Effective Product Reviews

"Product review meetings happen every Tuesday and Thursday for a total of two hours. These two hours are divided into 20-minute slots that product teams sign up to present. The agenda of these meetings is product teams presenting their proposed product changes for the first 5 to 10 minutes and then reviewers asking questions and giving feedback for the rest of the time."

"One thing I encourage for both is to first present the “option space”—it’s really powerful to have a framework that maps all possible solutions or problems and use that as a device to discuss high-level tradeoffs or philosophical differences."

"We are relatively extreme in letting the teams autonomously drive their own agendas. That is, once a pod has been assigned an area of responsibility, a great outcome is that they come up with the respective product design. So the leadership team is hardly involved in the detailed design or the iterations with customers along the way."

"We don’t have formal product or design reviews. It’s more ad hoc and iterative, which enables us to move faster. For example, our designers share an early design in a project-related Slack group and get informal asynchronous feedback from many different people that way."

"Product reviews can focus on different stages of the product development lifecycle: P-Strat: long-term strategy and vision; P0: the opportunity and problem that we want to pursue; P1: the proposed solution; P2: what we launched and how it’s performing."

"One of the product leaders came up with the 'Mona Lisa principle'—simply put, everything we ship should be like a Mona Lisa painting, something we’d be proud of putting our name on. . . Every month, they review everything that was shipped and say what is high-quality or not."

"At Ramp, we build in the open and empower teams as much as possible to make the decisions in order to move quickly. What this means in practice is that every spec, design, decision, progress, and status is published in project-specific Slack channels, and anyone is invited to read and opine."

"It’s actually been really good practice for the PM team, because most of these reviews come with a short video from the PM explaining what the product or project is. I think it’s great practice for PMs to have to say, very concisely, 'What is this thing? Why is it valuable? How does it work?'"

"The goal of a product review isn’t to “sell” the leadership team on a new investment but to detail customer requirements, align on relative business priorities, and provide a clear direction of how to address these challenges."