Product Leadership
LATEST POSTS
How Going Part-Time Made me a Better Product Manager
In 2013, before Shared Parental Leave was a thing in the UK, I decided that I wanted to change my work-life balance from full-time to a four-day working week with one day of childcare. Part-time product manager roles are rare, but luckily I worked for an employer who was open to the idea. So after a successful […]
Solving Product Development Challenges With Product Review
Have you ever worried about knowing what to do next for your product? Often, the qualitative and quantitative data you have on hand about your product can provide only a fuzzy outline of what is happening and it can be challenging to know if you’re heading in the right direction. While product managers have a […]
Pizzas, Minivans, and the Innovation Core Team
We’ve all been aware of the benefits of organizing your team with a small, cross-functional core team structure since the early 1990s when Wheelwright and Clark published their seminal research in “Revolutionizing Product Development”. My colleagues and I used to joke that your entire core team should be able to fit inside a minivan. Today, […]
If You Don’t Feel Like an Imposter You’re Doing Something Wrong by Rik Higham
Summary: You’re not expected to know everything. The best way to help you and your team progress is to stop thinking about failure or success and to start working out how you can learn together. Seventy Percent of us Worry we Don’t Know What We’re Doing We’ve all been in meetings where you feel like […]
Manage Conflict by Building Your Product EQ
I introduced a concept called Product EQ when speaking about managing conflict at work at a recent ProductTank London. It’s a term that focuses on the emotional intelligence / emotional quotient competencies that were introduced by Daniel Goleman and remain essential to our craft such as influencing, teamwork & collaboration, leadership, organizational awareness, and empathy. All […]
Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders
Much has been written about the process of creating product roadmaps, not least the six great articles written by my own team. But there has been surprisingly little written about a product leader’s role in the process. I believe the actions of a product leader all too often are the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without […]
Product Warrior Podcast: Janna Bastow Talks the Challenges of Established Products
This week’s Product Warrior podcast, supported by Mind The Product, centres on the challenge of “adopting” an established product from previous product management. ProdPad and Mind The Product co-founder Janna Bastow explains how existing products in different growth stages come with additional product challenges compared with greenfield products. Such challenges include: Tech debt Business and […]
Techniques to Help you Build a High-Performing Team
I think of high-performing teams like a personal best on a run: they don’t happen overnight or by accident, but they’re worth it. As product managers, we’re often on point for building team culture. And we really feel the benefit of it when teams are working well together: a team that can move fast, understand […]
4 Challenges That Get in the Way of Effective Product Leadership
I recently had the opportunity to attend a roundtable discussion for product leaders in London. Under strict observation of the Chatham House rule, the group picked out a host of themes for discussion, and I’ve chosen the four topics which seemed to resonate universally, along with a selection of the considerations mentioned and the approaches […]
Your Team is Smarter Than You Are: Why Autonomous Product Teams Work Better
I’ve always argued that product management is a team sport. But as soon as you have more than one team in an organisation and you need them to interact with each other, you introduce friction. This friction between teams is why we have libraries full of project management books and methodologies, inboxes and outboxes, dependency […]