Jekyll2023-04-08T13:43:50+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/feed.xmlDavid ViscomiDavid Viscomi is a Product Manager of Analytics & Search at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.Being a Better Internal Product Manager Through Interviews2023-03-19T18:30:02+00:002023-03-19T18:30:02+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/2023/03/19/being-a-better-internal-product-manager-through-interviews<p>The benefit of continuing discovery interviews as an internal product manager.</p>
<p>Most discussions and learnings on product management do not focus on Internal Product Managers. A lot of focus in product management is around direct value to customers or direct business value. While there is nothing wrong with this focus, it’s important to keep in mind how critical internal product teams can be at removing obstacles in the way of these teams to build successful products fast.</p>
<p>A danger of managing internal products is that the consumers of the product often don’t have the same luxury of using alternative products that external customers do. For example if you are a Product Manager of an analytics suite, the alternatives that your users have is to imply not use analytics in their day to day work. This type of product can sometimes have high adoption & engagement rates, but still does not deliver the value it should to the business.</p>
<p>When I started my career as an Internal Product Manager focusing on connecting teams with user behavioral data, I struggled understanding what the needs of the different teams required with the value my team was providing. Early methods of gaining feedback on our products were through issues and bugs raised to our team to address, and large meetings to discuss new data feeds/improvements to data currently collected.</p>
<p>Having meetings to gather input on a proposed change sounds like an effective way of gaining feedback. Key areas it does to work effectively are identifying the value individual users gain from the feature and identifying the individual opportunities that the feature brings. Oftentimes in these meetings, there would be a small group of vocal contributors, with a significant portion of silent attendees. With a large meeting it’s unclear if the silent attendees are agreeing with the route the group is going, having difficulty keeping up with the discussion, or are not that invested in the feature space to begin with. This meeting consensus model was used for a few feature changes that ended up having low adoption in production.</p>
<p>Bugs/issues in your product raised by different teams are a helpful method of understanding at least what features of the product are actually in use, and are causing an impact to users of the product. Understanding how bugs affect the users of your product will only help you understand how a slice of your product is being used. When our users tell us about issues/bugs in the product, we are only learning about how they interact with a portion of our product. It is not a very effective means of understanding how they work outside of our product, or the larger problems they are facing that could be opportunities our product could address in the future. Focusing on bugs as a primary way of learning & improving products will most likely lead to simply keeping the product focused on “status quo” value.</p>
<h3 id="so-where-did-we-go-from-here">So where did we go from here?</h3>
<p>Recently being encouraged to read Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, as well as seeing early success from other product leaders made me realize how critical it is to apply discovery techniques to constantly be learning how people in the org use our products.</p>
<p>The first step we took was to change how we collect feedback on proposed changes to our product data stream. We moved away from having committee style meetings to address proposed changes to the product. Instead, we set up individual one on one interviews with members of these groups in an interview format to collect individual perspectives and feedback on proposed changes. With this we were able to get a better understanding of how important the changes were for respective teams, as well as individual concerns and suggestions.</p>
<p>The second step I personally took was to plan out continuous, recurring meetings with various internal users of our products. With these meetings in place, I was able to build a continuous qualitative feedback source of how users were finding using my products or the impacts of using these products. A major additional benefit of these recurring meetings is when we had product mocks we wanted feedback on, we already had meeting slots booked we could take advantage of</p>
<p>Outcomes of this style of determining what to work on was significant, out of 3 different large changes proposed for the product, we uncovered that 2 would not have delivered the value to our users as we expected. This free up of time allows us to continue discovering improvements to the product that will make a meaningful impact, while also helping reduce the backlog of “work” that gets queued for the development team.</p>
<p>As a PM of an internal product, it can be so easy to fall into a “certainty trap”, where we are convinced we understand the needs/problems of our users because we work side by side with them. Adopting the same techniques as traditional stream aligned Product Managers is a key step to make sure we are not just “making work” but are creating value for the business.</p>The benefit of continuing discovery interviews as an internal product manager.Decision Tree for Decision Making2022-08-27T19:24:02+00:002022-08-27T19:24:02+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/2022/08/27/decision-tree<figure class="image">
<img src="/assets/Justin-DoCanto-butterfly.jpeg" alt="butterfly on a flower" />
<figcaption>Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@justindocanto">Justin DoCanto</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We make a lot of decisions in our daily lives, some that have huge impacts to our future, and others that we hardly notice deciding on. When there is a lot on the line, or we have multiple people with conflicting decisions, its helpful to have a few frameworks on hand to help make the best choice with the information on hand.</p>
<h2 id="proscons-table">Pros/Cons Table</h2>
<p>An extremely common framework to help make decisions is a pro’s cons table.
