LATEST POSTS

I want to be a Product Owner: The Hard Truths Revealed

BY Esther Kieft on November 10, 2020

Before the pandemic, many organisations had already chosen to go agile. The pandemic has however stress tested our agility (or ‘wagility’) with deep embedded, organisational processes and roles being challenged. Similarly organisations who resisted agile in the past are realising they need to be agile to survive and thrive both during and after the pandemic. Read more »

Three Hidden Problems That can Ruin Your Agile Retrospectives

BY Ben Staples on September 1, 2020

Scrum.org defines a sprint retrospective as a time at the end of each sprint where the team discusses what went well, what could be improved, and aligns on specific actions the group can commit to improving for the next sprint. Retrospectives are an essential part of any organization running agile software development. I don’t care if Read more »

A product manager's approach to growing teams

BY Sharon Kean on August 28, 2020

Transferwise takes a data-driven, tactical approach to growing its product teams. Read about what they’ve learned, and why diversity is so important. Read more »

Scaling from 60 to 1,000 People

BY Nilan Peiris on July 28, 2020

TransferWise was formed in 2011 out of frustration with the expense of sending money overseas. Unlike the banks, we display our fee upfront and deduct it before currency conversion. We use the mid-market exchange provided by Reuters with no mark-up, so there are no nasty surprises for customers. We’re happy to boast that the service Read more »

Patrick Roelof 's 10 Essential tips for new Product Managers

BY Chris Massey on July 24, 2020

Thanks to his 2019 MTP Engage Hamburg talk, we now know 10 things Patrick Roelof wishes he’d known at the start of his career. Here he helps you to get one step ahead of the game by sharing them, giving you suggestions on how to adjust the way you work and excel in your product management Read more »

How Influential Leadership Builds Winning Products - Oluwatobi Otokiti

BY Sarah Oliver on July 10, 2020

An inspirational first-time talk from Tobi Otokiti asking us as product managers to consider ourselves as the product. See yourself as a product leader, not just a manager, and genuinely care for your team. Don’t be the aloof CEO of the product, but become a team player and get excited about your product – it will Read more »

Time Management – a Leader’s Responsibility

BY Rik Higham on November 26, 2019

Bad time-management in product teams (or any team for that matter) is a source of pain for many but, by taking some simple actions you can ensure they’re a thing of the past. Here’s how you can support your team’s time-management as a product leader. Time management is a challenge that appears again and again Read more »

The Product Manager's Identity Crisis by Mitchell Gillespie

BY Andres Phillips on September 30, 2019

Product people have a ton of different responsibilities – a number of stakeholders to answer to and a number of different problems to solve. In this ProductTank Toronto talk, Mitchell Gillespie, Director of Product Management at Wave speaks about: The product manager identity crisis Motivating others Playbooks Watch the video to see Mitchell’s talk in full. Read more »

Six Common Traps that Undermine Strategic Product Management

BY Matt LeMay on September 17, 2019

Increasingly product managers are expected to think and operate “strategically”, but, as this post will reveal, it’s a requirement that can lead to misaligned expectations and be full of traps for the unwary. Surely we’ve all noticed the increased emphasis on “strategy” as a core competency for product managers? Of course, keeping tactical work aligned Read more »

How do you Make Product Management Work Effectively in a Distributed Team?

BY Tim Herbig on October 17, 2018

Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, which range from cross-functional, to customer-centric, all the way up to iterative and independent. But there’s one aspect which should vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. In this first of two posts, I look at how you Read more »