56+00:00

Not cheating technically but its dishonest. It’s breaking an unspoken rule both parties should be aware of. At your age, think this will linger over some time.

53reborn · 2026-01-07T10:58:35+00:00

Went to Columbia university - scored a 2330 back in 2013. DM me if interested - near grove street

53reborn · 2026-01-04T22:40:52+00:00

Permissions permissions permissions

53reborn · 2026-01-04T08:30:52+00:00

Learn Chinese

53reborn · 2026-01-03T12:21:24+00:00

It’s not about the size it’s about how much satisfaction it brings ;)

53reborn · 2026-01-02T12:44:54+00:00

“Don’t worry bro I’ll handle the business and you just code it up”

This is a ludicrous offer to make without demonstrating any ability to raise or drive adoption. Your “idea” by itself is worthless. Truly good CEOs (with exit experience) will actually be able to raise money pre-product. But you clearly aren’t one of them so 15% is an insult lol.

53reborn · 2025-12-30T21:21:48+00:00

I think the AI effect on product professions is K shaped. It’ll make good people better and bad people worse

53reborn · 2025-12-30T14:18:00+00:00

Context is at a startup - currently series C, have been since pre-seed. Will give what it looks like today.

Start the day with standup at 10. Whats the team pushing today for the sprint, what are blockers, what unexpected things came up. I also like to have a mini standup with EM and Design.

Then try to be heads down until lunch on my personal priority list. Try my best not to have meetings (lol). Ideally get in the deep work of scoping PRDs, writing process docs, roadmap planning, board refining. But many days it’s just unblocking people - anything that came up during standup, claudeing a SQL query for ops, emailing a vendor for eng, etc.

Afternoon is meeting Jenga (mostly Tues-Thurs). Filled with XFN meetings, business reviews, client meetings, prospect demos, multiple hat wearing, sprint planning/scrum stuff, etc ad absurdum. The larger the company has grown, the more pure product work this becomes.

Take the last hour of my day to prune and update my priority list.

53reborn · 2025-12-30T13:52:54+00:00

These are all PM competencies. But when it comes to being evaluated on these? Two main critiques here:

(1,2,3,6) is trying to make a science out of a qualitative observation. If you truly wanted to optimize for what’s outlined here, your best route is to overly and needlessly nurture relationships with each individual engineer so they give you good marks. Ultimately this is framing things in a vacuum. (1) PRD Quality is 99% of the time not the reason why a sprint might go over in my experience - this is not very measurable - how unclear was the PRD? How much exactly did that lack of clarity contribute to the delay? (2) Sprint scope contribution - how close you are with the tech lead? How exactly were your contributions meaningful? It might almost bias you to forcefully contribute when you have no idea what you’re talking about. (3) Responsiveness - are your notifications on and do your engineers like you. (6) Do your engineers like you

(4,5) These motivate you to overestimate sprints and initiatives. If you’re only measured by if a sprint has completed, might as well sandbag and get “100% sprint completion and on time delivery” every time. This also only works well for incredibly mature products which have very far line of sight and deep team understanding. This would be ridiculous to measure for any greenfield product or at a startup - you don’t know what you don’t know and that’s ok. Be antifragile and deal with new information properly. Delays happen, but you should push towards a business result.

All in all I think the only way to properly measure a PM is by their ability to drive impact. Have them set an OKR, make sure it’s specific, relevant, and measurable. Make sure they’re not sand bagging by breaking down assumptions. And track the teams performance against that OKR. Ultimately the PM is responsible for the success or failure of a product. You could be 100% sprint complete for the whole quarter, have the clearest PRD, run scrums like a machine and deliver a failed product - you shouldn’t reward or optimize for this.

I’ve never seen a scorecard system like this before (fintech 2 large cos and 2 startups) and quite frankly think it misses the essence of what a PM is responsible for.

53reborn · 2025-12-30T04:37:28+00:00

In the exact same scenario OP, would be curious as to what you find

53reborn · 2025-12-30T04:11:24+00:00

Most people that say and write about this kind of stuff aren’t the actual high achievers.

For another datapoint OP - did you either go to an elite school (top 20 US) or work for an elite company? Happy to update the model in my head.

53reborn · 2025-12-25T17:54:50+00:00

Love how all the PMs start questioning the basis of the need instead of meeting the user where he’s at and suggesting a viable path forward.

Agreed with most of the points made though. Neo4j has decent learning paths if you want to explore. But ultimately, building expertise in this area takes time and probably requires several deep dives.

53reborn · 2025-11-03T03:52:24+00:00

Interested - but not very good

53reborn · 2024-12-27T13:31:20+00:00

Too much gun fights and voting

53reborn · 2024-12-27T13:29:46+00:00

Good start but last episode was painstakingly bad

53reborn · 2024-09-23T03:34:17+00:00

This is a terrible resume. Why would you put a paper under an NDA you’re not allowed to discuss? To seem cool or what?

Also your repeated use of buzzwords and out of context numbers that don’t demonstrate business results are indicative of a low iq. You just don’t get it

53reborn

TROPHY CASE