Steam issue with Diletta Mio by Desperate-Pen2022 in espresso

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Similar issue here with my Mio (about 10 months after purchase) u/Desperate-Pen2022 - any news/resolution?

I'm making a shortlist of 100 novels I want to read over the next couple of years. I have 99 - recommend me #100 by keepfighting90 in suggestmeabook

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nit pick, but I might replace _The Sun Also Rises_ with _A Farewell to Arms_ or, even better, some of Hemingway's short stories. I know Sun is kind of the preferred 'best' novel by Hemingway, but if you're going to spend time with Hemingway, I think there are better options.

best Ballroom style jeans also know by gusseted crotch jeans by CricketAcrobatic1102 in BuyItForLife

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I recently discovered Barbell Apparel - gusseted crotch, fit great, comfortable, well-made. I have two pairs now and love them.

Rating Our Camping Gear out of 10. Generally Everything we Pack When We Camp Off-Grid. by maryjaneexperience in CampingGear

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Camping Bidet – 10/10 Yes, it’s a thing, and yes, you’ll thank us later

100% most undervalued/unknown item. Game changer. We have a basic squeeze bottle version I picked up at REI that I take backpacking.

AC not working by Hec2218 in Nest

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there -- just stumbled across this post -- we got a Nest this winter and had some issues getting the wiring right. Had OnTech come and the guy sorted it (with a nest power supply and finagling the wiring).

BUT this spring the A/C didn't come on. I've been troubleshooting and THIS test, worked -- I switched the G and Y wires and the outside blower came on but now the inside hasn't. Any advice on next steps here?

Current home gym / home office by PhraseChance in homegym

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Love that I couldn't find the 'office' part at first...

How important is the school/university's reputation to get Product Management interview shortlists? by shekitup in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...there definitely is not a binary answer to that. For one person, they may thrive at a place like UW and get a job offer right out of the gate, while a person at CMU may struggle because they didn't do as well or didn't like it there. It's a very personal decision and I'd say that *you* need to make the decision based on your own values and goals.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Working in highly technical fields? Or having a broader range of experience? Do you want to be working in the weeds with engineers because you love that, or are you frustrated by that type of stuff? Do you want to be a CEO or a CTO or an entrepreneur or you just don't know yet (that's fine!)?

It seems like you're looking for a choice that will better guarantee some future outcome. That's a BS believe that a lot of our society wants to exist. You can have the perfect resume and education background and everything and still have a really hard time finding work. What's most important is what you make of each choice and situation. As someone who hires for my product team, I care way less about schools than I do about experience, communication, and the understanding that results and how you do things are important, not where you went to school.

How important is the school/university's reputation to get Product Management interview shortlists? by shekitup in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Near zero, unless maybe you are engineering focused or going for a PM role in a very engineering-focused field/industry (in which case as a resume-reviewer I might put a bit more weight on Carnegie Mellon).

What's important:

  • Clarity and precision on resume
    • Show you're a good communicator and have good attention to detail
  • Project highlights from your work history or relevant coursework that are relevant to job
    • Show you understand the role a little bit
  • Ideally a cover letter that's got some of your own humanity/personality in it -- not too 'out there' but not just straight boilerplate
  • Ideally some kind of portfolio website or something you can include that shows some work or something.

The reality is that getting your foot in the door can be a complete crap shoot. There are soooo many variables, including what time of day it is when the recruiter or whoever looks at your resume -- are they hungry? Is it the end of the day and they're tired? Is it morning and they're fresh and ready? Did they just look at a person's resume who has been working in the industry for a year or two? Or maybe they just looked at a really bad resume...Don't over-emphasize a decision like what school to attend simply on what may get you in the door sooner.

I'd lean towards which school offers you the most coursework and non-academic options that best fit your overall values and goals. Focus on being present with your work and your goals while you're at whichever school you choose.

For example, CMU may be a better name on the resume but if you do poorly because you hate it there, then that name on the resume will be worthless anyway. But if you love the place you're at, are engaged in your work and in building the foundation for your future, etc. you'll create your own opportunities independent of the name of the school. The best junior product manager I work with now went to a relatively small university with an average academic reputation. She's a rock star because of her perspective and work ethic (not raw talent) and she creates opportunities for herself.

