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
Product Decisions: Are Customer Requests Overrated?
As product managers, we are trained to focus on the customer. We know that customer satisfaction is of paramount importance and that we must do everything in our power to make customers happy. But I believe that this – contrary to conventional product wisdom – may be hurting your business. Don’t get me wrong, I […] Read more »
Getting Design Agencies and Engineering Teams to Work Together
Someone I know is about to kick off a big project with separate companies managing the design and development. I’m sorry to say I’ve seen this arrangement fail far more than I’ve seen it succeed because I’ve been the one called in to fix it. Design agencies and engineering teams are filled with talented and […] Read more »
How curious - the mindset of a product manager
Being a product manager encompasses many things, such as vision, organization, analysis, and communication. In my experience, there is one universal trait that permeates almost everything a product manager does, curiosity. In product management, I define curiosity as a desire to fully understand a problem from all angles, to want to gather information from a […] Read more »
The Heartbeat of Product by Nate Walkingshaw
Nate Walkingshaw is the Chief Experience Officer for Pluralsight, where he is responsible for Product, User Experience, Engineering, and Content, and the co-author of Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams. But he started his career as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) at $7.14 an hour, and in this […] Read more »
Stepping up Your A/B Tests
This is the first of two posts that deep dive on A/B testing, expanding on a talk I gave at Google Playtime 2016 in London. In this post I share some of the learnings we’ve had after running 60+ A/B tests at Peak, looking at each step of the A/B testing cycle in turn. When […] Read more »
Using Outsourcing to Launch and Scale Your Product Faster
Let’s establish this right upfront: nothing beats a well-managed full-time in-house team of local developers. So why would you want to outsource anything? Doesn’t outsourcing come with a lot of headaches just for a bit of saving? As with anything complex, it depends. Outsourcing: Why and When? Are there enough skilled developers at your location? […] Read more »
A Day in the Life of Prad Patel, Product Manager at Trinity Mirror
Prad Patel is the product manager of video experience in Trinity Mirror, one of the UK’s largest newspaper, magazine and digital publishers. Trinity Mirror’s flagship publication is the Daily Mirror and its portfolio includes more than 200 other titles. A seasoned PM with previous experience in News UK and other well-known news brands, Prad has […] Read more »
Remember HiPPOs are humans too...
At every tech or product management talk I go to there is invariably a slide about HiPPOs – standing for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinions”. It’s a term used to describe a senior member of the organisation who is not attached to the delivery team full time, and who is expressing a perspective that the […] Read more »
Applying Product Principles to Guide Better Product Decisions
Like a sailor who navigates a path through stormy seas, a product manager needs to navigate their product through the needs of customers, business partners, and stakeholders while following the product vision (the end state for what the product will deliver in the future). This includes making numerous product decisions in a consistent and coherent […] Read more »
Why Diversity Isn't Just Right, but Smart
As a Swede, the importance and value of diversity seems self-evident, yet the business world and the tech industry especially continue to struggle to embrace it. As I mentioned in my product management experience article, and as should be clear from the effort we put into the curation of our product management conferences, diversity is incredibly […] Read more »