Product Operating Model Archives - Page 2 of 3

3 Vital Techniques to Work Better with Stakeholders

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 […]

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Why Customer Value Is 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

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Self-Test: Analyze Your Company Culture

Frameworks and Tools, Product Operating Model

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

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The Big Project Syndrome

Anti-Patterns, Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

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

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Tech-Centric is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven

Product Operating Model

(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

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Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead

Anti-Patterns, Prioritization, Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

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

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Opportunities and Threats — The Building Blocks of Strategy

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

It was mid 2004 and my colleagues and I were gathered in a cinema hall in Tel Aviv to hear our American CEO speak. The charismatic gentleman on stage was all smiles and positive energy. He told us he was proud of what we had achieved that year. There was one topic, though, that made

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Planning and Execution in a Time of Crisis

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

The Coronavirus pandemic has turned into a global health and humanitarian crisis. But even when we will beat it and go back to work things will not be as they were. There are clear signs of a global economic recession, if not a full depression. There’s much uncertainty, but it’s likely that for a number

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Breaking The Walls Between Business and Agile Teams

Frameworks and Tools, PM Role and Skills, Product Operating Model

Managers and product managers are often frustrated by the apparent lack of care the development team is showing for the needs of the business. The team is forever busy with engineering and design projects (some visible and some well hidden), while business-critical projects are dragging on at a snail’s pace. When a long-awaited product or

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5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs

Anti-Patterns, Goals and OKRs, Product Operating Model

UPDATE: I published a free eBook that covers OKRs best practices and pitfalls in-depth: OKRs Done Right. Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to them. John

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