Shreyas Doshi published a post that struck a nerve with me:

The most salient point is the last one in that the onus is truly on the product leader. Product reviews are a direct reflection of the product leader’s true capabilities, objectives, values. If product reviews feel broken then I would offer that the product leader is either incompetent at their job or being dishonest with the team on the organizational objectives.

There is a better way

I’ve been through 100s of product reviews over my career and there is a simple fix that must start with the product leader convening the review: Start with the bad news.

Almost every review deck I’ve been part of, from high stakes board meetings to small team checkins, follows some form of “shit sandwich” approach where bad news is wedged between good news. This is a very common practice when members of team are insecure about the job or their role and are actively playing career defense. This is even more common in mid-level managers where they are a few steps removed from ground truth but don’t yet have access to the same information as the executive team, e.g. the CRO is falling short on the sales quota and is pinning the blame on the CPO, and the CPO is blaming the CTO for schedule slips.

Every leader needs to make it easy to get, triage, and act on bad news. It’s fundamentally their responsibility to provide channels and forums for bad news. That starts with product reviews, which should start with a slide that is simply titled “The Bad News” with this frame:

• What’s bad and why is it a problem for our business?
• Do we understand the problem side, e.g. root cause? Can we solve this as a business or do we need others?
• Do we understand the solution side, e.g. have we identified a range of options and a rubric for deciding what to do?
• Do we have the resources and conviction to take action?

Culture eats strategy

Shreyas raised another point that is often tied up in product reviews:PM leaders who view their main job as creating accountability operate very…

If a product team feels like their boss uses product reviews to hold them personally accountable, they’ll find the reviews to be grounded in the PM’s personal incentives and not the business.