A large benefit is we shift away from the motional feeling of the options, to the specific positives/negatives of the solution
Its easy for other people to add their perspective to the impacts of choosing one of the options</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Decision Point</th>
<th>Pro</th>
<th>Con</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Option 1</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Option 2</td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>A major drawback of this table is it is only helpful at looking at a snapshot in time for decision making. Often the best decision today can turn into the worst if the environment our choices are in changes. If the decision is important enough, taking into account environment changes against decisions can be a helpful exercise.</p>
<h2 id="decision-tree">Decision Tree</h2>
<p>A decision tree allows us to map our options against possible future environmental states. With this type of planning, we can see how a decision today affects us a week, year or decade later.</p>
<p>For example:
Let’s say that you are making a decision to switch from biking to work to riding a bus every day. You are low on cash so you sell your bike for a bus pass for the year. This bus plan works well for the first few months, but then your city bus drivers go on strike for a week.
What do you do? How do you get to work?</p>
<p>This simple example shows that there are multiple factors that can impact a decision way after the decision has been made. How can we take these external factors into account?</p>
<p>One beautiful model for this is a Decision Tree.</p>
<figure class="image">
<img src="/assets/decision-tree.png" alt="decision tree" />
<figcaption>a sample decision tree</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For our lazy commuter, their decision tree could look as follows.</p>
<p>In the tree above, you can see a couple of shapes, which are as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>square boxes for decisions you can make</li>
<li>circles for different states</li>
<li>arrows showing the path to each</li>
</ul>
<p>With each circle path, you can state the possibility of an event happening (lets say that the chance of a bus strike is guestimated at a 5% chance). you can also highlight your decision points after certain events happen.</p>Photo by Justin DoCantoBring Your Whole Self to Work2021-11-11T19:24:02+00:002021-11-11T19:24:02+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/2021/11/11/bring-your-whole-self-to-work<h2 id="bring-your-whole-self-to-work">Bring Your Whole Self to Work</h2>
<p>It’s interesting how we often avoid conversations with co-workers about their lives outside of work. People might feel like this is time wasted away from actually getting work done. This makes going to work draining, since we often have difficulties building real connections with our coworkers, who we spend the majority of our waking hours with.</p>
<p>It can also be difficult to disagree with coworkers, employee’s or bosses. We often try and find ways to avoid it to prevent uncomfortable situations. We sometimes find ways to ignore or sugar-coat failures made by others to prevent them feeling bad. When we do not actively provide others with real feedback and honest criticism it ends up hurting them more.</p>
<p>Kim Scott believes that real human connections and direct honesty are the key to being a great worker and manager.</p>
<p>Bringing your real self to work, and being open and honest with others also brings better energy from everyone. I can safely say that working with people who have embraced being radically candid has made an impact on my quality of life at work.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t we find ways to be our best and true selves at work?</p>
<p><em>Absolutely recommend reading the book <a href="https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book/">Radical Candor by Kim Scott</a></em></p>Bring Your Whole Self to WorkBusiness Agility Needs to Step Up2020-11-17T22:24:02+00:002020-11-17T22:24:02+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/2020/11/17/business-agility<h2 id="business-agility-needs-to-step-up">Business Agility Needs to Step Up</h2>
<figure class="image">
<img src="/assets/lost-businessman.jpg" alt="lost businessman" />
<figcaption>artist:<a href="https://unsplash.com/@fredasem">@fredasem</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="project-what">Project What?</h2>
<p>Let me know if this is sounds familiar:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Two Product Manager’s Eat lunch together</p>
<p><strong>Bill-</strong> Hey Diane, hows ProductA going?</p>
<p><strong>Diane-</strong> Its crazy, we are completely swamped trying to support initiativeX and projectY. We have not had any time to deal with the tech debt that is mounting up.</p>
<p><strong>Bill-</strong> projectY? I remember the CEO was hyped about that work 2 quarters ago, I didn’t realize it was still going on.</p>
<p><strong>Diane-</strong>Yea, projectY is a big improvement for my product. It’s hard to rally other teams to help out. How is your team?</p>
<p><strong>Bill-</strong> We just got the green light to start working on initiativeZZ. The CEO should be speaking about it in the next town hall. Hopefully you can prioritize the work we need you to do!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From this dialogue, there are too many things going on, and it’s not clear what needs to get done. The business needs to adopt Agile practices across the organization. Not just in the development teams.</p>
<h2 id="dont-buzzword-agile">Don’t Buzzword Agile</h2>
