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)?
As product folks, we should be responsible for reasonably anticipating misuses of our products, as well as harm that flows from fundamental product/economic goals. It’s not clear how we step up to this, though.
This podcast on Creating a Thriving Product Organization covered a lot of ground: becoming a product leader; what to do in your first month on the job; conditions that enable product teams to be their best; and Impostor syndrome.
Restructuring product management teams is challenging: there’s no universal “best practice” or generic org chart, and people issues are the tough ones. We step through two examples of redefining what product folks do…