As Product Managers we often need to take on tasks that we haven’t done before (this is probably true for many who aren’t PMs as well). When learning something new in such scenarios, when unsure of how to get started, I have usually found it very helpful to build a toolbox for this new task/skill….
Category: Product
My Thoughts on Leadership Without Authority
Recently, the topic of Leadership without Authority came up time and again in my various conversations, so I thought to write about some thoughts and learnings in having these conversations. I believe most people need to practice Leadership without Authority at some point in their professional and personal lives. Product managers is a good case…
My 3 Observations on Hyperlocal Technologies in China
Recently I travelled to China for the first time in three years. During the month-long stay (mostly in my hometown of Taiyuan), I became fascinated by the hyperlocal technologies there. From my point of view, the increasingly ubiquitous hyperlocal techs in China offered interesting examples of how such technologies can inject productivity and delight into…
5 Years Later, I Became a Remote Product Manager After All
When I first started my career as a Product Manager almost five years ago, it seemed like a common belief that a PM job cannot be done remotely. Where I was, remote work was generally frowned upon, but the PMs didn’t even get the bit of leeway that developers did: the argument was that you…
Azure Communication Services was launched at Ignite!
I’m really proud to share that Azure Communication Services, which I have been working on since July, was announced at Microsoft Ignite by CEO Satya Nadella! What is Azure Communication Services (ACS)? You can find a lot of descriptions out there, but quoting the official ACS webpage, Azure Communication Services brings rich communication APIs to…
Transcending storytelling
As a PM, I always see storytelling as one of the most important communication tools. Whether I am trying to get buy-in, build alignment, explain a strategy or share my learning, stories are usually a powerful way to retain attention and elicit empathy. But as I keep practicing storytelling, I am gradually realizing that as…
Diagnose before Prescribe: A lesson in empathetic customer listening
A few weeks ago, a customer told me that my product is so good that he plans to stop using it. A bit of context here: As you may know from my blog, I am the product owner of a wiki-as-a-service documentation web app at Microsoft. Our service offers multiple managed wiki sites to various…
Fuzzier language, better UX
This is a story of a customer psychology analysis. It led me to choose less precise language in a product UI, and achieve better user experience. It started when my dev partners found an internal API limitation in a web app we own. This API limitation was causing a data visualization dashboard feature to throw…
Building product bandwagon with early adopters
This is a story where I had to re-think why my product was successful. A few months ago, I created a web app at Microsoft. It was designed to host internal service documentation for a large org in Windows team. I built the business case and product roadmap, then worked with a team of engineers…
Being a remote PM: pros & cons
In this post I share my experience as a remote PM. Being a remote PM is both a bundle of challenges and a passport to a lot of opportunities. Working remotely is without doubt a trending topic in the tech world today, but in my observation most remote workers (in long-term remote arrangements) are engineers….
Saying “No” to customers, with empathy
Like many customers, I don’t like it when businesses say “No” to me, but I recently found myself on the giving end of that “No”. It was a new experience for me. As you may know from my blog, one of the products I own at Microsoft is an internal wiki platform for enterprise documentation….
Final thoughts on enterprise documentation
(Note: When I wrote this article I thought I was going to stop working on enterprise documentation to work on Inner Source. — Turned out, I’ve been given the opportunity to work on both!) In this article, I share some of my thoughts about enterprise documentation to wrap up my experience as a documentation PM…