Weekly Product Hits: Too Detailed, Aligning Teams Around Strategy, Take-Home Assignments
Product Hits: April 14, 2025Every week, I share three great product resources from a variety of perspectives. Let's dive in! Too detailed by Wes Kao Wes Kao, co-founder of Maven, emphasizes the importance of tailoring communication details to the audience and context. She advises PMs to reduce cognitive load by focusing on clarity and actionable takeaways. Aligning Teams Around Strategy by Victoria Wisot Victoria Wisot, Partner at AKF Partners, outlines seven practices to keep teams focused and aligned around a shared strategy. From clarifying the “why” to setting SMART goals and connecting daily work to long-term objectives, Wisot highlights how product managers can reinforce strategic clarity across functions. Giving Take-Home Assignments by Noa Ganot Noa Ganot, founder of Infinify, offers guidelines to product execs on how to design effective take-home assignments for hiring PMs. She encourages leaders to craft assessments that evaluate the process, rather than just the final output, while respecting candidates’ time and boundaries. Behind the ScenesHey there, it’s Clement! Let’s talk about a problem that doesn’t show up in dashboards but quietly drags a team down: burnout. It rarely hits all at once. Instead, it shows up in little shifts. The team that used to challenge ideas now nods along quietly. Curiosity fades. Fewer questions, fewer sparks. If you're sensing that your team’s energy is off, even if you can’t fully name it, here are three subtle interventions you can take. 1) Listen for what's missing: Burnout doesn’t always sound like “I’m exhausted.” Sometimes it’s the absence of feedback in retros, skipped async updates, or “I’m fine” in 1:1s without much detail. In those moments, I like to ask questions like this one: “What’s been draining vs. energizing lately?” 2) Check the energy footprint of the work: Not all tasks take the same emotional toll. For one of the product leaders I advise, we jointly mapped her team’s workload on a 2x2: impact vs. energy. I noticed that her team was shouldering a lot; without smaller wins, the team was losing its sense of progress and energy, since every initiative felt like pushing a boulder uphill. Together, we resequenced some of the “high-effort, high-impact” items. Instead of urgently pushing multiple large initiatives at once, she extended the timeline to give folks breathing room, and she prioritized a couple of quick wins to energize the team. Her team’s morale bounced back swiftly. It's worth remembering - the energy of our teams is largely dictated by how the work feels to them! If it’s always a long, hard slog, our teams will falter. 3) Create room to recover: You don’t always need a full team reset! Sometimes it’s a quiet Friday. Or one meeting-free week. Or letting people choose their own deep work day. Even a small breather can recharge momentum. Ultimately, burnout isn’t just a people problem. It’s a product problem. A burned-out team doesn’t invent, challenge, or execute at its best. The most effective PMs protect their team’s capacity to show up with energy and purpose! With love, Let's do more together!
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Product Teacher
In-depth essays and thought-provoking reads for product managers.
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