Three Common PM Role Antipatterns

Product Management has been around for a good 40 years, but many companies are still figuring out the basics, including the role of PMs, their reporting line, and relationship with other disciplines.  Getting these things wrong  can waste a lot of your product management resources and frustrate both the PMs and the people working with them. In …

Three Common PM Role Antipatterns Read More »

The Build-Measure-LooksGood! Loop

Experimentation is becoming more commonplace, but this positive development is often hampered by a common problem. I see company after company testing product ideas with users and customers, collecting the results, but then failing to take meaningful action — no parking of ideas or pivoting. I call this the Build-Measure-LooksGood! loop. Why is this happening? …

The Build-Measure-LooksGood! Loop Read More »

How To Learn From FAANG

There’s a popular notion that we should copy the playbooks of the most successful tech companies, aka Big Tech. The most obvious sources of inspiration are the FAANG companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. So you may be told to Work Backwards like Amazon, use OKRs and 20% projects like Google, or organize according to …

How To Learn From FAANG Read More »

Working Better with Stakeholders — Three Key Techniques

Working with stakeholders can be tough. Whether it’s sales, marketing, PR, legal, or finance, these folks tend to have strong opinions about the product, and they are often more senior or more influential than you. They certainly are better at negotiation, escalation, and corporate politics. Your company is probably not offering good tools to deal with …

Working Better with Stakeholders — Three Key Techniques Read More »

Visualizing Product Discovery

These days everyone seems to be talking about transformation, product-based development, and discovery. And yet, I find that many people support these concepts in principle, but can’t truly believe they can work in their companies. They see them as theory, something very futuristic, hard to do, and abstract. I disagree, but instead of giving you …

Visualizing Product Discovery Read More »

The Most Important Thing

In a famous essay Martin Eriksson defined product management as “the intersection between the functions of business, technology and user experience.” While it’s flattering to imagine ourselves as the center of things, it’s also a strange way to define a role. Why do we need a function in an organization that is a composite of …

The Most Important Thing Read More »