Product Management ✍️

  • Ricky and I set up some weekly 1:1s for mentoring sessions! He also gave me some additional resources on agile workflow and product management. Here are some good reads I’d recommend:
  • During our chat, we discussed the differences between Scrum vs Kanban vs Scrumban, Agile vs Waterfall vs Agifall Workflow and why the Spotify model is no longer in use today by the Spotify team. I got a better understanding of Product Manager’s role and how their input steers the trajectory of our roadmap.
  • One big takeaway is that the iterative development is often easier said than done. In an ideal world, the teams would do fast-paced discovery and prototypes with a lot of back and forth feedback, but in reality a lot of them would fall into the incremental and mini-waterfall approach in a sprint due to unresolved issues. In this case, alignment meetings, 1:1s and retros are useful to have transparent conversations.
1:1 with Ricky going through team structure
1:1 with Ricky explaining product management and team structure
What I worked on this week: SEO notification & global alert system

Stop people pleasing — lesson learnt💡

  • The biggest lesson I learn this week is the art of saying “no”. I am reminding myself, more than ever, to set boundaries and make decisions from a place of abundance, rather than fear. Of course, this is a soft skill that applies to more than just workplace.
  • This topic was brought up during a remote coffee chat I had with someone this week. When I asked “what personal characteristics and values does your company look for?”, she answered “interesting enough, my hiring manager said I was hired because I was able to say no, defend myself and rationalize my approach during my interview”. This also resonates with my earlier chat with my mentor, Sabrina, yesterday. It was the starting place for me to reflect on how I tend to be a people-pleaser, and right now I am consciously learning to make growth-based decisions, rather than fear-based ones.