Reading the Room / Knowing Your Audience
I’ve written a lot about how we (as product folks) love to talk about how our teams build things:…
Cross-Functional
25 posts
Coalition-Building and Corporate Anthropology
As product managers, we’re trained to talk about benefits with customers/ prospects rather than features. How will this product…
Count The Digits
One technique that I teach in my product courses/workshops is something I call “count the digits.” It’s a…
Why Product Request SLAs Fail
Building on a post from last July about Incompatible Worldviews…
Almost every Go-to-Market-side enterprise stakeholder I interview tells me that…
Product and Engineering Leaders: Shoulder to Shoulder (Talk)
In public — and when working with the rest of the executive team — VPs of Product Management and VPs of Engineering need to be fully aligned, aka “shoulder to shoulder.”…
Product Coaching and “Show, Don’t Tell”
I sometimes find product management teams composed entirely of first-timers,
where not a single person has any previous experience as…
Product Sprawl
There’s a pattern I sometimes see at software companies, particularly those targeting enterprises or on the long march moving…
Prioritization Beyond Algorithms
The problem of prioritization comes up in many of my coaching discussions with
product leaders, and in almost every product…
How Product Can (and Can’t) Speed Up Development
Half of the calls I get from CEOs include requests for Product Management to boost productivity in Maker teams (aka…
The Hungry Man Parable
I talk with lots of executives from the go-to-market side of the house who think that building serious software is…
I’ve abandoned “MVP”
After years of struggle, I’m advising all of my clients and product leader
coachees to stop using the term…
Hiring a Head of Product
Over the last three decades, across 10 full-time jobs and 180 consulting
clients, I’ve headed up product teams 18…