Product Leadership
LATEST POSTS
Strong Engineering Culture, Strong Product Culture by Andrew Martinez-Fonts
What does culture have to do with building great products? In my opinion, everything. I’m a group product manager at Yelp, and in this presentation from MTP Engage, I look at why it’s so important to create a supportive culture where product people and engineers collaborate and trust each other. I manage a team of […]
How do you Choose who to Hire as a Junior Product Manager?
Who to hire as a junior-level product manager is one the most difficult decisions a product leader has to make. Most product jobs require some level of product management experience, so you can focus on understanding what a candidate has done and how their existing skill set will fit with what you need for your […]
Product Leadership at News UK by Jo Wickremasinghe
The Times and The Sun, flagship brands of News UK, are on a journey to become more product led in how they develop and maintain their digital assets. To move them forward, Jo has introduced product lifecycle thinking, shared KPIs, product portfolios, and a lean process for testing new ideas. Along the way she’s learned […]
Lost in the Agile Jungle? by Christian Becker
When we compare today’s agile product management in practice with what we have seen some 10 years ago, not much has changed: Agility is still mainly limited to UX labs and A/B testing, and misses the potential value that could be found between the initial idea and a working product. The standard answer within product […]
How to Improve Your Team’s Conflict Competence by Julia Whitney
Conflict can be a productive way to collaborate as a team, ensuring a variety of perspectives are brought into a solution. It can also push teams apart, when it is focused on personal attacks rather than ideological disagreements. Improve your team’s conflict capability and you’ll see better decisions, more intense commitment to them, people holding […]
Clumsy Colossus or Gentle Giant by Julia Whitney
At this year’s MTP Engage conference in Hamburg executive coach Julia Whitney delivered a well-received keynote on psychological safety, as many studies have shown it to be the most critical factor in building high-performance teams. As product managers we can ruin our team’s speed by “threatening” our team members. Most of the time we do so without […]
How do you Measure and Motivate Product Teams?
Product leaders frequently ask me how they should measure and motivate their product team members. Traditionally, product teams are measured on revenue and dates, so if a company hits its numbers within a specific timeframe, then members of the product team will continue to earn their paychecks. But what happens when product leaders want a […]
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, […]