How we run Weekly Product Updates at Holistics
A few weeks ago, I ran across the story An inside look at how Figma ships product from Yuhki Yamashita, VP Product at Figma, I find how useful it is for people who are operating a product team to learn from each other.
Taking it as a reflection, it's fascinating to realize how our product operations have been evolving over the last 4 years, since I was the only product person to where we are now, a product team of 8.
Therefore, I decided to write a series to share about how we're currently operating to ship our products at Holistics, and let's get started with our Weekly Product Updates (WPU).
Note: I'd like to utilize the ingenious format Yuhki used in his post. We are using Notion at Holistics. and I'd like to focus on the approach instead of tooling, so it's up to you to find the tools you're comfortable with.
Bonus: See my collection of Leading Product Team here Building and Leading Product Teams | product management, management, leadership | Centroly
The Ideas of Weekly Product Update
1. Create visibility and transparency
As a fast-paced startup, transparency is one of the most important conditions that enables the speed of communication and development.
Everyone in our Product team and other teams should be up to date on what is happening or going to happen with our products regularly.
2. Embrace asynchronous communication to increase meeting efficiency
Having everyone talking and discussing is always time-consuming, especially when the problem is not aligned.
At Holistics, we require everyone to structure their thoughts through written documents and ask for comments before starting any meeting. The problem and objective alignment should always be ensured so we can save our time for productive discussions.
For more about how Holistics adopts Asynchronous Communication culture at Holistics, you can check out the slides from our CTO, Huy Nguyen.
3. Establish the culture of learning and reflection
Moving at a fast pace usually gets us neglected about how we got here and the key learnings from both failures and successes. It's also important for us to reflect on ourselves regularly, such as how the market is moving, how users are using our products, what we have learned so far, etc.
4. Decentralize accountability
My management philosophy is, good managers have to make sure their teams operate smoothly without them being there. That's why we have a product-duty person (PDP) rotated on a weekly basis. The PDP will act as a leader who is responsible for consolidating significant insights, routing product questions to the right product Squads, and holding product team meetings.
Weekly Product Update Template
After numerous experiments and iterations to deliver the ideas above, we've come up with 3 main product updates in our operations: Weekly, Monthy, and Annually Product Updates.
Let's take a look at our Weekly Product Updates today.
Weekly Product Updates (WPU)
The WPU meeting is organized every Monday from 10 AM to 11 AM to kick off the week.
Before the meeting happens, the on-product-duty person creates a new page with title {{ YYYY-WW Product Update }} in our Notion Company Workpad table, and makes sure all product members filling it out.
WPU Content
The 1-hour-agenda of WPU meeting consists 4 parts
Read-only time (10min): Each of us spends 10 minutes reading through and listing down the questions we want to ask.
High-level Update (5min): We add summarize the whole week in a short para
Key Learnings (20min): We spend around 10 minutes sharing what we have learned last week, such as interesting articles, customer interviews, notable support tickets, etc.
Squad Updates (30min): In Holistics, according to our strategy, we allocate our product and engineering team into 3 main squads: Reporting, Experience, and Data Modeling. We go 1 round of each squad to update on their metrics, highlights and to answer the questions from other members.
Read more about Spotify Squad Framework - part 1 and part 2
Lunch and Chat (10min+): After every product update, we usually have lunch together and share what our weekend story such as the movies we watched, the new things that we tried, new Tinder crushes, etc... However, during the quarantine time, we skip the lunch part but still keep the culture of sharing.
Resources
You can find the full template we are using here: Notion Link
This small process gives us a boost to start our week and gets us aligned along the week
Weekly Product Updates is a little operation that gets us aligned and gives us a boost to start the productive week ahead. However, it won't be productive if you don't have a clear higher-level setup such as Product Vision, Strategy, and Monthy, etc. in place, which I will share more in this series.
References