Double your value as a PM by discovering more of the "stack" of skills you can apply in our jack-of-all-trades profession.

1. How to Double Your Value as a PM
Samuel Clemens
sam@accomplice.co

2. You Know a what a Software Stack is...
2
Image: android.com

3. What is the “stack” of PM knowledge and skills?
3
STRATEGY
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE

4. Let’s play a game.
4
Level 1 Level 2 Level 3
strategy
comms
design
ops
data
code
arch
✔ ✔ ✔
✔
----------------------- Let’s self-assess.

5. STRATEGY
5
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
Overall Theory
● Beachheads, Early Adopter psychographics
(Crossing the Chasm)
● Disruption Theory
(Innovator’s Dilemma / Innovator’s Solution)
STRATEGY
Level 2:
KPIs
● LTV:CAC
● Payback period
● SaaS Magic Number
● Three types of churn %
● Renewal rate
● Bookings vs revenue
Level 3:
Playbooks
● Corp Dev: pre, post,
preference stack
● Finance: DSO, factoring
● Marketing: Brand vs
Lead vs ABM
● Sales: Challenger vs
Consultative sale
● Post-Sales: Acct Mgt in
Sales vs Services

6. COMMUNICATIONS
6
DESIGN
OPS
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
Internal
● New feature announcements
● Services documentation
● Sales training
STRATEGY
Level 2:
External
● The external web page for your product...without getting
edited by Marketing
Level 3:
Executive
● The board slide for your product...without getting
edited by the head of product
COMMS

7. DESIGN
7
OPS
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
UI Toolbox
Proficiency
● Figma or other low-fi wireframing
● Editing your own CSS
● Card Sorting
STRATEGY
Level 2:
UX Principles
● Five-second screen tests
● Two-sided navigation test
● CRUD / hub models
Level 3:
Cognitive
Science
● Human memory and recall
● Gestalt UI principles (proximity, closure, common fate…)
● Physical effects of hue & contrast
COMMS
DESIGN

8. OPERATIONS & PROCESSES
8
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
Development
Processes
● Scrum vs Kanban
● Tasking aka making standups not suck
● Story writing and relative estimation
STRATEGY
Level 2:
Failure
Processes
● Four ways to triage bugs into engineering...with pros &
cons of each
● MTBF vs MTTF architectures
Level 3:
Planning
Processes
● Roadmap work granularity (story / epic / theme)
● Roadmap time granularity (month / quarter / year)
● Roadmap update frequency (month / quarter / year)
● Roadmap ownership, uncertainty and communications
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS

9. DATA & ANALYSIS
9
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
VLOOKUP
● Excel VLOOKUPs
● Pivot tables
STRATEGY
Level 2:
SQL
● SQL select and where
● Joining data (inner, left, right, outer)
Level 3:
ML
● Scikit-learn and pandas data arrays
● Jupyter notebooks
● Kaggle competitions
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS
DATA

10. CODE
10
ARCHITECTURE
Level 1:
Read Code
● git fetch, pull, commit, diff, push
● Your own development box
STRATEGY
Level 2:
Edit Code
● Can edit existing python/ruby/js/whatever code
● Generate your own pull request
● Get code live on production
Level 3:
Create Code
● Stand up your own trivial django/rails/react/whatever
mini-webapp
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS
DATA
CODE

11. ARCHITECTURE
11
Level 1:
Options
● Database design
● Microservices vs Monolithic
● VMs vs Containers vs Serverless
● ...
STRATEGY
Level 2:
Tradeoffs
● Knowing the inherent tradeoffs
for each of the above
Level 3:
Wisdom
● The judgement to know which
tradeoffs to take, and when, and
why
COMMS
DESIGN
OPS
DATA
CODE
ARCHITECTURE
Image: XKCD

12. 12
Samuel Clemens
sam@accomplice.co

13. Sam’s Cheat Sheet to evaluating a product org
13
1. “Where is the Product group in your org?”
Under Marketing; under Eng; standalone
2. “What’s your tech stack?”
A framework mismatched for the problem; a framework suited to the problem
3. “Do you use Agile or Waterfall?”
Waterfall; hybrid Agile with specs; Agile without specs
4. “How often do you push to production?”
Monthly batched; weekly or daily batched; continuous deployment
5. “Can PMs or Designers edit code and push to production?”
“Are you serious?”; designers can edit; both PM and Design can edit
6. “How do you do testing?”
Lots of human QA; small eng-embedded QA; fully automated suite with feature gating
7. “How do you communicate the long-term product roadmap?”
Don’t have one; exists but infrequently updated; four-quarter roadmap updated & distributed monthly