I recently met a product team, let’s call it Team Red, who is developing a new product in an established, traditional industry. On the surface Team Red has it all: it is cross-functional, fully-staffed, well-funded, working towards clear business goals, and is empowered to make decisions. And yet as we sat down to talk, I …
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 …
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? …
Q: My manager keeps instructing me to build certain features that were decided on by management without my input. I’m not happy not to be consulted, and I disagree with many of these ideas, but my manager always presents them as a “must” and is not willing to challenge the decisions. What can I do? …
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 …
A common question I get is when it is ok to stop validating a product idea and switch to delivery. It’s a natural question given the pressure product teams face to execute and launch. It’s also an important question. If we stop too early we may end up launching a bad idea (we’ve all been …
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 »
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 …
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 …
Roadmaps are a hotly debated topic these days. I regularly meet CPOs who try to ban this staple of product management altogether. This often worries and confuses the rest of the company. What’s wrong with roadmaps? Why can’t we just go on planning as we did since the 1970s? In this highly entertaining talk, Gojko …