Aadil Mamujee

I’ve worked in product management the last 15 years at different levels of scale – from concept to hundreds of millions of users (and revenue). Here are some things that I’ve learned and written about along the way:

Product Leadership

• The “Why” behind work: Aligning on “Why” for product development work is especially important for distributed teams.
• Product lead: My thoughts on being a product lead for large teams – principles, product, people and process.
• Management frameworks: A short summary of tools that I use for running product development teams.
• Managing performance: A framework I’ve used to manage performance (good and poor) on my teams.
• Managing distributed teams: How I manage distributed teams – a set of principles and practices.
• IC to Manager: My learnings and struggles transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of managers.

Product Recruiting

• Hiring your first product manager: Advice for startups bringing on their first product manager. hire someone who can execute and never compromise for aptitude or culture fit.
• Hiring product managers at scale: A short guide on how to hire product managers at larger organizations, but particularly for distributed and hybrid organizations. Make sure you have a written component to the process.
• How to become a product manager: A candidate centric guide for getting into product management.
• General startup hiring: How I suggest running your hiring process as a startup.

Product Rituals

• Product development practices: A quick summary of some of my favorite product development rituals and practices.
• Simplified product roadmaps: I like Now/Next/Later as a way to simplify the roadmaps. Roadmaps should be public internally wherever possible.
• Insight from independent sources: Good PMs will make sure they get their data from multiple, unrelated sources data, gut/team, and users) before making decisions.
• One-pagers: I suggest having short product specification documents (1-2 pages) in a consistent format for your product and team.

Other things

• Gamification: My thoughts on applying gamification to regular software products (not games).
• Learnings from making a VR film: Learnings from a failed “zero to one” product building experience. Making software, especially something totally fresh, is really hard and you should expect a degree of failure (not to be confused with poor execution).