product management teams

Today’s Sunday Rewind takes us back a few years to a post written by MTP Co-founder Martin Eriksson that delves into the causes of friction between teams in a business. Friction between teams kills momentum and speed. It’s bad for business and is the reason why we have libraries full of project management books and Read more »

One of the tropes we’ve heard again and again is that product people don’t actually build anything. We’re not designers (except when we are) or engineers (unless we can code) or anything actually, y’know, useful. What that viewpoint misses is that we build understanding, alignment, and purpose – and that our best tool is conversations. Read more »

As a product manager at Split, 5,000 miles away from the rest of her team, Sophie Harpur has learnt a thing or to about successful remote working. As you’ve probably read in all those blog posts and books about product management, the ideal scenario is to have your product manager co-located with engineering, sitting no Read more »

If your product managers are performing well, but not as a team, it’s a problem—a problem you need to solve fast. Here I’ll explain a few methods, tried and tested at Skyscanner, that could also help you to improve your product management culture and community. When this issue surfaced at Skyscanner, we were a bunch Read more »

In this ProductTank London talk, Ben Fields, formerly Lead Data Scientist at FutureLearn, looks at getting the most from the relationship between product managers and data people, working out people’s background understanding, the benefits of leading with a story, and how best to spread knowledge. There are three key aspects of how data science can Read more »

The standup meeting, or daily scrum, as a team information-gathering staple has evolved into dogma, and especially tech dogma, over time. Not only did it seem like everyone was doing standups as their default way of conveying project context, it felt like there wasn’t an alternative. This was the path of the agile startup, midsize business, Read more »

You know that moment when you realise that something is not quite right in the team? Often you think you know straight away what needs improvement, but for some reason the team can’t see what you’re seeing. What’s wrong with them? It’s so obvious! There’s nothing wrong with them. There’s a saying from the world of Read more »

What’s the alternative to hiring based on unconscious bias? The best alternative to “culture fit,” is “culture add”. It has shaped decisions in several teams and is a valuable way to shape hiring standards in companies. Read more »

A few years back I interviewed for a product role with an event management company. The beginning of the process was typical – I visited their local office for three hours of initial interviews, followed by another three hours of virtual interviews with their San Francisco office. At that point, the fit was a maybe Read more »

Last month I was one of more than 200 product people who got together for this year’s ProductCamp London.  To make the most out of my first time, I proposed and ran three sessions. They all provided a safe space to share insights among peers, but I’ll focus on just one of them – a Read more »