Jason Ephraim

Your product isn’t broken. Your decisions are. Most companies don’t have a product problem. They have a decision problem. Projects stall because ownership is unclear. Roadmaps break because priorities change weekly. Teams burn out because accountability is fuzzy. We love to blame tools. We love to blame people. But the real issue is leadership clarity. When decisions are slow, everything downstream suffers: Product. Ops. Tech. Customers. High-performing organizations don’t move faster because they work harder. They move faster because they decide better. If your teams feel stuck, don’t ask them to work harder. Ask yourself: Who owns the decision? Who is accountable for the outcome? Who is empowered to say “this is the direction”? Fix that — and product becomes a multiplier instead of a bottleneck. #Leadership #ProductManagement #Operations

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Velocity and story points are capacity signals, not success metrics. Adoption is where value actually shows up (and it exposes the real bottlenecks: onboarding, UX, data quality, change management, and reliability). In my fractional work, I will often start by resetting the scorecard: - Adoption + retention signals (activation, usage depth, time-to-value) - Delivery health (lead time, failure rate, recovery time) - Learning loop speed (how fast we validate and iterate) Funny thing: when teams measure value, they stop shipping “more” and start shipping better and the roadmap gets easier to prioritize. #SaaS #EngineeringMeasurement #DeliveringValue

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Your performance review didn’t go sideways in December. It went sideways in February. When your brain decided “I’ll remember this later.” Spoiler. You won’t. Most QA reviews aren’t hard because you’re “bad at writing”. They’re hard because you’re trying to reconstruct 11 months of impact from Jira archaeology and emotional damage. Here’s the core mistake. You submit a list of tasks. Not a case for business impact. What usually shows up: - “I improved quality.” - “I supported releases.” - “I helped automation.” What your manager needs. - What changed because of you. The fix is unsexy. That’s why it works. A weekly 5 minute wins log: - Add 1-3 bullets. - Each bullet includes one of these: a number, before vs after, risk avoided, customer or revenue angle - Add proof: ticket, pr, dashboard, praise Examples that instantly level you up: - “Raised checkout critical flow coverage 62% → 81%.” - “Cut regression time by 35 minutes per build.” - “Introduced smoke test for 12 top journeys.” If you want this to be easy, keep a lightweight career memory system. Even a simple tool like CareerJourney can help you store wins with context so review season becomes copy-paste, not panic. #QA #SoftwareTesting #QualityAssurance #PerformanceReview #CareerGrowth #TestAutomation #Engineering

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The fastest way to kill a transformation is to measure the wrong things really well. I’ve seen teams ship genuinely better products, clean up years of tech debt, unblock customers who were stuck for months… and then get grilled in a QBR because some legacy metric dipped three percent. Not because the business was worse off. Just because the scorecard was written for a different era. This is how it usually goes. Leadership announces a bold transformation. New strategy, new org, new slogans. Everyone nods, slides look great. Then you ask, “How will we know it’s working?” and they point to the same dashboard they used 5 years ago. That’s when you know the transformation is cosmetic. If you change how you work but keep the old metrics, the system will drag you back to the old behavior. It’s like telling a team to focus on quality and learning, then ranking them on lines of code and tickets closed. You don’t get better engineering. You get keyboard typing contests. I had a team once that moved from project delivery to product outcomes. We killed a zombie feature that was expensive to maintain and barely used. Customers didn’t miss it. Support tickets dropped. Performance improved. But our “feature throughput” metric tanked. On paper, we looked lazy. In reality, we had finally stopped building junk. Guess which story the old dashboard told. Here’s the uncomfortable part: bad metrics are comfortable. They’re familiar, easy to game, and make pretty charts. Good metrics feel risky at first, because they expose the gap between activity and impact. They force you to admit that a high-velocity team might still be running fast in the wrong direction. If you’re serious about transformation, start by asking one annoying question: “What behavior does this metric actually reward?” If the answer doesn’t match the story you’re telling about the future, that metric is not neutral. It’s sabotage. The technology will evolve. The org chart will shuffle. The slide decks will change fonts. But if the scoreboard stays stuck in the past, don’t be surprised when your “new” organization keeps playing the same old game. Most “digital transformations” don’t fail because of tech. They fail because teams are still judged by legacy metrics that reward the old behavior. What’s one metric your company clings to that quietly sabotages real progress?

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Your dev team being a vendor isn’t the problem. Treating them like order takers is. If you work as an internal Product Manager, there’s a high chance that part of your development is done by a vendor team. That’s normal. Internal products exist to support the business. And technical talent is often sourced from different companies. What I struggled with early on wasn’t working with vendors. It was learning how to build a healthy, long-term relationship. How do you avoid the dynamic where: → work gets handed over → hours get counted → motivation stays low Because in product teams, you need developers to care about: → the product → quality → users → long-term stability That doesn’t happen automatically because of a contract. Over time, these are the practices that helped me turn vendor teams into real collaborators. The slides walk through them one by one. --- I'm Maria. I teach Internal PMs how to actually deliver: technical skills + stakeholder communication + delivery workflows. Join my newsletter → link in bio

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The job title says Marketing. The real job is getting in the room before the decision. Most PMMs think their job starts after the product roadmap is set. They wait for the brief, then scramble to create positioning for whatever Engineering decided to ship. Your real value was never about wordsmithing features into benefits. It's about influencing what gets built in the first place. I keep seeing the same pattern. A PMM gets handed a feature no one asked for and spends two weeks making it sound compelling. Launch emails, battlecards, enablement package. The whole thing. The feature still underperforms because the decision to build it happened in a room they weren't in. When it works like that, you're a marketing afterthought. Not a strategic partner. The PMMs who get pulled into every important conversation do something different. →They show up to roadmap planning with win/loss data →They sit in on customer advisory meetings →They join competitive strategy discussions before the brief gets written They don't wait for the handoff. They help shape what's being handed off. Showing up is step one. But a strategic PMM brings something the room doesn't have. You understand the nuance and context that product and engineering teams miss. →The win/loss reports →The churn reasons →The sales call recordings You either corroborate what the room is proposing or you redirect it. Most people in the room have opinions. You have opinions backed by evidence from the people who actually buy the product. Say your team is about to commit a quarter of roadmap to something customers asked for in surveys. The PMM who checks win/loss data before nodding along finds out you're losing deals for a completely different reason. That insight only shows up when you're close enough to the decision to question it. Your messaging gets better too. You helped shape the thing you're messaging. You're not reverse-engineering a story for something you weren't consulted on. You're telling a story you co-authored. What room do you need to be in this week?

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I see so many talented people striving for that next promotion, and their strategy is often the same: try to invent a brand new process, launch a side project, or create something "extra" to get noticed. Here's the truth: You don't need to try so hard to impress by doing things outside of your core role. Want to stand out and earn that next title? Focus on becoming the absolute best at what you already do. Instead of chasing novelty, dedicate yourself to mastering your craft until you are the deepest well of knowledge on the team. When critical questions arise, you must be the person who instantly offers a confident, correct, and actionable answer. And when a messy, difficult, or high-visibility task needs a reliable owner—the one everyone else hesitates on—step up and embrace that necessary burden. Taking ownership of the unloved work is a powerful signal of true leadership and commitment. Your personal brand should be synonymous with impeccable execution and reliability in your core responsibilities. Excellence in the essential is impossible to ignore. Let your mastery speak for itself. #CareerGrowth #Leadership #Productivity #PromotionTips

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