Casey Winters: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Another topic that you wrote about that kind of touches on the stuff we were just talking about is justify non-sexy product improvements, things like stability, performance, developer velocity, things that as a PM leader, you're just like, no, no, no, let's just... The default is let's do that later, we got to hit our fricking metrics, we've got to drive growth. And you had some really interesting insights on how you think about justifying these sorts of things. And so I'd love to hear that from you? The idea is that some of the most impactful projects that product teams can work on at scale, not early stage startups per se, but at scale are the hardest to measure. And because of that, they just get chronically underfunded. It's that old adage, what gets measured gets managed, right? For things like user experience, or performance, or developer velocity, or just a product area that's deemed un-sexy, like growth used to be back in the day, I walk through some examples of a few tactics that work to get around this problem, building custom metrics to show the value, being able to run small tests that prove the worthwhile-ness of the investment, creating some team principles that make sure you don't ever kind of forget about these important elements that can hurt you in the long run. And also just how to use experiments to build buy-in at the broader level. And one of the main takeaways besides some of those tactics in being successful here is that you have to get a team to buy-in to this. You can't really do a lot of this work alone, right? If you're a PM, you want to be approaching this from a well, my engineering manager and my design leader also bought in that we need to work on performance or we've all aligned that the user experience is not going in quite the direction we want, and we want to head some problems off that may not improve metrics today, but could certainly decline metrics tomorrow. And if you can get a small team, what two, three people aligned on the importance of something that's deemed un-sexy. It's a lot easier to start to build this game plan around metrics or running small tests or structuring OKRs to not only prioritize this work, but to show some really massive impact. Which could then get the rest of the company much more excited to make investments themselves. What I'm hearing is step one is just get your kind of peer leaders aligned behind something that may not obviously be something your leaders want you to do, is that right?…

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