💪🏽 Kim Merino

My biggest fear as a product manager are Friday afternoon code deployments. 😄 Kidding (but really, please don’t). My actual biggest fear is that I’m not driving the value my teams and customers need from me. 🔗 As product managers, our job is to drive value for our product’s teams and customers. We aren’t necessarily the people who deliver the tangible results that our peers and customers see – a lot of what we do is traditionally “behind the scenes” work. It makes sense, product management is often seen as the bridge between business and technology, customers and solutions, etc. 💡 That’s where a lot of my fear comes from. I’ve felt it the first day I served as a product manager, I still feel it over a decade later even with a list of achievements saying otherwise. But fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with coaches and mentors in the product space, each of which assure me that the feeling is normal. I recently had a conversation with a product manager from the MAANG space; several more years of experience than I and an even longer list of achievements. He, too, still holds a fear that he may not be driving value. But, he counters that fear with a few affirmations like these: “I am the reason my developers know what to build and why it matters.” “I am the reason my marketing and sales teams know who the product is for and how to engage them.” “I am the reason my product is solving a problem that people in my space want to solve in the first place.” 💭 Today, I still use affirmations to overcome my fears. They remind me that fear is “False Evidence Appearing Real.” What are you most afraid of as a product manager? How do you face your fear and overcome it? #productmanagement #productmanagers #impostersyndrome #fear #affirmations

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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Product Rockstars in tech....It's not about strategy. It's not about frameworks. To play big...it's about the soft skills. Yep....your EQ is critical to level up and lead. You need to master the human side of work.  Treating people with respect Understanding how to communicate Executive presence Managing politics (yep...,I said it) Treating people as human beings To level up in the world of tech....it's about the human game. #productmanagement #techleaders #womenintech Are you ready to level up into leadership? Are you ready to learn how to play the human game? Respond with 'yes' and I'll send you my E-Book on The Next Generation of Leadership in Product

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Let’s get real. In the tech world, we love our rockstar engineers and visionary product managers. But what about the unsung heroes who make sure the trains run on time? Enter: Technical Program Managers (TPMs). Here’s the deal—TPMs are the connective tissue in any tech org. Without them, your next big thing is just a pipe dream. Here’s why they matter: 1. Master Planners: TPMs are the strategists who see the big picture. They map out the journey from idea to execution, ensuring every cog in the machine is working towards the endgame. 2. Diplomatic Leaders: These folks are the UN of tech. TPMs navigate cross-functional teams, aligning everyone from engineering to product, and making sure egos don’t derail progress. 3. Execution Powerhouses: Think of them as project ninjas. TPMs oversee the whole process, managing timelines, resources, and risks. They get sh*t done. 4. Tech Savvy: A TPM isn’t just a project manager with a fancy title. They understand the tech stack and can speak geek. This lets them make smart decisions and steer the ship effectively. 5. Communication Gurus: Ever been left in the dark on a project? Not with a good TPM. They keep stakeholders in the loop, ensuring transparency and trust all the way. 6. Risk Avengers: TPMs spot risks from a mile away and crush them before they become a problem. It’s like having a crystal ball and a wrecking ball in one. 7. Efficiency Experts: These pros are all about optimizing. They refine processes and drive continuous improvement, making sure your team isn’t just working hard, but smart. Bottom line: TPMs are the unsung heroes who turn chaos into order and dreams into reality. Next time you see a project succeed, know there’s probably a badass TPM behind the curtain making it all happen. To all the TPMs out there: You’re the backbone of innovation. Keep rocking.

