The folks at the Devver Blog have posted a piece, called Project Management with Niel Robertson, summarizing Robertson‘s recent presentation on product management for start-ups:
In fact, he went as far as saying the number one thing that goes wrong at startups might be PM. Niel described PM as a process for delivering Kstrong>the right features at the right time. He went on to discuss why PM can become stale, be ignored, and is often hated because it is associated with excessive documentation, which it shouldn’t be. Mentioning more than once that the best feature requests, requirements, and specs are often just one sentence.
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His basic points about why every project can benefit from PM are:
- It takes 30 secs to write a requirement
- 2 minutes to clarify in discussion
- 5 min to for an engineer to spec
- Hours or days to prototype, write code, integrate, or deploy it
[...]
As my notes are often just a list of key points that caught my attention, I will do as I often do and share some favorites.
- How to write a good requirement… “The user should be able to…”
- How to respond with a good spec… “The user can do that by… doing X… List the exceptions”
- A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.
- Doesn’t encourage people to shotgun tons of things to market. “When I make spaghetti, I try not to throw all of it against the wall.”
- On gathering data, go out and talk to people getting more data points about the problem you are solving until you start hearing the same things and can’t learn more from talking. Then go work on it, knowing all this data.
- Niel doesn’t recommend a developer also taking on the role of PM, as there needs to be a tension between who represents the user and who implements the product.
- “The PM should be the most empowered employee in your company… Yes, even more than the CEO”
I’ve uploaded the actual presentation to Google Docs: