I think of weekly updates as ready-made information links I can send to anyone who asks. I ask myself: what are the things most people who are not intimately familiar with my team will ping me to ask about in the next week (or the cadence of the updates) related to an update?
Another focus was documentation so I could spend less time answering questions and redirect them to the documentation. For example, I used to receive a lot of inbound from customer support specialists, the marketing team, and engineers and spent a lot of my day sorting and triaging them. I soon realized that because there was no clearly defined path for how to report an issue, others did not have confidence that the issue would get resolved and feared their Jira ticket would get lost in a black hole. Once I documented the path for how our team received and resolved issues, I had many hours free that used to be spent individually responding to each stakeholder.
The nuance that I take away with the 80/20 aspect is it feels lopsided. With 80% strategy, 20% execution I've found that things don't get done. It is easier to sit around and talk about what to do than it is to do them. My engineering counterparts speak of this phenomenon within their "guild" discussions as part of the Spotify organizational model. A lot of great ideas get bandied about but delivering something tangible is elusive.
Someone needs to drive and move the project/feature forward. As the product manager, you've got the vision. You know where the product needs to go and what steps will move things forward. So there is a back and forth between movement and seeing where you're at in the moment. More 50/50.
The other part of this is with a 50/50 structure, it is a partnership. The great PM "bringing opportunities to the team..." sounds like either you're the smartest person on the team or you're the CEO PM mantra. (don't truly think that is how you meant it, but it could be construed that way) It is unrealistic in many instances. Get the team's input and allow them to drive. You'll be amazed at what they come up with.
The common rhetoric is that product managers should act as the glue between engineering, design, and sales. This mindset was a trap. When I* first started as a product manager at Tesla, I was so set on being the glue -- being the conduit of all information and communication, shuffling mocks and comments between engineering and design -- that I found myself working many hours while not getting a lot done. While I felt important -- without me, the team would not be able to operate -- my aspiration to be the team\u2019s glue actually made me the biggest bottleneck for my team and took away time that I could spend doing things that product managers are best positioned to do -- to look at the forest.
Most of my days were spent communicating. I asked myself: How can I communicate, and what can I communicate so I can save time in future? That way, I\u2019ll have time to do things only a PM can do, such as strategy. That\u2019s when I started thinking about team infrastructure, and creating pathways to reduce my time being the sheer connector.
When most people think of metrics, they typically think of a metrics dashboard on a website, but it can also be surprisingly helpful to collect metrics by hand. For example, if your team is constantly fighting fires, you could track the number of fires per month. Over time, you\u2019ll see patterns in the fires you are fighting, allowing you to design ways to systematically attack them. For example, you might notice that you\u2019re frequently finding out about bugs through customer reports, and these are creating fires that your team is constantly rushing to fix. You would then draw patterns to identify a gap in your logging strategy, and then augment your logging strategy to reduce the number of interruptions, and instead catch these early on in your bug triage.
While these may all seem obvious in hindsight, it can be easy to become the glue and stay the glue \u2014 feeling squeezed for the time and energy necessary to take your team and product to the next level.
It\u2019s easy to believe that being the glue is the goal of a product manager, but being the glue is only table stakes. As a product manager progresses in their career, what they spend time on shifts. You may start with 80% execution and 20% strategy, but you have to quickly get to a place where this number is flipped, and you are spending 20% on execution and 80% on strategy.
There was an ambulance in front of the house when I arrived. I pulled up the handbrake, rolled up the window, and locked the doors from the inside. A man in a white unbuttoned uniform came out of the house with a stretcher. A sheet hung from it, rubbing on the ground. I put my head on the hot steering wheel, covered my ears, and pressed them as hard as I could. I waited. Then, slowly, I opened my eyes, hoping they had left. No one was there.
I got out of the car, picked up the bag from the backseat, and folded the side mirror. Once inside, I locked the door behind me. I emptied the bag onto the carpet and sorted all the adhesives into glues, tapes, or sprays.
I stood up and scanned all the items in the house. Everything looked like she had been living there until just a moment ago. I had to sit down on the chair for a few minutes. I tried to remember its exact position so that when I stood back up, I could put it back where it was before. I wiped off my tears and took a few deep breaths. I knew the location of a few things. Next to the oven, just right of the pot, there were always some loose dried tea leaves. I sprayed them with glue, and when it dried, I covered them with transparent tape. Then I went for the rice sack and the sugar container, and then to the flowerpots, hoping to find some dry petals. I searched the entire house.
I carefully applied glue under the chairs and dinner table legs as well as the carpet. Then I went for the half-opened balcony door. I fixed it with glue. I also glued the closed and halfway-closed cabinet doors.
It was already dark and I could not turn the lights on anymore. I had glued all the light switches, electrical outlets, and everything that was attached to them. In the dark, I had to look for the things that could be moved. I was anxious about hitting something, not knowing where it was originally placed. I touched everything carefully, examining it with the tips of my fingers. I only hit a saltshaker. Salt spilled on the floor. I stood still. I took off my socks and marked where I hit the saltshaker. I put its lid back on and tried to wipe the salt off the floor. I lapped up the rest. Then I glued the saltshaker where it was before.
By the soft rays of light coming through the old green blinds, I determined everything in the house was affixed. I gathered all the empty tubes, cans, boxes, bottles, and rolls in a bag and threw it out the half-opened window with difficulty. Then I poured glue all over the sofa where I used to sit and listen to her talk. I put my hand on the arm of the sofa and pressed the back of my head on the backrest. I squeezed a glue tube into my only free hand, which I gently placed on my face. I pressed it a little and held still.
Arash Dabestani is an author who counts among his publications one novel and three collections of short stories, for which he has been honored to receive recognition. His stories often make use of surrealist themes and have been translated from Persian to many languages, including English, German, and French.
Washing plate - Every 2-3 prints or when the glue is visibly messy on the plate.
I wash the entire plate in warm soapy water (Dawn\Fariy\whatever detergent you have to get rid of oils) - then I apply glue stick across the whole plate basically.
Fortunately, she returned with her gardening shirt on and with a basin of water and a wet cloth. The two of us were gradually able to get eight layers of glue-covered strips clamped around the oval form. It required all my appropriately sized clamps, plus some of my shorter bar clamps, plus a number of screwed blocks and wedges. We surveyed the finished oval. I hoped it would stay together. I measured to see if it would fit. Adjustments would be needed.
But I fear he meant the first kind of glue, which is to my mind an absolutely positive attribute to have and to cultivate, and it baffles me that Google would look for everybody who even smells like that kind of person and fire them without further cause.
It's been 10 days since my lumpectomy and my surgeon said I could gently/slowly take the steri-strips off. WOW, that was a lot of glue. My skin is still all sticky. What kind of soap/product can I safely use to get the glue off, without having to scrub so much I harm my incisions?
You need to make sure your surgeon did not use Dermabond. It's a product that they actually use to join the skin together and should not be removed but allowed to wear off (it eventually peels off like dead skin). In my case it was a very light purple when you looked closely.
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