Nikita Miller

And many of the companies that I've either worked with or advised, coached over the past few years, it was all about outcomes. Everyone was, 'Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes,' which is right. You want to make sure you're doing the right thing with the right goal, and that's fine. And some folks, myself included at certain points, swung way too far on the outcomes train and forgot that output is an indicator of that.

If you have a team that's doing all of the ideation and figuring out how to make decisions quickly and getting the right documentation and setting up the right product briefs and design briefs and experiment briefs, all the things that we know go into to successful product development, that's great, but if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much.

I think that smaller teams, especially folks that are ideating, when you haven't landed on what you're going to build yet, I think Trello's a great product for that. For pulling ideas, for prioritizing them, for tracking how we're progressing through discovery, I think Trello's really great for that. For things that have been decided and are ready to go and are really in the breakdown these tasks and assign it to people, then something like Jira is probably a better use case.

When I think about work-life balance, I don't use the word balance, I use optimization. It's this question of what are you optimizing for right now? Whether it's today or this court or this year, with the understanding that I don't think you can have it all at the same time all the time.

I think product managers are increasingly I think a bit more technical or expected to be. I think there was a moment where they were technical and then it was, 'No, no, we're all generalists,' and now I think we're going back to PMs need to be more technical. I think designers, the expectation is that they'll be more business-oriented, design as a means, honestly, to an end. And I think engineers are increasingly becoming what more product-focused, more user-focused.

For me the biggest thing is just if folks are working on a sprint, it's very simply, 'What did you deliver this sprint?' That's it. Just ask a bunch of questions. 'What did you deliver?' And more questions, 'Okay, fine, but what did you deliver to production? Great. And how long have you been working on that? How long? What was the cycle time?'