Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
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…
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.
A wide-ranging conversation about product leadership, stakeholders, understanding our different audiences.
I’ve been following Nandini Jammi’s truth-affirming work at Sleeping Giants for the last four years, which is suddenly now in the mainstream with support of like-minded social action organizations and a rebellion of Facebook advertisers. She and co-founder Claire Atkin have just launched a for-profit company called Check My Ads…
