Tips for a trip to Nashville, Tennessee (USA)

THINGS TO DO BEFORE THE TRIP

• Not much to do except booking flights and a place to stay. You can also book tours in advance, but it’s not a must.
• If you want tickets for music + food: Bluebird Cafe is the really famous one and you have to queue on their website 8am Nashville time on the Monday before to get a chance at getting tickets (you get randomly placed into the queue at 8am so you might still not get seats). If you can’t get tickets, Listening Room is easier to get tickets and offers a similar vibe.

GETTING THERE / GETTING AROUND

• Airport: BNA is the airport code. It’s not that far from Nashville. …

What is Just Travel Guides and what can you expect?

I’ve been writing travel guides for a few years now via Google Docs and I always started them with the line “I’m not an expert but…” and even here on Medium, the same holds true. I’m not a travel expert.

I don’t even purport that my travel guides are the only guides that you need for your vacation. In fact, we might have different travel styles and preferences. …

🧭 How ranking these criteria will help you navigate your next move and enable you to achieve your career goals.

Let’s face it, the era of “lifers” is over. In fact, it’s both accepted and expected that an individual will jump from one job to another multiples times in their career.

So with that in mind, it’s important to consider the underlying “why” of these moves — specifically, why are you leaving your existing company? or why are you planning to accept an offer elsewhere? — in order to take control of your journey, optimize towards your career ambitions, and avoid cruise control.

Another reason is that I’ve seen people blindly accept roles in order to run away from their existing one. The problem here is that when you’re blinded by desperation to escape, you forget to be intentional and run the risk of repeating history: you will find yourself in the same situation… again seeking a hasty exit. …

🎯 My recipe for success and some content tips

If you’re a product manager or aspiring to become one, you’re likely familiar with take-home assignments, which are a common part of today’s application process. Take-home assignments are used to weed out applicants— they help demonstrate how you think, how you communicate, and how you work.

I’m not here to talk about what they are, but how to leverage these assignments to showcase your product sense and strategic storytelling…so let’s get on with it!

As a product manager, you must have a knack for structured thinking and the ability to synthesize complex problems into simple terms (paraphrased from a job description). …

Plus a list of tips and a decision tree to decide which one is right for you

Product management is a hot career for many reasons, so it goes without saying that countless professionals and new grads today are looking to break into it — maybe you are one of them.

After years in product management myself and many coffee conversations with product leaders and aspiring product managers alike (many of whom have now successfully made the leap), I’ve created a decision tree of suggested paths and a list of tips.

Despite the simple decision tree, keep in mind that transitioning into product is never this easy. …

The importance of denominators for meaningful data

Let’s jump right into the meat and potatoes — I’ll walk you through a scenario to illustrate one of many reasons why your product metrics should include ratios.

• You are a product manager at Bubbls, a fictional house cleaning service with a subscription model that gives customers 1 or 4 credits a month, depending on their plan.
• Customers can redeem a single credit for an entire house cleaning. Assume all house cleanings are worth the same number of credits, regardless of square footage or complexity.
• If credits are not redeemed by the end of the month, they expire and do not carry over to the next month. …

You’ll never guess what’s in mine…

In Jack of All Trades, Master of One, I discussed the importance of being T-shaped — that is, an individual who has breadth of knowledge in a variety of disciplines, but depth in one. As a T-shaped product manager, you should have just enough competence in other domains to steer your team through the product development lifecycle.

But there are other situations where having a multi-disciplinary skill set is useful. In the same article, I briefly discussed how I used a hodgepodge set of tools to create mid-fi designs in the absence of design resources on our team. …

It’s okay to be a generalist. In fact, as a Product Manager, relish in it.

I’ve always considered myself a jack of all trades — a tech-savvy lover of the arts with an entrepreneurial spirit — but for almost just as long, I’ve also considered it a weakness. After all, the phrase goes: Jack of all trades and master of none.

After conversations with my mentor, Tom Comerford (Everyone is a Product Expert), I came to the realization that the actual flaw was in my way of thinking, not that I was a generalist.

Reframing it this way allowed me to dig into my own experiences as a product manager and bring to light situations where being a generalist was a powerful weapon, rather than an Achilles’ heel. …