Product Leadership
👩🚀 Product Leadership Focus Week 🗺
On 25 April – 1 May, you joined us for Product Leadership Focus Week, thank you! Scroll down to explore the content we released each day and more.
Content
- 📝 Blog [MTP Leader members only]: In Developing a positive mental health culture as a product leader, we reveal simple strategies product leaders can use to implement and nurture a positive mental health culture in the workplace.
- 📝 Blog: In this #mtpcon London+EMEA session, The 5 ways Product Management prepares you to become a CEO, Kristina Walcker-Mayer, CEO at Nuri, explains the ways that being a product manager provides a great apprenticeship to becoming a CEO. Conference talk videos are usually exclusively for MTP members, but we’ve opened this one up to everyone!
- 🎧 Podcast: In Leadership challenges throughout the product lifecycle, Todd Olson, co-founder and CEO of Pendo, reveals how he climbed the leadership ladder and shares his advice for anyone keen to do the same.
- 📽 Live panel discussion on Learning to Lead [Members only]: In this panel, exclusive to MTP members, we’ll hear from a panel of product leaders about how they got their jobs and what’s worked for them (and what hasn’t!) as leaders. We’ll discuss the secret to success when moving into product leadership and how product people at all levels can start laying the foundations for becoming excellent leaders later on in their careers, and much more. Watch the recording here.
- 📝 Blog: High performing teams acknowledge the role of both optimism and pessimism and create systems of work that exploit their benefits equally. In this post, ‘Train your product team’s brain to embrace optimism and pessimism’ we’ll unpack optimism and pessimism, and look at ways to make the most of both in your team.
- 📽📝 Video + Blog [Members only]: In this #mtpcon Digital Americas session, Applied Product Management: Why you may be struggling as a product leader, Gijo Mathew, CPO at VTS, explains why we should be thinking of product management in the same way we think of applied mathematics — the application of methods and specialised knowledge.
- 📽📝 Video + Blog We go back to 2020 and a talk by Tobi Otokiti, How Influential Leadership Builds Winning Products. In it she asks us as product managers to consider ourselves as the product – to see ourselves as product leaders, not just managers, and to genuinely care for our teams.
LATEST POSTS
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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, […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »
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 […] Read more »