Sunday Rewind: Product, dance, and pockets of brilliance by Pippa Topp

In this keynote session at #mtpcon London 2022, Pippa Topp, then Interim Head of Product at Charlotte Tilbury, talks about product and creating pockets of brilliance.

Pippa started her career as a project manager and comments that it’s hard to get to grips with the idea that you’re a “proper” product manager when so often you’re given projects to work on by the rest of the business. While we should strive to do product really well, she says, more realistically our careers and our experience build up through what Pippa calls pockets of brilliance.

She says a pocket of brilliance is made up of:-

• Context – it includes factors such as company size, funding, company maturity, product maturity.
• Personal values – these values guide how we behave, and approach things.
• Capabilities – our skills and expertise.
• People – we can be good at everything else but our relationship with people creates a pocket of brilliance.

She then turns to an example from her own experiences in Product, using it to show that the constituent parts of product values are curiosity, learning, creativity and collaboration.

She also shows a framework of product team competencies (https://nealcabage.com/framework/product-team-competencies/) that she uses to ask her team to heatmap their capabilities.

She concludes: “Proper product management is hard and ruthless. But if we appreciate our context, use those values as a guide, apply our capabilities flexibly, build relationships with people bonded by trust, then we can all enjoy pockets of brilliance.”

Watch the original talk: Product, dance, and pockets of brilliance by Pippa Topp