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A friend asked for some advice on interviewing for an expanded role. This is for the Head of Product Management. Here’s the probing questions I’ve asked, some of which I think are applicable for most jobs. - Are you doing product development or product management or both? The former relates to innovation and coming up with new products; the latter relates to managing a portfolio of existing products (small tweaks and largely maintenance)? - What’s the direction or strategy at the top of the house? How important is innovation to them? Is there an innovation strategy right now? - What does success look like to the company for this role? Number of new products, revenue or annual contract value? - Is it a new role or replacement role? Why wouldn’t they promote from within? What’s the missing skill gap they see in you I.e. what do you bring to the table? - What’s the culture in the company and in the team? What’s holding people from performing ? What solutions or support or autonomy do you need to transform and enable the team? A good interview needs to be two way - good questions will allow us to find out if it’s a good job fit. Anything else I’ve missed? #career #job #interview #innovation #productdevelopment #productmanagement #jenelim

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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Great observation from a Senior PM currently on the job market: "the roles where they highly value domain knowledge I find to be not very versed in product and just go for what they know." When you don't understand the value of product you revert to looking for domain experts.

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Jr. Devs, Looking at my TODO list for work this morning I found myself paralyzed. There was a lot to get done and many different priorities that I could place on each item based on availability, needs of clients, resources, etc. So… I just ordered them alphabetically and started working on them. Perfect? No. Moving forward? Yes! I know the amount of learning you face can be daunting. It’s often hard to know where to start or where to go next. Sometimes you just need to DO. Especially right now when getting hired may be somewhat out of the question for many of you due to the current market, analyzing the “best way” may keep you from moving forward at all. Find something that interests you and just start doing it. You never know what doors or new ideas or directions it might open up. #juniordeveloper #mentoring #do

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Hiring: Attention, Code Whisperers! 📣 Sunnyvale, CA Are you a tech wizard who can speak fluent GraphQL? Does the thought of wrangling a wild distributed system or taming a virtual cloud get your code running? If so, you might be the missing ';' in our program! We're the techno maestros behind Walmart U.S., crafting digital symphonies to empower our stores, eCommerce business, and, most importantly, our customers. From groceries to glitter glue, we've got it all covered, online, on mobile apps, or in-store. Now, we're looking for a tech virtuoso who can play a mean concerto in Distributed System, Virtual Cloud, NodeJS, GraphQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash, Looper/npm, GIT, Jenkins, and Kubernetes. Yes, you read it right! GraphQL isn't just a "nice to have" for us. It's a "if you don't have it, don't bother" kind of thing! As part of our ensemble, you'll take center stage in guiding small engineering crews, troubleshooting business and production issues, managing complex projects, and contributing to high-level design. You'll be our maestro, orchestrating business solutions by building relationships with stakeholders, identifying needs, and adapting to changes. So, if you're a tech aficionado who can debug a live application faster than you can say "Kubernetes," and develop high performance, scalable solutions that can handle a ton of big data like it's just another day at the office, we need you on our team! Think you can handle the tempo? Then let's make some music together! Hit the apply button faster than a 404 error and let's code in harmony! 🎵🚀 Raja Kukkadapu #JobSearch #BayArea #GraphQL #WalmartTech #HiringNow #TechHumor

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Yesterday someone said to me that the true Engineering Managers job description is: To enable really smart people to make them look good. I think in truth there is a bit more to it than that phrase. I like that they have included the word 'enable' and that they are highlighting really smart people. If I had to try and rewrite this in the same vain perhaps: To empower and enable really smart people to achieve business outcomes and deliver business value. How you empower and enable those is the art of Engineering Management.