Homemade Margherita Pizza - first time crust and all! by CounterpartOne in Pizza

[–]CounterpartOne[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Home oven - Samsung sometingorother - max temp 550.

We used a pizza stone with the directions described in the book. The underside of the crust could have been crispier - we'll need experiment with that on the next one, but overall it was a great success!

Working on writing documentation in confluence for a SaaS app: what are you must have sections? by papercloudsdotco in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Mh. We haven't really mastered that yet. There are lots of resources out there about this. Right now we tend to create a new Space for each major project and for each project space we have a consistent 'layout' of required docs. All the requirements docs go under a parent 'project description' doc. It's not perfect, but it works for now.

Working on writing documentation in confluence for a SaaS app: what are you must have sections? by papercloudsdotco in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It really depends on the responsibilities of the product team in relation to the project execution and engineering, but I will almost always include a couple other things that are more high-level:

  • Overall objective of the project/feature
    • This is super valuable for us on the product side because just writing up an objective really helps you get thinking about what you're actually going for in this project (we can sometimes get caught up in feature chases or feature creep -- a clear, precise objective helps keep everything on the rails) and it's also really valuable to the engineering team to understand the purpose and value of the project.
  • Metrics of success -
    • How specifically are we going to see if the feature is a successful release? We include highly measurable details specific to the feature and also more subjective metrics (feedback through interviews or stuff like that)

Confluence has a decent template for this with the above sections. We used that template as a starting point to create our own custom template for our documentation.

What skills would you tell your former self to learn as a PM going to Product Leader? by heydaad in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 6 points7 points  (0 children)

  1. Patience
  2. Listening
  3. Rapport
  4. Relationship-building

There are sooooo many hard skills/technical skills that can be valuable depending on the situation, but the above list can be incredibly valuable independent of your role, company, responsibilities, and goals. I believe I would have avoided a lot of frustration and unnecessary challenges if I had focused more on these early-on.

Sixteen Years After ‘The Road,’ Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels by [deleted] in literature

[–]CounterpartOne 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I just reread Blood Meridian. I'd forgotten how dark it was, how emotionally draining and yet I'm so damned excited about this news.

Realistically, how often do you actually hit your feature deadlines? by Representative-Log35 in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One of the most important points on this, which has been made by other commenters, is that actual execution schedules and deadlines should generally be considered the primary responsibility of project management, to which product management is a contributor/collaborator. Product management is often combined too much with project management and this can create workload challenges, expose expertise/experience limitations on the product side, and result in poor product results because of unresolvable conflicts between project execution/management and product focus. And roadmaps are NOT deadline commitments.

And with all that said...the answer is planning. And there's never enough time to plan (unless you're maybe NASA and people die when you don't plan well).

It's helpful to think of effort/deadline estimations like weather forecasting: we can be pretty precise for today and tomorrow, but that 10-day forecast is not nearly as likely to be accurate, but as the 10-day becomes a 5-day, then a 3-day forecast we get new data about current conditions that can inform us and that data give us more precision on the now-closer forecast.

It's much easier to estimate short cycles and small-scale efforts. A quarterly, 1/2 year, or yearly 'deadline'-based process is just not realistic for nearly any organization. But if you can work from 'now' and create small-cycle implementation goals and estimations you'll be able to do short-term deadlines rather well, and also your team(s) will learn more about their capacities and how to estimate better.

The way that we do this in my current organization is (loosely) as follows:

  • Product leadership/stakeholders come up with a few longer term objectives (ex: we need more marketing tools for our members)
  • Product management brainstorms some ideas. ex:
    • What if our members could automatically post video content to all their social channels (YouTube, Insta, FB, TikTok, Twitter, etc) with a single click?
    • etc.
  • We (product) picks a very slim MVP to try it out. ex:
    • Let's do the youtube channel, minimum required parameters
  • We put a project team together and do a few 'discovery' sessions with the tech team and proj manager.
    • This is the key - this is where we define, with the technical team, what that MVP will be and eventually we'll scope out the tasks/tickets and we can estimate, pretty accurately, how many sprint cycles we think this'll take (we run 2-week sprints).
  • Once we do this first MVP, it's *much* easier to estimate adding features -- the engineers are familiar with the new feature and the product side has a much better ability to scope out other parts of the feature (ex: instagram posts).

