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.
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?
a podcast about product management, real-world validation, executive teams, and highlighting the contributions of product folks on our teams,data-aware decisions
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?
In this podcast with Jay Stansell, we note that company executives often have very different perceptions of customer needs than the product management team. How do we understand this, sympathize, yet still bring balance evidence into C-level conversations?
Product leadership workshops in Toronto and Kitchener workshops co-led with Saeed Khan. We’ll look at organizational structures, leadership roles, portfolio-level prioritization, mentoring, and other product leadership challenges. A very full day of learning, sharing, collaborative problem-solving.
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.
An episode in ChadMcAllister’s Everyday Innovator series featuring Felicia Anderson and me on “How Product Managers Can Work Effectively With Data Scientists”