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How much process is too little process? "The team isn't getting along, and they are fighting each other." "Customers aren't engaged with the sh*t we built." "Our burn rate is too high, and we are going to hit a wall." "I have to layer a cofounder. They're upset and will probably quit." "The founders keep going directly to my team members and telling them what to do." "We've hired some a**hole that is making everyone miserable." "We keep betting on a losing strategy and hoping something will happen, even though we all know it is doomed." "Engineering is going off in the weeds building stuff no one cares about." "My investors don't think I'm right for the job anymore." These are just a few common startup problems that are often symptoms of "a lack of process ." People never think, "You know, I don't think we have enough process." Instead, they start having problems that could have been avoided. While the idea of no process sounds great, issues emerge if you don't start adding a little early on. Again, I'm not suggesting lots of complicated processes, just a tiny amount to start building the muscles you will need later when the company is scaling up. Here are 5 key areas to address early that help prevent problems and chaos down the road: •⁠ ⁠Call out decision-makers. Centralize guidance, but make decisions locally. Assigning owners and pushing decision-making close to those doing the work will prevent slowing as you scale. At scale, centralized decision-making requires layers of process and communication. •⁠ ⁠Set clear goals. Teams that set goals outperform those that don't — it's that simple. Set some product, customer, and engineering goals. Holding a team accountable by setting challenging, measurable goals from day one can evolve into a more robust product process down the road. •⁠ ⁠Formalize hiring. When small, one bad hire can do a lot of damage. So, screen for values and behaviors. Do they value feedback? How do they deal with conflict? How do they influence? Etc. In short, don't hire jerks. They will bring everyone's game down, no matter how smart they are. •⁠ ⁠Build a culture of feedback. It's hard to get better without feedback. Set up a cadence to assess what people are doing well and where they need to improve. You will need a performance review process at scale, and it is tough to cold-adopt one when you have over 50 people. •⁠ ⁠Define your governing principles. IMO, this is the most important. Agreeing on the underlying rules on how decisions get made promotes consistency, provides clarity, and can help to prevent politics from developing later. It is important to note that having too little process is often better than having too much. Therefore, it is crucial to find the right balance of process and productivity that aligns with your team's individual needs and culture.

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At a certain level of seniority you and your peers will share less and less in common, you don’t have the same jobs, you don’t work on the same products or are solving the same problems. The two questions I’m thinking about are (1) does it represent a failure of company strategy that somehow we aren’t aligned as peers to something larger and compelling (2) are there practices to still make a regular staff meeting compelling under these conditions (or I supposed (3) is the staff meeting a success and sufficient if it works for the person whose staff meeting it is)

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I talk to so many people weekly who are feeling stuck in their roles, careers or lives. Whether you... 👉 quit your job or been laid off, 👉 want to change jobs/careers,   👉 need product or business related advice 👉 help resetting your goals  👉 level up in product management I am opening up my calendar to those who need a little boost, or even a transformation in the way they do things today. 💡 I’ve been lifted by incredible opportunities and mentors, and I want to pay it forward. ⭐ So if I can help you at all → send me a DM 🙏 #probono #coaching

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Small gripe: You know I'm all for indie-published content in the tech space. There's so much room for niche topics that aren't necessarily great fits for traditional publishers. But if you're going to charge $79 for your book, please spend the extra effort on making it accessible as an ePub and HTML, not just a PDF that looks like you just printed it directly from Word and called it good. #a11y

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“Developer health first” ... I pitched in a board meeting. “I don’t know, Gabe. We’re not a wellness company”, leadership told me. If you don’t know me: I’m a recovering workaholic and dealt with an illness called CIRS for years. I was heavily invested in the developer community and they donated $22k for my treatment. I then realized that beyond being a tech talent marketplace, our passion at G2i is Developer Health. You see, putting the developer first has real benefits. For tech workers AND clients. My story about my health isn’t unique. Thousands of developers deal with burnout, stress, and health issues. People produce their best work and sustain it for longer when their mental and physical health is protected. It actually makes a lot of sense to prioritize health. In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins writes about how every company needs a “hedgehog concept”: The one thing they can do better than anyone else. Developer Health was our hedgehog concept. We hired Michelle Bakels, our first key hire for Developer Health. She had her own experiences in burnout. We hosted dozens of convos with the Developer Health Twitter Spaces, launched the Developer Health Show, wrote the Developer Health OS, and more. We grew G2i’s team, recruiting more developers who wanted to avoid burnout and wanted a healthier work environment. We’ve served 100s of developers and companies over the years. And we keep expanding. Developer health first... It’s not just a passion. It’s vital for our employees, our clients, and ultimately developer success. --- PS. If you are a developer and want to talk about dev health, hit me up and I'll gladly answer your questions.

