Skills
LATEST POSTS
Why Product Managers Should Learn to Code
Building products is amazing. You take an idea – sometimes big, sometimes small – and with your team you make it real. Or at least you make a version of it come to life and then send it out into the world. Every day I find this creatively inspiring. To craft a product from scratch Read more »
Top Tips for Negotiating With Stakeholders
Product managers are meant to be many things – visionaries, decision makers, leaders and much more. But what about negotiators? Negotiation is rarely mentioned outside an interview for a product manager – yet, in reality, being a product manager is a role that demands good political judgement. It’s all about setting and managing expectations. Here Read more »
Product Requirements: Using a Written or Visual Framework
There’s a lot of variation in how companies document product requirements. Some are moving away from detailed, written product requirements documents (PRDs), while others are using shorter write-ups, user stories, or jobs-to-be-done formats. Some product teams are moving away from written PRDs to visual artifacts like mockups and prototypes. It’s a change in approach that’s driven by demands for more agility Read more »
Seven Things you can Learn From WeChat Product Development
We tend to think of Chinese companies as imitators rather than innovators, but is this fair? App developers and designers may look at other apps for inspiration on new features, but most only look to well-known apps like Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Take Messenger for example. We got excited about its Snapchat-like Messenger Day, Venmo-like Payments, Read more »
The Six Essential Books that Every Product Manager Should Read
I always tell the participants of my workshops that as a Product Manager you should be voraciously curious about what’s happening in the field. Read books, keep tabs on blogs, follow people on Twitter, listen to podcasts, be a massive consumer of ideas and then see what resonates most with you. Here are some of 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 »
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 »
Managing - not Just Maintaining - a Product Backlog
Or Three Ways Product Owners can Stay on top of Scrum 2016 was a big year for the Justinmind product development team. We shipped a new feature every month or so, tackled bug fixes and upgraded the usability of our software (an interactive prototyping tool). With hindsight it was exciting, but such intense activity presents Read more »
Learning in Product - Ellen Chisa (ProductTank NYC)
Ellen Chisa has an educational background in engineering and is currently working on her MBA at Harvard Business School. She has worked for companies like Microsoft and Kickstarter, and is currently the VP of Product at Lola. They connect travelers to travel agents for hotels, restaurants, and any other travelling needs. In her ProductTank NYC Read more »