Ryan Singer: belief

Transcript context

…I want to talk about Basecamp and how maybe not every company can operate like Basecamp. Before we get there, is there anything else along the lines of Shape Up that you want to add or share? Yeah. There's one key thing, which is the role of the PM. I think what we see today, out of necessity in a lot of teams, is that the PMs spend a lot of time chasing around inside of the build phase, inside the time box, to try and make sure that people aren't stuck and getting lost in the weeds and try and keep things moving. And it can sometimes be too close to project management rather than product management. And what we see in Shape Up teams when they hit their stride is that the PM moves upstream. So the PM is less busy with, "How do I get this project to not be in a bad state when it's getting built?" And they're way more in, "How do I understand the business context? How do I narrow down the problem? How do I negotiate back and forth with maybe the CPO who brought this to me to understand where the core of it is?" That really getting the deeper understanding of the business and the problem and the customer domain and like what problem is worth solving and what's even slice of that problem is the valuable slice to argue that we should spend a few weeks on. That's the place where the PMs can really contribute a lot in the Shape Up world. That's kind of what they do, rather than shepherding the process or being a ritual master or something like that. That sounds pretty wonderful. I've been doing some thinking about what an AI-oriented world does to the role of PM and it feels like very similar to that actually, where the building now is going to happen for you with AI tooling. And that means the bigger question now is like, "What the hell should I build? And is the thing I've built right and correct and likely to work?" And it feels like this is similar, it's like the PM spending a lot more time upfront thinking through what to build. And then, the building is a lot more hands off. So hands off it gets done in like five minutes when you're just like, "Well, build this thing for me." "There it is."…

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