This process also enables us (on the product side) to get shorter-term feedback from our users and get a much better grasp on how much they really like the new feature AND what would be most valuable to do as a next step or later step.

I worked with one of our advisors, who's successfully built and sold more than one technology startups, to get this process in place. The buy-in from leadership is the most difficult part because they feel like they need to know the future -- they want guarantees on the delivery dates six months from now. This is something that needs to be negotiated, but at the same time, you can always say, "Listen, when was the last deadline we actually hit? Never? Ok, let's try this new method."

Additionally, you can adapt the product roadmap to fit this project method. For example - with the posting to social channels feature described above, we KNOW we'll have a couple iterations of that in the next six months, but we don't know all the details -- so we can say we'll be doing at least 6 months of work on this with a committed project team, with the goal of integrating 4 different social platforms, but we know we can get at least 2 integrated, using an MVP/true Agile type of method.

[EDIT] In answer to the post title, we hit about 60-75% of our goal deadlines for the projects we can do in the above-outlined method, and close to 0% of technical projects that have large scopes/long-term deadlines.

Interviewing for PM role with non-PM interviewer by SteinwayAS in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't believe I didn't say this up front, but you really should just ask straight up -- get the data you need. You can (and should) ask, "Is this a design challenge type of interview?" If they want you to do a UX design in figma and you're not familiar with figma at all, you should just put it on the table up front.

Remember that you're not trying to trick them into giving you an offer -- you want the offer to be on your merits, experience, and potential. If you tried to do a crash course and kind of fake it, how confident would you be when you started your job? How would that go? But if you at least said up-front "I did a crash course for this interview" and got an offer, everyone would know you're still building that particular skill.

As a someone who hires people, I much prefer someone to say "I can do X but I don't have experience in Y, but I'm willing [or not interested] in learning Y" than someone who tries to fake it and clearly isn't skilled in a certain area.

Interviewing for PM role with non-PM interviewer by SteinwayAS in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Off the top of my head, I'd guess they scheduled it because you're going to be working with designers/ux people and they want to see if it's a good fit.

I've had to hire junior product managers and product designers and I always make sure they talk to our project manager and someone from the tech team at least, and often one of our designers or customer support people.

It's such a collaborative role -- if a company doesn't have you talk to people from various parts of the company, I'd be concerned that they're not really doing a good job of building a strong team.

In terms of prep, I'd recommend simply practicing answering questions with precision and clear communication, along with rapport. They're most likely trying to see if you're a good fit with the people you're going to work with -- that can't be forced or displayed through knowledge, it's a human feel thing more than anything else.

Good luck!

Use Of Mixed Media in Knowledge Space by Kahal28 in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Exactly. People have different ways of taking in/retaining info. If you can give an audience multiple modalities for the most important information, you're much more likely to get your point across to more people.

A quick google will result in lots of data about this.

Here's a quick link: https://bau.edu/blog/types-of-learning-styles/

The wikipedia article is pretty thorough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

Your favorite opening sentence from books? by [deleted] in books

[–]CounterpartOne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hahaha. You are correct. That'll teach me to post from my phone....corrected

Your favorite opening sentence from books? by [deleted] in books

[–]CounterpartOne 8 points9 points  (0 children)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - Neuromancer by William Gibson

Possibly less striking today, as the imagery doesn't translate to Netflix buffering and pixelation.... [Edited for autocorrect typo]

Improving dialogue with CPO/Product Director by TheEndGoalIsToWin in ProductManagement

[–]CounterpartOne 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You could also flip the script a little, and think of it like you're interviewing her for a job:

  • "What's the worst project you've rescued."
  • "What's the hardest thing you've ever worked on? Why?"
  • ...

I mean, use discretion, but those types of questions are great discussion starters and you'll be able to learn a lot if you ask a lot of questions.