Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Prioritization is hard, and we HOPE that a clear corporate strategy plus well-considered OKRs will get our internal stakeholders to agree on what’s most important: unambiguous #1 and #2 and #3 priorities. That our spreadsheets and analysis will sell everyone on our plan. But that rarely happen…
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?
When coaching our product teams (and others), it’s important to remember our objective: to build up skills and talent so that we can delegate as much ‘line’ product work as possible. Plenty of leader-level work left for us…
Everyone wants innovation, especially if we can plan and schedule into each sprint.
But innovation is uncertain. Can we shift the discussion to planning and scheduling and funding of discovery that can (often) lead to innovation?
How do we navigate when our internal stakeholders are misaligned (and they usually are)? It’s important to understand what drives this, see the pattern rather than get angry, and find some tools to keep our products/business moving forward.
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.
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.
Sometimes we struggle to communicate important concepts that others don’t seem to get. So we have to try different approaches. Here’s a short post on framing the “shifting priorities” problem in non-technical terms.
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.
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…
