Questions to ask on a new job search An Article by Sally Lait sallylait.com The role and expectations What does this job entail? What's driving the hire? What are the biggest challenges? What scope is there to do x, y, z? How/when/why would you consider hiring me to be successful? What does progression from here look like? What's the biggest mistake I could make? The wider business Can you tell me a bit about the company? What about the culture? How does diversity, equity, and inclusion play into this? What's the most exciting thing on the company horizon? What's been the impact of COVID-19 on company finances/strategy? What are the best and worst things about working here? Day to day What's the size/structure of the team I'd be around/have reporting to me? Which other people would I work most closely with? What technologies/tools would I work with? What could I do that would make your life easier? The practical bits What salary are you offering for this role? Additional package/benefits How do you approach distributed working, and is there scope for this? What timescales are you hoping for? Holiday Job title Give yourself an extra shot: Is there anything I've said today that makes you hesitate? work
Product vs. Feature Teams An Article by Marty Cagan svpg.com This article is certain to upset many people. Empowered product teamsViability, usablity, feasibilityWhat went wrong? featuressoftwareagile
Empowered product teams When I wrote about the virtues of empowered product teams, I was referring to what I’ll continue to call here as product teams. Specifically, they are cross-functional (product, design and engineering); they are focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output); and they are empowered to figure out the best way to solve the problems they’ve been asked to solve.
Viability, usablity, feasibility In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense, give and take, in order to discover a solution that work for all of us. However, in a feature team, you still (hopefully) have a designer to ensure usability, and you have engineers to ensure feasibility, but, and this is critical to understand: the value and business viability are the responsibility of the stakeholder or executive that requested the feature on the roadmap. What went wrong? teamwork
What went wrong? If something ships from one of the companies I advise, and it is virtually unusable because of poor design (which as we all know occasionally does happen), you can bet I go directly to the designer and ask how this happened? It is absolutely on the designer to ensure this does not happen, so something went wrong. Similarly, if the product ships and performance is terrible you can bet I go directly to the tech lead with the same question. And most frequently of all, if something ships and the analytics show that it’s either not being bought or not being used, or it turns out that it violates some business constraint like compliance or privacy, you can bet I go right to the product manager with that question. Viability, usablity, feasibility