Product Leadership

As a Swede, the importance and value of diversity seems self-evident, yet the business world and the tech industry especially continue to struggle to embrace it. As I mentioned in my product management experience article, and as should be clear from the effort we put into the curation of our product management conferences, diversity is incredibly Read more »

In 1999, the economist Joseph Pine wrote a prophetic book which outlined a fundamental change in the way we live our lives. He provided ammunition for an emerging field in digital design, potentially signalling the death of product-centric thinking. Pine saw that it was becoming easier and easier to create products. The barriers, tariffs and specialist Read more »

Stakeholder management is one of the biggest factors in your success in product management. At the same time product managers frequently tell me that it’s one of their biggest challenges. The most powerful foundation for managing stakeholders is building strong, positive relationships with them. To help think about what this means in practice, I’ve developed Read more »

Product managers are well placed to share learning from failure and to drive a culture of innovation, and so Dave Martin, Digital Director & Product Strategist, talks to ProductTank London about how to build Culture of Innovation in Enterprise Organisations. Learning Fuels Innovation If you’re looking to use innovation to drive growth, then you have to Read more »

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 »

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 »

The role of product management is becoming more and more important inside media companies. The reason is twofold: media companies increasingly need a direct relationship with their audiences through new digital products, and they need to transform their cultures to adapt more quickly to the changing world around them. Over the last decade I’ve had Read more »

How can we design products that users love, while also building a sustainable business model through advertising? User experience and advertisements seem incompatible.  For publishers or social platforms, content and services are normally free to use — and in our age of information accessibility, users expect it to stay that way. Meanwhile, product managers are tasked with maximising Read more »

Every product comes with a tumultuous ‘origin story’. Ours is still unfolding, but I’ve been reflecting on what building a product business within a service agency has brought to the tale. We decided, about 18 months ago, that our consultancy business model, though growing and successful, could benefit from diversification — specifically, from creating something with tangible intellectual property. Six Read more »

  I love asking people this question. It is quite a shocker that most people can’t really answer it. Everyone talks and writes about the importance of customer development, but companies still don’t spend enough time really talking to their customers. It’s a bit like data: you won’t find a single founder who doesn’t say: Read more »