Product Strategy

It may be obvious, but defining your strategy, goals, and mission is something we all need to have rooted at the heart of everything we do – but it’s very easy to get pulled in countless different directions while we try to deliver against these. In this talk at MTP Engage Manchester, VP of Digital Read more »

For the last 18 months our team has been working to rebuild an existing system using entirely new technologies, methodologies, and a new development team. My company, Hindawi, developed a platform in the mid 2000s to allow academics to peer review academic papers online. For 10 years, the system performed admirably, helping the company grow Read more »

For a bootstrapped product start-up, investing in visual design and illustration to humanise your product can seem like a low priority. You’ve bugs to fix, marketing to fund, and a user feedback log as long as your arm. Delightful touches, like illustration, are a luxury for those with six-figure investment, surely? A nice to have Read more »

In this #mtpengage Manchester talk, Nilan Peiris of Transferwise talks about simultaneously growing a business and growing its people, and how the two aren’t at all mutually exclusive – in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Money transfer service Transferwise has undergone phenomenal growth and now moves over £3 billion a month, saving its customers more Read more »

The world is full of examples of well engineered products that have failed to make an impact. What is common to them is that they failed to resonate with customers because they lacked the delight factor – the capacity to offer delightful user experiences. Such products can feel like a collection of features rather than Read more »

It’s a new year, and while the date changing on a calendar doesn’t really have some magical power, it is a nice reminder to slow down and reflect. Many of us will think about the personal goals we want to achieve this year, our businesses will be setting plans and strategizing how to make this Read more »

A lot of teams struggle with how to increase engagement. We all want our product to be used more often and by more people, but how do we identify opportunities that will transform how your product is used? UserTesting’s Product Insights proposes digging deeper to understand not simply the most engaged users, but those who’ve Read more »

I write a lot about product strategy, and use Netflix as an example so that others can learn from the company’s success and failure. I often highlight that half of Netflix’s high-level product strategies fail in order to help product leaders to understand how hard it is to launch and grow startups. I also think Read more »

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of developing a product when you realize you’re going to miss the launch date. That’s never happened to you, right? Well, according to the Center for New Product Development, “the average new product development project exceeds its schedule by 120%.” So why does this happen, even to the best of Read more »

Managing culture can quickly become one of the most complex challenges for companies that seek to scale agile practices. If self-organization and continuous improvement aren’t already tricky enough in a team of 10 individuals, they represent a daunting challenge when teams grow to the hundreds (not mentioning companies of thousands of people). Scaling agile practices[1] in Read more »