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
Understanding how Design Thinking, Lean and Agile Work Together
The ideas of Agile are great. It’s the way it has been codified into rituals and certifications, and rolled out mindlessly that misses the point. When people talk about Lean, the conversation often ends at process optimization, waste, and quality, and misses so much of what the Lean mindset offers. Design Thinking is held high as the […] Read more »
Turn Your Release Notes Into a Content Marketing Machine
If you’re in a product company the chances are that you’ve developed some process of informing your users about new features. This could be in the form of a blog post or as a notification within the UI. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Spending a bit more effort on the process can help […] Read more »
5 Product Leadership Lessons From the #mtpcon Leadership Forum 2017
Last week I joined the Mind the Product Leadership Forum in London. Among the speakers and panelists were Matt Walton, Julia Whitney, Roman Pichler, Arne Kittler, and Brant Cooper. It took me two days to get to London from Yogyakarta, Indonesia for the night before the sessions, but it was worth it. While I originally wrote […] Read more »
Negotiation in Product Management: the Pursuit of Compromise
When I was a student, I took part in a negotiation exercise. We were given imaginary countries and had to negotiate our rights to the surrounding sea. The whole exercise quickly descended down into what the lecturer politely described as a study in realpolitik. To try and help us curb any dictatorial inclinations we were given […] Read more »
Scaling Your Platform and Managing its Evolution
Examples of platforms are all around us. Businesses that have been successful at building platforms have disrupted traditional companies and scaled quickly. AirBNB, Amazon, Salesforce, and Uber are just some examples of platforms that have become massively successful in recent years. You’ll find platforms across many industries, from transportation to book publishing. For a product […] Read more »
Innovation is Broken by Janice Fraser
What is the point of innovation? Why do we focus so much time and effort on digital transformation, agile transformation, and innovation? Simply put it’s because large organisations need to grow – and can’t. All of their current management practices optimise against anything new ever being successful. In the course of a storied career that […] Read more »
How to Run Product Portfolios at Scale
In this talk I share my lessons learnt from client engagements with many of the world’s largest organizations. I showcase how I’ve helped enterprises rekindle their capability and culture of experimentation and learning. What are the key aspects to consider? Where should you start? What are the tools and techniques to use? How do you […] Read more »
Gibson Biddle - Wicked Hard Decisions at Netflix
Gibson Biddle has worked in product at several entertainment companies, such as Netflix, Mattel, and EA, as well as educational companies such as Chegg and The Learning Company. In his presentation, he discusses “wicked hard” decision-making and how it is a practiced art, and can be very easy with practice. He discusses all of these […] Read more »
Smart Home Truths for Product Managers
My Twitter feed is full of stories of Amazon seizing the lead in the smart home industry. While the Amazon Echo Show is an impressive addition to the repertoire of voice and video monitoring systems in this growing market, it’s not the product features that are drawing attention. Rather, it is Amazon’s smart home product […] Read more »
Debbie Wren - Scaling Autonomous Teams
At ProductTank London, Lean & Agile Enterprise Coach Debbie Wren shares insights into successfully scaling autonomous teams. Her key takeaway? Get good at the basics first. Walk before you can run, small changes can have a big impact and it all comes down to people Don’t Hire Talented People and Then Tell Them How to do Their […] Read more »