AMA: Shopify Senior Product Lead, Lizzy Masotta on Product Development Process

Engineers are part of your squad. They should be in the room for Problem Shaping, Live Prototyping, and Fresh Eyes. You should review your problem backlog regularly with your engineers and get their input and feedback. —Influence is the curiosity to get to the best solution— and engineers will undoubtedly think about things differently than you - leverage this to find the biggest problems and get to the best solutions. More about influence here: https://medium.com/@lizzymasotta/product-managemen ...Read More

I don’t believe in a universal end-to-end product development process. I believe there are key rituals and elements that should be present on every team to ensure great outcomes, but each team needs to tailor the development process to their unique situation. My must-have product development elements & rituals: Common Language - Your company should have a common language for the product development process. This is not a prescribed way to do product development for every team at the company ...Read More

“Agile Research” This is a term I coined to describe the act of always conducting user interviews. The problem with well-designed research projects is that they take too long and tend to deliver the insights after you’ve started building the thing. Advocate for a “rolling recruit” of your key personas so that you can tap into talking to users *every week.* This ensures you have feedback and insight in the moment you need it most before the product is built and decisions are made. Alternatively, ...Read More

To answer this question, I’m going to put my PM hat on. Why is the engineer “rogue”? What is driving them to want to “slip in this feature”?  First, I’d talk to them, understand their frustrations, and where they’re coming from. From that conversation, I would expect to learn a bunch of stuff I probably didn’t realize about how frustrating it is to build in our codebase. The engineers and designers on your team are a key persona you must also serve as a PM. If you can make their lives better, ea ...Read More

It is the Product Manager’s job to identify, prioritize and shape the problems the team is tackling. We’ll break this into two parts 1) finding problems 2) shaping problems. Finding Problems You need to have ongoing sources that you’re plugged into to find problems. Common sources are 1) customer research 2) exec requests 3) support tickets or user feedback 4) product usage data. In my experience, I’ve found the most fruitful source of problems and opportunities is customer research. Be careful ...Read More

Work in the open. Create a culture on your team that encourages sharing unfinished work and working live together. This will drive the highest quality bar for your team. If you wait until the end of development to QA too many problems will be compounded. Some rituals I use to encourage a high quality b ar throughout the entire product development lifecycle: Fresh Eyes - Once a week anyone in the Product Squad can demo unfinished work for the purpose of getting feedback mid-build. The phrase and ...Read More