Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
You can’t build great products without great teams, and great teams need great leaders. This panel dives into what modern product leadership looks like, and what it takes to build empowered product teams. John Cutler will moderate a lively panel discussion.
Jason Knight invited me onto his One Knight in Product podcast for a wide-ranging chat about product issues and organizations titled “Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management”
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.’
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?
Product management is a complex and strategic, with most of us falling into it accidentally. Career paths are unclear. So what do product leaders — the people managing teams of product managers — do?
ProductFocus’s Ian Lunn and I will talk through how software product companies make money, and how that’s in direct contrast with how software outsourcing and custom development companies make money. Then we’ll apply that to B2B/enterprise software vendors who may have conflicting business models.
I joined Cyrus Eslamian for an episode of his Product Manager Hub podcast. We talked about challenges that product leaders face, working with other C-level executives, strategy versus process, mentoring, and building trust/empathy across departments.
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.
I joined Scott Baldwin’s Age of Product Excellence webinar series to talk about soft skills/EQ, moving into leadership roles, understanding how different functional groups think/act, motivation, and how not to act like an MBA.
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.
