Hey, it's Maggie, here to talk about products, my biggest tweet ever and how backlogs don't matter.

So about a week ago, I got off a Friday night phone call with our San Francisco sales team,

all fired up from hearing about what they're working on, what's going on out there. And while I was on the phone, someone had tweeted at me saying, hey, jump in on this conversation and tell this person what your favorite tool is for managing a backlog. And, you know, it's Friday night, to be frank, I don't give a shit about backlogs. They just don't matter. And so I fired off something saying, you know, stop wasting time, talking about tools and

backlogs. It doesn't matter. Go talk to your sales team, figure out what hurdles they're running

into and solve for them. And I left for dinner and didn't think anything of it. Turns out that

tweet got 320 likes, a bunch of impressions, and I only have 400 followers.

That felt like a pretty good result.

And even more importantly, I got my very first internet troll, which, you know, I think

unlocked female product manager on the internet level 10 with that one.

But in all seriousness, I think this reaction sort of highlights an interesting nerve that I struck within the product community on my admittedly hot take on backlogs.

And if you step back and sort of take a scan through popular articles, lists on medium or whatever, basically everything that you come across about building software is about the process.

It's about what framework to use, what tool is best,

how to build relationships with your software team, or how to work the designers. And none of it

really gets to actually what we're building and why and why does it matter. And more importantly,

what are the results? So I think the reason why there was such an interesting reaction to this is

that in product, we've built up this was such an interesting reaction to this is that in product,

we've built up this sort of instinctive reaction to criticism.

And what that means is if something bad happens, you know, if I could just refine my process,

if I could just better estimate when we're going to finish something,

if I could figure out how to get that burned down chart all the way down to the ground in Dura,

if I could turn the more things into reusable components, if I could finally ship that style guide, then the results are really going to start to roll in. Really, I think this is just a combination of arrogance and fear talking, because it's really hard to look critically at what you're doing and to really think about whether it's going to generate results for your business. And I don't mean whether or not there's a metric tied to your future. I mean actually making money, especially if you're in the middle of a bunch of work, your roadmap was agreed upon a couple of quarters ago, or you've already invested a bunch of time and money in what you're building. You know, all of that sort of builds up and then gets in between you and your customer and makes it really hard, if not impossible, to be responsive to customer needs. And I think that's exactly why, coming back to where we started, product can be so reluctant to talk to sales. Because your sales team doesn't necessarily understand the roadmap and they don't have to. You know, they don't have all the context you have on why you've prioritized the features that you have or made the choices that you've made. And because really, they don't have to. All they care about is do customers actually want what you're building and can they sell it? And I think at the heart of it, that's what product cares about too, right? What we want to know is can we solve a problem that matters well enough that customers actually want to buy whatever it is that we're building? And so to me, as a product person, if you're reluctant or unwilling to enter into that conversation with your sales team, or if you avoid it or you don't do it regularly, or if you're not even, you know, really having the same conversation with your customer success team, then, you know, you're hiding a little bit. And even if you are having that conversation, maybe you find yourself saying something

like, yeah, that's a really great point. You know, we just really need to get through building

...