Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
We know that external customers must recognize a problem before they consider buying our solution. But I often see product managers / product leaders forget this when dealing with internal stakeholders and executives. We push for product-side practices and processes without clearly framing the underlying problems. I think of this as ‘selling philosophy.’
Product management work is much easier when the product team is well-respected: when stakeholders believe that we’re smart and hard-working and good at product stuff. So an under-appreciated skill of product leaders is merchandizing good product work and good outcomes from our teams.
What does that look like?
Company leaders who aren’t steeped in how software is designed and built can apply less-than-useful analogies for how software products are built. These analogies tend to highlight predictability, scheduling and cost management… but may not be that useful. This post unpacks a few of them.
CEOs may not see their role in systematic product/development problems, and product leaders may not know how to frame their concerns so CEOs can hear them. Can we get past buzzwords to difficult organizational discussions?
When coaching our product teams (and others), it’s important to remember our objective: to build up skills and talent so that we can delegate as much ‘line’ product work as possible. Plenty of leader-level work left for us…
Everyone wants innovation, especially if we can plan and schedule into each sprint.
But innovation is uncertain. Can we shift the discussion to planning and scheduling and funding of discovery that can (often) lead to innovation?
Prioritization is an essential part of product management. We want it to be a mechanical process: pick a metric, estimate ROI for the entire backlog, then do whatever scores highest. But that very rarely works in practice.
VPs of Product and VPs of Engineering need a strong, trusting, collaborative working relationship so that their teams can succeed. What does that look like?
While development (or maker) teams don’t formally report to product management, there are things we can do to get more value out of the team. And some things that we can’t or shouldn’t…
Sometimes we struggle to communicate important concepts that others don’t seem to get. So we have to try different approaches. Here’s a short post on framing the “shifting priorities” problem in non-technical terms.