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What is the one thing you need to do as a software manager if your team has absorbed responsibility for managing more systems or has lost personnel? I hope you said “redo my org mapping.” If you didn’t, take 5 minutes to read what I have to say. You need to identify the gaps in your new org: skills, knowledge, experience, and resources. Gaps represent unbounded risks; risks which tend to materialize at the most inopportune times. Minimization of risk falls under your purview as a manager and it is your responsibility to assemble, quantify, and plan to address as many of them as possible. It is not, however, your responsibility to do this in isolation. If you have never done it before, find someone who has. If that’s no longer an option (RIFs suck, I get it) then do the following: 1. List all the applications your team is responsible for  2. List all the technologies that go into them  3. Ask your team to rank themselves in terms of knowledge of the apps  4. Separately, ask each person to rate their confidence with the technical stacks you now own 5. Finally, ask them to rate their knowledge of the domain Now take that list and sit down with your tech lead, product manager, and if possible, boss. Work out what is or isn’t acceptable. Then figure out what impact mitigating the issues you’ve uncovered has on the quarterly or half year plan. Rumsfeld said it best when he spoke “there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns; with the later being the most difficult.” You have a chance to remove a whole bunch of unknown unknowns before one or more become a catastrophe. #projectmanagement #tech #planning #management #layoffs #softwaredevelopment #leadership #riskmanagement #strategy

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It's hard to choose the right code reviewers. I just read the research paper below, detailing persistent gender inequities in who reviews code. In short: examining code reviews at Google over one three month period, the authors found that women were sent about 25% fewer reviews than men. The number is closer to 16% when accounting for factors like whether the person is actively writing code or whether they kept their job for the entire period. Even shorter: Coders send women fewer code reviews than they send to men. In my experience, this is only one part of a general problem with assigning code reviewers. As a team lead, I typically wanted code reviewers to be assigned so that: 1) The code ends up getting a good review. Reviewing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. A good review has to be gracious, provide both positive and constructive feedback, and have a reasonable turnaround time. You also want thoughtful - ideally diverse - ideas and feedback. 2) More than one person on the team understands the code. You need this so that code can be maintained when one person is unavailable. 3) The code reviews are evenly distributed through the team. The good reviewers are often in high demand. But they can get bogged down with too many reviews. And you don't get to be a good reviewer unless you get some practice first. Like I said, that's what I wanted. In reality, these goals can be hard to reconcile. If you have one person writing a subsystem, and you really want someone else on the team who understands that subsystem, then you often have to pick a single person to do all of the reviews. That makes it hard to distribute reviews evenly. If you have someone who is a relatively new hire, and you absolutely need the best review possible, you may not give that hire a lot of reviews. That makes even distribution hard. And that's not even counting the stresses of having to worry about this while you juggle product deadlines and complicated personalities! As a result, teams tend to fall into very bad review assignment habits. There's the TL who is overwhelmed because they try to do everyone's code reviews. There's the expert who has a week-long turnaround time, but you *absolutely* need their review. There's that one developer who needs to be reminded every single day that they have pending code reviews. The article suggests automated reviewer selection tools that apply round-robin strategies can help deal with bias problems. They absolutely can - but those strategies just can't account for the human aspects of the review. My take is that code review is a bit like bug assignment - you need to assign reviewers for project code as thoughtfully as you assign the project itself. It's not something that can completely be done by a given developer in a vacuum - but it's also not a problem that a tool can solve by itself. https://lnkd.in/gTDxAhpG

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Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

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Happy Wednesday from me and Santo! 👨‍💻 🐶 ❓ This month, I'm running a video series where I'll be answering some of the questions I get from product managers. If you have a question about product, shoot me a DM and let's chat! ✉ #productmanagement #productmanagers #careeradvice #askaquestion #askmeanything

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