Welcome to my blog. You may want to filter posts by your role for your convenience. Click here if you are an individual contributor in product (aka. PM) and here if you are leading a product organisation (aka product leader).
As part of my ongoing research into product Communities of Practice (CoP), I have been conducting interviews with people who organize and participate in these communities, both within their companies and in the larger external product community. In today’s post, you’ll hear from Zainab Arilesere who is the Head of Product at Omnibiz Africa as well as the organizer of ProductTank Lagos.
Read MoreA CoP will help product people share best practices and ways to solve specific challenges. It will make it easier for product people to understand how your organization works and how to effectively work with others outside the product team. This post talks about how to get started with your product community and it contains tips on how to mature this community over time.
Read MoreFor the next post in the series of interviews about product Communities of Practice, we’ve got a real treat for you! Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach, teacher, and author of the wildly popular book Continuous Discovery Habits. In addition to these roles, she’s also the facilitator of the Continuous Discovery Habits community where product folks from all over the world come to cheer each other on as they build their skills around continuous discovery.
Read MoreIn an earlier post, I’ve already shared my key learnings from the conference program. Here are a few other learnings and observations—some from the attendees, some personally from myself.
Read MoreWe put a lot of thought into curating the content for the MTP Engage workshops and conference. Our goal was to provide a lot of thought-provoking and actionable material for experienced product people. Want to get an overview? I share some of the highlights and key takeaways in this blog post.
Read MoreMTP Engage Hamburg is a three-day event packed full of workshops, panel discussions, keynotes, and networking, so rather than try to cram everything into a single blog post, I’ll be writing a mini-series of MTP Engage Round-up posts. This first post focuses on the Product Leadership Forum portion of the event.
Read MoreI’ve observed a trend over the past few weeks. There seems to be a major shift in the business world. In the past, the best growth stories have attracted senior leadership and investors. But this no longer seems to be the case. In 90% of the coaching sessions I’ve had with product leads over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed how to “pivot” their product strategy from a growth story to a profitability case.
Read MoreAs the title of this post explains, I’m going to be taking two months off from working with clients. I know this announcement might be a little surprising or unexpected, so I wanted to take a moment to share my reasons and motivations for this decision.
Read MoreAs part of my ongoing research into product Communities of Practice (CoP), I am continuing to interview people who organize and participate in these communities, both within their companies and in the larger external product community. In today’s post, you’ll hear from Patrick Sauerwein, a Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom AG.
Read MoreIt’s been a little while since my last update—as I shared at the end of last year, I’m spending a little more time in 2022 researching and developing my knowledge of product Communities of Practice. But I’m happy to say that I’m still out there discussing my favorite topics for product leaders, so I’m back with some new STRONG conversations for you to check out! Please give these a watch or listen and be sure to share them with any coworkers or fellow product people who you think would enjoy them.
Read MoreOne of the goals I outlined in my initial post on “Communities of Practice” was to conduct interviews with product people who are currently involved with Communities of Practice to gather their firsthand accounts.
Today, I’m thrilled to share the first interview with Jennifer Michelmann, Senior Product Manager at XING.
Read MoreOne of the most common questions I got asked in conversations with product people in 2021 was: How do I make sure to learn the right things to do the PM job well? And Product leaders in particular often asked me: How do we scale people development and make sure our overall product culture evolves? And how do we achieve this if our people development budgets are tight?
Read MoreGood employee performance is critical to the success of an organization and the products it builds, and feedback is one of the most important factors in employee performance for good reason. As management professor Christine Porath points out in Harvard Business Review: “High-performing teams share nearly six times more positive feedback than average teams.”
But most of us are guilty of not giving enough feedback to our peers, colleagues, and direct reports. Why is that?
Read MoreOne of the recurring themes on my blog and in my work is about professional development. I can’t help it—I’m a coach! I’ve written before about why it’s so important to focus on your own development as a leader. But what exactly should you be focusing on? I realize that it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts, which is why I wanted to share what I’ve been hearing from others who are in your position. Near the end of last year, I asked my LinkedIn community (which is largely made up of Heads of Product, VPs of Product, and other product leaders) to share what they’d like to learn in 2022. Here’s what they had to say.
Read MoreWhen you’re working in product, there’s generally no shortage of ideas. And that is a good thing. But it can sometimes be overwhelming to collect and qualify all these ideas to see which ones have the potential to add value to your product. So how do you filter all these ideas and prioritize what to pursue? I will try to provide a pragmatic, hands-on answer to that question with this article, through a process I refer to as “opportunity assessment.” But before we start, let's talk about some prerequisites and the basic process.
Read MoreHow much time do you spend communicating with the other people in your organization? Chances are, it’s not enough. Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar, told the MTP Engage Leadership Forum that she spends 50% of her time on internal communication. This was such an important tidbit that I called it out as a key learning in my blog recap of the event.
Communication is one of those tricky skills. Since we all do it all the time, we tend to think we’re much better at it than we actually are. But there’s often a gap between the way we view ourselves as communicators and the way our teams view us. Here are a few of the most common communication problems I see in product organizations.
Read MoreLeaders often find it difficult to get feedback, especially in a structured and actionable way. That’s why I started to offer 360° Leadership Feedback, where I schedule and conduct interviews with your employees and colleagues and package what I learn into an easily digestible format. I believe this will provide you with a solid basis for your self-progression journey. But what is it really like to participate in 360° Leadership Feedback? I figured you’d like to hear directly from a past participant.
Read MoreAs a product leader, it’s likely that you’re always searching for tools that will help you foster alignment, transparency, and focus in your product organization. Maybe you want to help your team work in a more customer-centric manner. Or perhaps you believe metrics could be valuable, but you don’t yet know how to use them properly. If any of this sounds like you, KPI trees might be the answer.
Read MoreSince publishing my book, STRONG Product People, I’ve been on a mission to get it into the hands of as many product leaders as possible. But beyond just getting product leaders to read my book, I want to help them actually apply the concepts they’ve been introduced to in the book.
This is why I’m excited about one of my newer offerings, the corporate book club for STRONG Product People. Everyone on your team receives a copy of the book and then we hold two 90-minute sessions to discuss any questions your team has about the concepts from the book and how to apply them.
One of your core responsibilities as a product leader is growing your team. And this is not a passive activity where you let the recruiter do all the work and you just watch the candidates roll in. As a thoughtful and engaged product leader, you should be an active participant in this process. After all, this is the future direction of your team we’re talking about.
For this blog post, we’ll be focusing on one aspect of hiring: writing job ads (also known as job posts or job listings) for your open roles.
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