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
Real-World Product Discovery Read More »
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 »
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
Your Roadmap Isn’t Really a Road Map Read More »
UPDATE: An expanded version of this article is available as a free eBook: ICE Prioritization Done Right ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) is a popular idea prioritization method that has lately been getting some bad press. Some people openly warn against it as the worst thing you can do to your product. In this article I’ll explain
ICE Scores – All You Need to Know Read More »
When I talk to product teams and company leaders, one challenge comes up more than anything else: the mindset of the company. It seems that even in the 21st century many people feel that their companies are too top-down, sales-driven, output-focused, and traditional. This is a far-reaching problem. I see it in old businesses looking
Company Mindset – Mapping Out The Ultimate Challenge Read More »
Here’s a sentence that always fills me with dread: “We plan to adopt this new approach, just as soon as we launch these must-have features.” The must-have feature list (AKA catch-up features) has become my nemesis—it’s forever standing in the way of progress. Usually it’s a laundry list of things copied from leading competitors, from
Enough With Must-Have Features Read More »
There’s a common and highly destructive pattern I’m seeing time and again (and likely you have too). The leadership team falls in love with a big idea and turns it into a big project. This project becomes the top priority—apparently the future of the company depends on it. Other projects (including yesteryear’s top priorities) are
The Big Project Syndrome Read More »
I regularly meet teams that carry a heavy burden of guilt—they don’t experiment as much as they should. They aspire to build-measure-learn, but they mostly design-build-launch. They wish to run dozens of experiments per month, but barely squeeze-in one per quarter (and even that is typically a late-stage “MVP”.) Both the teams and their managers
Think Learning, Not Experiments Read More »
(Update: this article used to be called “Product-led is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven”. This conflicted with the term “product-led growth” [PLG] which threw people off. I replaced all the uses of product-led to make it clear I’m not talking about PLG). A common complaint I hear from product folk is that management is too
Product-Centric is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven Read More »