After years of struggle, I’m advising all of my clients and product leader coachees to stop using the term “MVP”. Not to stop doing validation, discovery, prototyping or experiments they may associate that that acronym, but to remove the label from all of their docs and presentations and talks. To delete the letters MVP from roadmaps and product charters…
I’ve seen some patterns in how companies recruit their Heads of Product (aka Chief Product Officer, VP Product, Director of Product Management, or Group Product Lead). This post unpacks some fundamental misconceptions — and how to get the strong product leadership we need.
A wide-ranging conversation about product leadership, stakeholders, understanding our different audiences.
Companies often celebrate hierarchy but rarely longevity – the willingness and commitment to stay with a company long enough to have an impact. I recently uncovered some artifacts that reinforced an important cultural emphasis on company-wide success…
I don’t think that product managers should lie to customers or prospects. In enterprise selling cycles, though, there is a lot of gray space around what’s true enough. Can we draw some hazy lines?
Leading a product management team includes delegating most product-level decision-making. How do we match that to team maturity and differing difficulties of various product work?
What: Product404’s podcast, hosted by Kent Keirsey Recorded: 14 April 2020 Length: 46 minutes _______________ Product404 is an Atlanta-based product community, normally hosting in-person events. Kent Keirsey is turning this into a podcast series (for now). Kent and I talked at length about product leadership; smokejumping into companies; moving up the career ladder; helping those who need it (in the current COVID-19 crisis and more generally); paying it forward; and what product management interviewing feels like on the other side of the desk. Give a listen.
As product leaders, most of us have spent the first few weeks of the COVID-19 crisis focused on (worried about) our people and teams. But we’re now shifting attention to how this changes priorities and product plans…
Sending an expensive B2B sales team out to discover what we should build isn’t a great strategy. We should do less expensive, unemotional, non-commissioned validation and learning before scaling up our selling effort.
There are no generic or universal KPIs, since every business has unique aspects. So if we want KPIs for a B2B/enterprise company, where would we start? And how do we avoid committing to improvements in metrics/KPIs before understanding our current scores (or situation)?