Some quick tips I’ve been sharing on my Twitter and wanted to expand. PEARL Framework Instead of STAR for answering “tell me about a time when..” questions, try PEARL — Problem, Epiphany, Action, Result, Learning. Start with the setup of the problem you were faced with. Ideally it’s a business problem or…

How do you empower your team while ensuring consistent, high-quality results? Some companies get stuck choosing one — either leaving decisions entirely to the teams and not being able to enforce quality, or giving lots of mandatory feedback and leaving the team feeling disempowered. Some people alternate between both and…

The product manager role is a little bit different at every company and even across teams within a company. It’s okay to use generic interview questions you get out of a book, but you can get even better signal if you write your own questions specific for the role. …

Occasionally I interview someone who is wonderful and brilliant, but they’re “just not a product manager”. At first I went with my spidey-sense on that feeling, but soon realized that my inarticulate feeling could accidentally just reflect bias towards people who don’t look like PMs I’ve met. I want to…

I’ve written a lot about interviewing from the candidate’s perspective in Cracking the PM Interview, and now I’d like to flip that around and share some of my tips on the other side. Hiring the right people for your team is essential, and it all starts with how you interview. …

Why do some people’s careers grow quickly while others trudge along? If you’re ambitious, what can you do beyond just being good at your job? Here are some non-obvious things I’ve learned, both in my own career and in the careers of my reports. Career growth within a role is usually about increasing scope, complexity, autonomy, and impact As a junior employee you usually…

I took more than 40 courses at Cornell. These are the 15 that stuck with me 15 years later. From freshman to senior year: Freshman Writing Seminar: Theatre of the Absurd Taught me to see the meaning beyond the plot. I used to think “why do I have to read all these books from a long time…

The Spec, or PRD, or Project Brief is kinda at the heart of what PMs do. It’s one of the few deliverables we’re personally responsible for. I’ve meant to share the template we use at Asana for a while, but kept getting caught up with other things. So in the spirit of “good is better than done”, here is the template we use for our specs. The Asana Spec Template Hope it’s helpful! (I might clean up this blog post and make it all pretty later)

When you share your ideas it helps your whole team perform better. But, it doesn’t really matter how good your ideas are if you can’t get other people to listen to them. At Asana we want all teams to work together effortlessly, and so we think about the best ways…