Ship products not slide decks
Inside growing companies, there’s a danger that product and engineering teams start shipping great slides decks instead of great products. It can be tempting to “manage up” and feel like a meeting went great with a beautiful deck shown to superiors. But our customers never see the slide decks we create. They only see the product.
So we’re experimenting with banning slide decks in product and engineering reviews. Instead of a slide deck, you can show:
A dashboard with your metrics — hopefully your team is looking at this at least weekly anyway
Figma mockups
But most importantly….show the product itself and use it live!
It’s fine to include a one page agenda to capture action items, or to link to any pre-reads like technical design documents. But the best use of time in product and engineering reviews is to share your screen and walk through the actual product on mobile or web. It could be the production version, or a staging version. The important thing is to get hands-on with the product, see what the customer is seeing (or is about to see), and make it better.
As we do this, we should avoid spending too much time talking about what’s going well in meetings. We can share what’s going well in the pre-read, and take a moment to celebrate it, but the majority of the time in meetings should be focused on what is not going well, so we can improve the product.
It’s hard to overstate this point. Inside companies, there are plenty of things that feel like work, but ultimately don’t improve the customer experience — from market cycles and negative press, to policy efforts, internal politics/drama, titles, and compensation. We have teams that focus on these areas, so that the vast majority of the company (80%+) can remain focused on talking to customers and building better products.