Culture

A good product manager generally has a keen instinct for human behavior. However, the best product managers have learned how to incorporate the science of human behavior in a more rigorous way than just relying on instinct. This post (with a nod from Ben Horowitz’s seminal post) introduces the idea of a behavioral product manager (BPM) – a product Read more »

My journey to product management was not what you might expect, but then again, maybe you would. I studied accounting and computers in high school. At 19 I got a job as a computer technician and by 21 I was a computer science major. I then got a job on campus as a network administrator. Read more »

Observations of a B2C startup product manager working in enterprise. I once heard an anecdote about a very young child being told a story about a very old man. The child was asked to imagine what this octogenarian would look like. And the child said that as he was very, very old he must be very, very tall… To this Read more »

Product management is a cool job, arguably one of the most sought-after roles in business today. But, if you’ve been at it long enough, you inevitably end up hearing some version of this phrase at one time or another: God only knows when my product is going to be shipped!Frustrated Business Person (or product manager) Read more »

Last month I participated in a Design Sprint, a structured and facilitated Lean development workshop designed and championed by Google Ventures. This is a regimented five-day process of unpicking a core business challenge and working up a speedy solution that then gets tested with real humans. On the face of it, the primary goal of Read more »

The Parable On June 26, 2017, English football team Crystal Palace enthusiastically announced the appointment of the great Dutch defender Frank de Boer as its new manager. Admittedly he was joining after a disappointing spell in Italy,  but his success with the Dutch champions, Ajax, with whom he won the Champions League four consecutive times, Read more »

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 »

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 »

First coined in the mid 20th century, the term “speculate to accumulate” refers to the need invest (at some degree of risk) in order to make meaningful gains. In other words; roll the dice, take a punt, have a gamble. This is a risky strategy for product managers, and if your gambling skills are anything like Read more »

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 »