Product Strategy
LATEST POSTS
How Humanising Your Product can Make all the Difference
For a bootstrapped product start-up, investing in visual design and illustration to humanise your product can seem like a low priority. You’ve bugs to fix, marketing to fund, and a user feedback log as long as your arm. Delightful touches, like illustration, are a luxury for those with six-figure investment, surely? A nice to have […]
Product Growth = People Growth by Nilan Peiris
In this #mtpengage Manchester talk, Nilan Peiris of Transferwise talks about simultaneously growing a business and growing its people, and how the two aren’t at all mutually exclusive – in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Money transfer service Transferwise has undergone phenomenal growth and now moves over £3 billion a month, saving its customers more […]
Why you Should Organize Product Teams Around Customer Experiences
The world is full of examples of well engineered products that have failed to make an impact. What is common to them is that they failed to resonate with customers because they lacked the delight factor – the capacity to offer delightful user experiences. Such products can feel like a collection of features rather than […]
Goals for 2019 - A Product Manager's New Year's Resolutions
It’s a new year, and while the date changing on a calendar doesn’t really have some magical power, it is a nice reminder to slow down and reflect. Many of us will think about the personal goals we want to achieve this year, our businesses will be setting plans and strategizing how to make this […]
Uncovering Your Most Pivotal Users by Marieke McCloskey and Doug Puett
A lot of teams struggle with how to increase engagement. We all want our product to be used more often and by more people, but how do we identify opportunities that will transform how your product is used? UserTesting’s Product Insights proposes digging deeper to understand not simply the most engaged users, but those who’ve […]
Why We Fail: What I Learned From 5 Years with Friends, Netflix's Social Strategy
I write a lot about product strategy, and use Netflix as an example so that others can learn from the company’s success and failure. I often highlight that half of Netflix’s high-level product strategies fail in order to help product leaders to understand how hard it is to launch and grow startups. I also think […]
How Speed to Market Starts With a Strong Foundation
Imagine this: You’re in the middle of developing a product when you realize you’re going to miss the launch date. That’s never happened to you, right? Well, according to the Center for New Product Development, “the average new product development project exceeds its schedule by 120%.” So why does this happen, even to the best of […]
Why Simply "Allowing" Mistakes is a Dead-end for Agile Companies
Managing culture can quickly become one of the most complex challenges for companies that seek to scale agile practices. If self-organization and continuous improvement aren’t already tricky enough in a team of 10 individuals, they represent a daunting challenge when teams grow to the hundreds (not mentioning companies of thousands of people). Scaling agile practices[1] in […]
Take Care of the Misfit Toys: Managing End of Life Products
So you’ve read all those books and articles on how to become a product manager, about how tough it is, but also how rewarding it is. Now finally you’ve become one. I remember when I moved from being a sales engineer to product manager. I had a picture of myself in my new role. I […]
What Product Teams say and What They Really Mean — 10 Tips for Diagnosing Team Issues
Team issues can have a negative impact on a project and your people long term. There are a bunch of ways they might manifest themselves – and I’ve written them down as I’ve heard them over a decade of building digital products in cross-functional teams. I’m not touching on the upfront issues like bad sales […]