For Product Tank Auckland, we’ll replace traditional front-of-room presentations theory with live exercises and group experiences borrowed from Rich private product management workshops. Some fun and (we hope) fresh insights.
Many infrastructure development teams don’t have a product manager. That forces an architect or senior developer to manage a range of responsibilities they are not best equipped to handle: settling conflicting business priorities; internally “selling” the value of architecture; tying technical decisions to business metrics; making connections between software and end user joy.
Your different audiences have different (often opposing) goals and incentives, which means they probably want different product decisions and therefore different roadmaps. You need to understand and anticipate their agendas.
What are the questions that various groups really want to ask, and how does that shape our roadmap conversations?
How do we communicate product management’s view of prioritization and strategy to ROI-focused executives? Here’s my side of several recent conversations.
The “No Head of Product Syndrome” is where product managers are scattered throughout a complex organization, but lack an executive-level product leader who can to create conditions for success: drive good hiring/mentoring, create bits of semi-standard processes, and set achievable role/job expectations.
This one-day roundtable (workshop) is specifically for those managing teams of product managers. We will collectively tackle VP-level organizational and leadership issues. Plus dinner the evening before: wine, wisdom, war stories, and closed-door networking with other product executives.
We may be over-investing in a few outlier prospects and neglecting our core customers. How do we frame this and get support to fire one or two?
As data-driven product managers, we’d like to pretend that incoming technical requests are simply transactional. In the real world, though, real people and real agendas are involved. And that means there’s a personal and political context to consider when prioritizing demands on our already-overloaded development organization.
Quora question: What kind of politics is involved in the job of a product manager?
My answer: “Politics” has a negative spin to it. Let’s rephrase slightly: Given that no other groups/functions actually report to product management, what are key influencing approaches or styles?
