What makes the best product companies different, and how to to build a product organization that creates high-impact products at speed in the face of uncertainty
On Feb 1st 2018 I published my most viral article. Originally shared on Medium and LinkedIn, it got hundreds of thousands of reads, and was liked and shared in a volume I haven’t seen before or since. It’s still my most popular article, What was all the fuss about? In this article I first shared the GIST […]
Why I Wrote A Book About Evidence-Guided Development Read More »
Like it or not, many of us are working in feature factories . We’re churning out feature after feature, trying to deliver on a roadmap. To some that’s just how it’s supposed to be, but for others Feature Factory became the banner term for all that’s wrong with traditional product development. Why are we
Moving from Feature Factories to Value Generators Read More »
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 »
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 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
3 Vital Techniques to Work Better with Stakeholders 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
Why Customer Value Is The Most Important Thing 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
Self-Test: Analyze Your Company Culture 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 »
(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
Tech-Centric is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven Read More »
An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping
Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead Read More »