Earning Our Keep
(this is an excerpt from my upcoming book on Money Stories)
As CPOs or product leaders, we often have conversations with CEOs about Return On Investment, which come in two wildly different contexts.…
Politics
15 posts
No Nonsense Leadership (Podcast)
Murray Robinson & Donna Spencer let me join their No Nonsense Leadership podcast for an extended discussion of corporate organizations,…
Coalition-Building and Corporate Anthropology
As product managers, we’re trained to talk about benefits with customers/ prospects rather than features. How will this product…
Permission To Stay Focused
An essential role of CPOs and other product leaders that’s never listed in the job description is giving organizational…
Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem
Product and engineering leaders tend to be analytical, and we think of prioritization as an algorithmic problem. Unfortunately, other execs see a different kind of problem...…
Difficult Product Discussions with CEOs
I’m sometimes pulled into difficult discussions with CEOs, where I’m trying to
describe systematic product-side failures that directly…
I’ve abandoned “MVP”
After years of struggle, I’m advising all of my clients and product leader
coachees to stop using the term…
Do Infrastructure Teams Need Product Management?
I’ve been mulling this for a while, recently prompted by thoughts from Josh Robb
[https://twitter.com/josh_robb]…
Your Audience’s Real Roadmap Questions
I get pulled into lots of discussions among product managers about the best ways
to represent (and then present and…
“My CEO is a Finance Guy Stuck on ROI…”
(combining a series of similar conversations)
Head of Product: My CEO is a finance guy*, and is pushing the product…
7 Ways to Know That You Need a Head of Product
Over the last year or so, I’ve seen more than a dozen companies with a
meta-product management problem that…
Let’s Fire a Few of Our Customers
As product managers, we worry about market results – not just successfully
shipping stuff on time, but growing our product’s…