Product Development Process

In this talk to the MTP Engage Hamburg audience my colleague Natalie Moschner and I share some of our experiences and learnings from implementing product discovery in daily work routines, and we look at how we integrated product discovery in a firm with over 400 employees like AutoScout24. Product Discovery Basics Firstly, you should keep Read more »

Having “no company strategy” is one of the biggest issues facing product managers, according to a recent survey of over 600 product people. After all, how can you set a reasonable direction for your product when you don’t know where your company is headed? It’s an issue that confronted me recently, when I started work with Read more »

I have been the CPO/VP of Product for four startups as they scaled to thousands of employees. Because of these experiences — and the many challenges of growth — I’ve become obsessed with different tools and tactics that creative leaders can use to keep fast-growing companies pointed in the right direction. Having a clear, well-defined Read more »

There are lots of different frameworks for how to run projects so they are ‘agile’. Tim Beattie takes us through some principles that will help you no matter which specific ways of working you choose to implement. Don’t Make Assumptions of Simplicity When working through a Discovery phase, you’ll be doing activities such as empathy Read more »

“The hallmark of successful scaling is knowing when to hit the brakes so you can scale faster later,” according to Bob Sutton, organizational behavior expert at Stanford’s School of Engineering. I couldn’t agree more. Finding the right moment to enter the growth phase is crucial. Startups are quite vulnerable to focusing too much on scaling Read more »

The internet lends itself to binary positions: you’re either for something or against it, advocating it or decrying it. It’s not just Twitter’s 280 characters that limit us to this black and white thinking, most blog posts and conference talks seem to follow the same trend. And I’m not even talking about politics. Waterfall vs Read more »

In this third post in his series on product management for manufactured products, Dustin Levy looks at how you prepare for launch. You can read his earlier posts here and here. During development you’ve been building prototypes and presenting them to key customers for feedback. Often, these prototypes will demonstrate selected features or subsystems of the Read more »

Failing is an eventuality in software development. Not only do we fail, we are encouraged to fail iteratively. Let’s do it over and over again! And yet, the job of the product manager comes with a level of accountability and scrutiny that is unique. Product managers are asked to look after all facets of a Read more »

In this ProductTank London talk, IBM iX engineer Chris Hay highlights how technology can help us truly to change the world. He speaks about his experiences of engineering innovative Kenyan payment systems such as M-Pesa and M-Shwari, and of reinventing how we manage asthma conditions using simple computing tools. The Story of M-Pesa and M-Shwari Read more »

JustGiving’s goal is to grow the world of giving, enabling more money to be raised for good causes through the use of technology. Initially JustGiving supported only registered charities on its website, but the founders’ vision was to support all good causes. In 2012, when I was working as part of the JustGiving team responsible Read more »