Product Development Process

Six years ago at Skyscanner there was no experimentation: now, there might be 500 tests running at any one time. In this #mtpcon London talk, Skyscanner’s Principal Product Manager Rik Higham looks at how experimentation can be a strategic capability for an organisation. First you should change your approach to failure – rather than look Read more »

There are lots of resources to help startups through their first product launch (if you haven’t found them yet, try looking here). But what if you don’t work for a startup? Is the process different if you’re a product manager in an established organisation, where products have already been launched? The answer is yes…and no! 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 »

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 »

Have you ever opened up an exciting new app, but instead of being asked to “Sign up” you saw “რეგისტრაცია”? Maybe you’ve received a confirmation email saying “Th□nks you for you reg□ster. Conf□rm□ng here ple□se”? Or perhaps you attempted to enter your name into a text field, only to be told it contained invalid characters? Read more »

So you’ve read all those books and articles on how to become a product manager, about how tough it is, but also how rewarding it is. Now finally you’ve become one. I remember when I moved from being a sales engineer to product manager.  I had a picture of myself in my new role. I Read more »

Do you start with a “No”?  Defining your process for feedback will save time and improve feedback quality. My seven-year-old son has the gift of positioning, a trait he comes by honestly as his mother is a sales professional.  He knows that, given the opportunity to present his case the likelihood of approval increases.  Lately, Read more »

It takes many different competences to be a product manager, but one of the most important ones is the ability to decide on the future direction of your product. A product manager ideally uses a mix of methods to figure this out, with experiments at the forefront of strategic and meaningful decision-making. The first real Read more »

Making stuff is awesome. Developing new product ideas with smart people is genuinely rewarding. And while the outcome of putting a finished product into the world is fun, technologist Tom Coates says the experience of making things can be even more enjoyable. In his closing keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Tom takes us through where ideas Read more »

Team issues can have a negative impact on a project and your people long term. There are a bunch of ways they might manifest themselves – and I’ve written them down as I’ve heard them over a decade of building digital products in cross-functional teams. I’m not touching on the upfront issues like bad sales Read more »