Michael Lai

You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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It's been less than two weeks since we released Replit Agent into the wild. The response has been more than we expected. So many people have great ideas for software, and their creativity has just been unleashed. As a result, we're hiring for multiple roles in engineering to help double down on our efforts and keep improving it every week (our weekly all hands is called Weekly Wins for a reason). Want to be part of the action? Message me or just check out: replit.com/careers Want to know more about Replit Agent? Check out Matt's deep dive: https://lnkd.in/gb8z8i6S

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An executive criticized my management work by claiming I was "too nice" to my team and unwilling to make hard calls and reprimand employees. I acknowledged I wasn't sure, but declined to change my practice. It took years to realize the disconnect: I was aiming for a wildly more challenging standard that I didn't have the words to explain. I do now. Psychological safety is the most powerful productivity multiplier. Without it, no one can take ownership of their piece of the company and make it better. You won't get the honest feedback you need to succeed. You easily get trapped in feedback loops of management panic & overreaction reducing safety, which creates worse outcomes, which creates more panic. On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is perfect psychological safety), this is what I see: - Most companies are at 1 across the board. - "Top Workplaces" are in the 3-4 range. - I'm aiming for an 8 on my teams, maybe achieving 5 or 6 on my best days. If you're working for a company with a '2' for psychological safety and you see someone run their team with a goal of '8', I understand the criticism. The bar is at your feet and you see someone trying to pole vault over it, which looks like a waste of energy and a misalignment of goals. From the ground, it looks stupid and counterproductive. Practice pole vaulting for a while. It's incredibly challenging, but you'll see stuff you can't from the ground. Your internal standards will grow. Eventually, you'll ignore the bar too. #psychologicalsafety #management #leadership #productivity

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🚀 Leading Through Change: A Guide to Growth and Resilience 🚀 I reconnected with a few folks I worked with at #Google amid the recent round of reorgs and layoffs. We discussed all the changes happening and I wanted to summarize some of my philosophy around change for leaders here. Change is inevitable, especially in the fast-paced tech environment. How we perceive and react to change can significantly impact our career and personal growth. As leaders, our job isn't just to manage change but to drive it and turn challenges into substantial growth opportunities for our teams and ourselves. “Growth and comfort do not coexist” - Rometty. This is particularly true in leadership. Here are a few strategies to embrace and lead change effectively: - Develop a Growth Mindset: View changes as opportunities to learn and innovate rather than threats to your comfort and stability. - Communicate Openly and Offer Support: Help your team navigate through changes by fostering open communication and understanding the emotional impacts these changes might carry. - Lead by Example: Show enthusiasm and confidence in the face of change. Your team will likely mirror your reactions and adapt more readily. - Encourage Resilience: Remind your team of past challenges you’ve overcome together and the lessons learned, boosting morale and resilience. Change should not only be managed but embraced as a stepping stone to greater achievements. Let’s not shy away from change, but instead, let’s lead through it. #Leadership #ChangeManagement #GrowthMindset #TechLeadership #Innovation

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I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete. Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat. Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering. Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your "fastest" engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!

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