Monthly-ish Personal Update (Jul 2020)

An update on the not-so-new job, Write of Passage, and Coaching Project.

Meetings can be the best type of work.

Most people hate meetings. We’ve been indoctrinated with the belief that meetings take us away from our “real work.” In this post, I share a belief I have about the world that others don’t realize. It is that meetings can be the best type of work. People give

How I change careers so "easily"

In 8 years of working, I’ve held 4 different roles in 6 companies, based out of 3 countries. I went from Management Consultant to Product Marketer. From People Manager to Product Manager. I’ve worked for companies based in the Philippines, the US, and Germany. This has enabled me

Don't make a hundred (product) decisions when one will do

One thing that pains me at work is when people perceive me to overthink. I don’t agree that I do 🤪 What I try to do is articulate decision criteria, product principles, and similar things, not for mental masturbation, but in order to make one generic decision that makes a

Platform Product Owner as vehicle and storyteller (and not domain expert)

In Julia Cameron’s book The Right to Write, she says, > When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well—we certainly write more easily. This is true. I’m coming to see a big part of my

That’s okay. This is the game I choose to play.

I have been randomly bursting into tears at work. It has nothing to do with the company or the people I work with. It has everything to do with me. Why? I am not sure. Out of frustration, I guess. All I know is, this happens in the first six

Sparring above your weight class

In high school, most of my friends were smarter than me. They went on to attend Harvard, Stanford, MIT… So, yeah, graduating magna cum laude in the best university in the Philippines? It was practically a requirement for me. Professionally, I sign up for things I do not qualify for.

Thesis: Infrastructure Product Management is a unique category of PM-ing and needs its own best practices

To address this, I started by asking a Product Owner colleague of mine at Giant Swarm, “How is doing product here different from doing product in your previous company?” The answer: > Omg I don’t think there’s one thing that is the same 😂 I’ll start by thinking

A mini enlightenment

I had a mini enlightenment today. I checked my morning run on Strava. It reminded me that I haven’t “kudos”-ed anyone on Freeletics recently. /And that I should go do that now./ Here’s the mini enlightenment. I stopped. And I thought, “You know what? Just because I

How do you measure if your product is providing real value? It’s enough to measure if your user is using it.

In this post, I want to make two arguments: * Usage is positively correlated with Real Value. * To measure if the user is getting Real Value from your product, it’s good enough to measure if the user Is Using your or Is Getting Nominal Value from your product. 1-Generic Metrics