Product Leadership
LATEST POSTS
How to get Things Done: Raise Your Organizational Awareness
Organizational Awareness: The Leader’s Sixth Sense In our product management community, we rightly place a great deal of attention on the people who are going to use our products. We are constantly answering that seemingly basic (yet challenging) question: What problem are we trying to solve for customers? We test our ideas again and again. […]
First, Do No Harm by Mariah Hay
Product managers are problem finders and problem solvers. But what happens when we become problem creators? In her talk from #mtpcon San Francisco, Mariah Hay, VP of Product at Pluralsight, challenges us to think about our ethical responsibility as product managers. […]
Social Tech for Local Change: the Story of Spacehive by James Chant
TL;DR: James Chant, formerly Head of Product at Spacehive, talks to ProductTank London about a social entrepreneurial marketplace, how this ecosystem can driven by the network effect and fed by non-product functions, and what influence “social tech for good” can have on a wider society. What is Spacehive? Spacehive is a UK-based crowdfunding platform where […]
Dear CEO, Innovation Starts with a Good Product Manager
I’ve worked for more than a decade in product management with Fortune 500 companies and startups, and I realize I’m seeing a scary pattern. Product managers are only hired after the innovation or startup teams get concepts or funding approved. This means that product managers are thrust into developing a product or service concept they […]
Product Design Politics by Michelle Chu
Michelle Chu began her career in publishing as a sales assistant at Backpacker, before working in advertising, layouts, and packaging design. She then moved to digital products and eventually to her current role as Senior Product Manager and Head of Design at Alpha. Start-up Alpha is a user insights platform for use as a tool […]
Customer Obsession
I have been the CPO/VP of Product for four startups as they scaled to thousands of employees. Because of these experiences – and the many challenges of growth – I’ve become obsessed with different tools and tactics that creative leaders can use to keep fast-growing companies pointed in the right direction. Having a clear, well-defined […]
Is it Time for a Licence to Practise Product Management?
I recently came across a piece by Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, titled Design’s Lost Generation, in which he makes the case that designers should require a licence to do their job. Mike got me thinking; should product managers also require a licence do their job? After all, we’re a sizeable […]
The #1 Answer in Product: It Depends
The internet lends itself to binary positions: you’re either for something or against it, advocating it or decrying it. It’s not just Twitter’s 280 characters that limit us to this black and white thinking, most blog posts and conference talks seem to follow the same trend. And I’m not even talking about politics. Waterfall vs […]
Reboot Your Team by Christina Wodtke
Opening #mtpcon in San Francisco, Christina Wodtke turned our focus to our teams. Among the many jobs product managers perform, team coordinator is often added to the list. This isn’t a job that product managers should have to do, but like many other tasks, “if it ain’t happening, you’ve gotta fix it.” Christina told us […]
How to tap Into the Collective Wisdom of a Team
I’ve always been keen on learning from other people. And one way of doing this is by interviewing professionals and experts and asking them about their experiences. This year, I travelled from Berlin to Silicon Valley and interviewed 15 product management experts from Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, eBay, and other companies, to learn about how they […]