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
Third-Party Software Integration: Best Practice, Perils and Pitfalls
Product management teams often ask themselves if third-party integration is right for their software product roadmap. The thinking is that you should integrate with products such as Salesforce and Slack, because you never would want to try to build those sorts of products by yourselves. Because of this, look through product management job descriptions and you’ll […] Read more »
Agile died while you were doing your standup
Like the technology we use to build the products we love ages and gets left behind, Agile has died while we were perfecting our standup. In this post, I’ll explain why. […] Read more »
Optimize to be Wrong, not Right
Let’s be honest. We have no idea what is going to happen a year, a week, or even five minutes from right now. And what’s worse, believing we do means we are not only kidding ourselves, but it’s almost certain we will not achieve our desired result. Rarely do predictions come true. We live in […] Read more »
Be in a Band, not an Orchestra: how to Grow an Agile Product Team
Some years ago, I wrote a blog post noting that small teams are more creative and productive than big teams. I suggested that this might be because, like a band, they were self organising, communicated easily and informally and had autonomy over what they played. Band vs Orchestra I contrasted this to an orchestra, which […] Read more »
Why you Need a Sense of Urgency in Product
When I was doing my basic training in the military one of the things our instructors continually stressed was a sense of urgency. Nothing was to be rushed, but equally, nothing was to be done at a leisurely pace either. No need to take five minutes to shower when you are just as clean after […] Read more »
We Need More Human One-on-Ones
I still remember the day when I held my first one-on-one as a manager. I was nervous. I had read a dozen articles filled with advice from “let them lead the conversation” to “come prepared”. I had a list of questions in front of me, all carefully worded to spark great discussion. When I finally […] Read more »
9 tips from TED speakers on successful product management
Being a product manager is not easy. After all, a product or a complete product line is under your full responsibility – from launch through to sales, and every milestone in its lifecycle included. If you’re already a product manager and in search of new information, ideas, and insights on product management to help you […] Read more »
Product Management is Culture Management
Or “How to Manage Software Development in Teams who Think Nothing Like you“. Product management has two diversity problems. The first one is well-acknowledged: our industry must have more women, other ethnicities, and better representation from LGBTQIA. The second is more subtle: in those instances when we do achieve diversity, and especially cross-cultural diversity, we […] Read more »
Netflix Abstracts the Team out of Product Design
This week I started watching Netflix’s new show Abstract. It’s a beautifully produced documentary that follows the achievements of world renowned designers across a wide range of design disciplines, from Tinker Hatfield, Nike’s head of design to the architectural boy wonder Bjarke Ingels. Many of the designer’s stories are inspiring and touching. These individual’s stories […] Read more »