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?
The jump from being a Product Manager to overseeing Product Managers/Owners is a big one. What’s in a Product Leader role, how do we design good product organizations, and how do we work across the organization to get good product work done?
Many of us have spent the first few weeks of this crisis focused on (worried about) our people, our teams, and the economic impact of COVID-19. But now we are shifting attention to changed priorities and product plans
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…
Most agile conversations are about morale, velocity (aka throughput), quality, predictability, and team dynamics. But we rarely address actual customer/user vale or business outcomes — instead hiding behind story points or vanity internal value metrics. This discussion will be about how strong product management bridges the outward customer/market view and inward development view.
The ProductTank Dublin team has shifted this to a real-time virtual discussion. We’ll be talking about developer critiques of user stories as a way to understand unclear feedback and tailoring agile processes to each team’s local needs. What does my team really want vs. what they ask for?
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.
Most companies that need a Head of Product Management don’t know how to find one. They write kitchen sink job descriptions; look for subject expertise instead of product expertise; fail to organize their interview process; and eventually give up on hiring the right product leader. (Or repeatedly hire wrong folks who don’t stay.) This talk will disassemble the problem, then offer recommendations for getting it right.
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.