Product Leadership

The Parable On June 26, 2017, English football team Crystal Palace enthusiastically announced the appointment of the great Dutch defender Frank de Boer as its new manager. Admittedly he was joining after a disappointing spell in Italy,  but his success with the Dutch champions, Ajax, with whom he won the Champions League four consecutive times, Read more »

The ideas of Agile are great. It’s the way it has been codified into rituals and certifications, and rolled out mindlessly that misses the point. When people talk about Lean, the conversation often ends at process optimization, waste, and quality, and misses so much of what the Lean mindset offers. Design Thinking is held high as the Read more »

If you’re in a product company the chances are that you’ve developed some process of informing your users about new features. This could be in the form of a blog post or as a notification within the UI. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Spending a bit more effort on the process can help Read more »

Last week I joined the Mind the Product Leadership Forum in London. Among the speakers and panelists were Matt Walton, Julia Whitney, Roman Pichler, Arne Kittler, and Brant Cooper. It took me two days to get to London from Yogyakarta, Indonesia for the night before the sessions, but it was worth it. While I originally wrote Read more »

When I was a student, I took part in a negotiation exercise. We were given imaginary countries and had to negotiate our rights to the surrounding sea. The whole exercise quickly descended down into what the lecturer politely described as a study in realpolitik. To try and help us curb any dictatorial inclinations we were given Read more »

Examples of platforms are all around us. Businesses that have been successful at building platforms have disrupted traditional companies and scaled quickly. AirBNB, Amazon, Salesforce, and Uber are just some examples of platforms that have become massively successful in recent years. You’ll find platforms across many industries, from transportation to book publishing. For a product Read more »

In the course of a storied career that started at Netscape, and includes co-founding Adaptive Path and Luxr, consulting for Fortune 500 companies as well as the White House, Janice Fraser has focused on how to handle this “newness”. In this awesome talk at Mind the Product San Francisco, she shares how to tackle change and really drive growth in large organisations. Read more »

In this talk I share my lessons learnt from client engagements with many of the world’s largest organizations. I showcase how I’ve helped enterprises rekindle their capability and culture of experimentation and learning. What are the key aspects to consider? Where should you start? What are the tools and techniques to use? How do you Read more »

Gibson Biddle has worked in product at several entertainment companies, such as Netflix, Mattel, and EA, as well as educational companies such as Chegg and The Learning Company. In his presentation, he discusses “wicked hard” decision-making and how it is a practiced art, and can be very easy with practice. He discusses all of these Read more »

My Twitter feed is full of stories of Amazon seizing the lead in the smart home industry. While the Amazon Echo Show is an impressive addition to the repertoire of voice and video monitoring systems in this growing market, it’s not the product features that are drawing attention. Rather, it is Amazon’s smart home product Read more »