<p>There is so much hype around agile in software engineering. Companies often proclaim agility like it’s a badge of honour. It looks like most groups will adopt the meetings, without the spirit. Often people will talk about Agile and Scrum, but they are tied to the frameworks, instead of true Agile. When in doubt, refer to the original <a href="https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html">Agile Principles</a>. (You’ll see that there is no line about requiring a standup to be agile.)</p>
<p>From the principles above, there is one that <strong>Diane</strong> would probably highlight is not happening in her world</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How can her CEO help build a sustainable list of initiatives?</p>
<h2 id="what-is-business-agility">What is Business Agility?</h2>
<p>To steal the line from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_agility">Wikipedia</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a nice overlap between the Agile principle and business agility.</p>
<p>A company with too many initiatives, with no clear visual in what cross-product teams are trying to accomplish is not sustainable, and will lead to lagging responses to market changes.</p>
<p>The way this problem can be solved by first identifying what are the big initiatives that each team is rolling their work up into. And then determining if the system has capacity to take in another initiative. The key with this approach is being able to take stock of the whole product department to determine if there is capacity for more work. In the example above, if the CEO only talked to Bill, they would think: “great, the floor has capacity to take more work on.” Not taking into account potential dependancies with Diane’s team, which is at full capacity.</p>
<h2 id="optimizing-work-in-progress">Optimizing Work In Progress</h2>
<p>By limiting the number of big initiatives, we are essentially taking advantage of limiting the Work In Progress. Limiting WIP will lead to some teams not being part of big initiatives, which is actually a good thing. It’s not always possible that every team will be required for the top 3 priorities to be achieved. The team can benefit in their “idle” time to deal with tech debt, and individual product improvements that they would not be able to tackle with big initiatives over their heads</p>
<h2 id="further-reading">Further Reading</h2>
<p><em>A lot of these insights came from the following book: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tVP1zc0zDDKSDIrqIo3YPQSKEotycjMy87MS1dITM_MSQUArpYLAg&q=rethinking+agile&oq=rethinking+agile&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46j0l3j0i22i30j69i64l2.3577j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility</a>.</em></p>Business Agility Needs to Step Up artist:@fredasemSafari CNAME Cloaking Prevention2020-11-15T19:24:02+00:002020-11-15T19:24:02+00:00https://davidviscomi.ca/2020/11/15/cname-cloak<p><img src="/assets/spray-camera.jpg" alt="sprayed on camera" /></p>
<h2 id="safari-cname-cloaking-prevention">Safari CNAME Cloaking Prevention</h2>
<p>Safari has released a new Intelligent Tracking Prevention(ITP) feature recently, “CNAME Cloaking Prevention”. This is to extend the behaviour of Safaris treatment of first party and third party cookies.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-a-cname">What is a CNAME?</h3>
<p>To first figure out what CNAME cloaking is, we need to understand what a CNAME is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A Canonical Name record (abbreviated as CNAME record) is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that maps one domain name (an alias) to another (the canonical name).
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="what-is-cname-cloaking">What is CNAME Cloaking?</h3>
<p>CNAME Cloaking is essentially any use of using CNAMES.
For example, let’s say we wanted to create a site “crazyfrisbees.com”. Our friend Jack offered to let us host crazyfrisbees.com on his webserver “jacksserver.com”. We could work with our Domain Name provider to set up a CNAME to point “crazyfrisbees.com” to “jacksserver.com”.</p>
<p>CNAME cloaking is where CNAMEs are used to make the browser think content comes from crazyfrisbees.com, even though it really is being served from “jacksserver.com”.</p>
<p>Most use cases for CNAME cloaking are valid in the eyes of Safari (like the example above). ITP will not limit the duration of cookies generated by “crazyfrisbees.com” because it sees all requests from “crazyfrisbees.com” being passed from “jacksserver.com”.</p>
<p>Where ITP starts limiting cookie duration is when CNAME cloaking is coming from a third party.</p>
<p>For example:</p>
<ol>
<li>We have our “crazyfrisbees.com” site set up with a CNAME to jacksserver.com.</li>
<li>Our friend Fred comes along and says: “hey, you can use my tracking server to collect audience signals. We can set up a CNAME so track.crazyfrisbees.com points to fredstrackingserver.com”.</li>
<li>You say “sweet! sounds like a good deal Fred!</li>
<li>When “crazyfrisbees.com” loads, Safari will look at the DNS CNAMEs and say: “ok I know crazyfrisbees.com is really jacksserver.com, thats cool”.</li>
<li>When track.crazyfrisbees.com tries to set a cookie on the client, Safari will say “hold up, track.crazyfrisbees.com is really fredstrackingserver.com? Thats not jacksserver.com, this looks like a third party to me”.</li>
<li>Safari will then treat any cookies set by track.crazyfrisbees.com as a third party cookie.</li>
</ol>
<p>Further information on CNAME tracking can be found at their <a href="https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-tracking-defense/">blog post</a></p>