LATEST POSTS

How to Improve Your Team’s Conflict Competence by Julia Whitney

BY James Gadsby Peet on May 30, 2018

Conflict can be a productive way to collaborate as a team, ensuring a variety of perspectives are brought into a solution. It can also push teams apart, when it is focused on personal attacks rather than ideological disagreements. Improve your team’s conflict capability and you’ll see better decisions, more intense commitment to them, people holding Read more »

Clumsy Colossus or Gentle Giant by Julia Whitney

BY Petra Wille on May 15, 2018

At this year’s MTP Engage conference in Hamburg executive coach Julia Whitney delivered a well-received keynote on psychological safety, as many studies have shown it to be the most critical factor in building high-performance teams. As product managers we can ruin our team’s speed by “threatening” our team members. Most of the time we do so without Read more »

How do you Measure and Motivate Product Teams?

BY Cindy Cruzado on May 3, 2018

Product leaders frequently ask me how they should measure and motivate their product team members. Traditionally, product teams are measured on revenue and dates, so if a company hits its numbers within a specific timeframe, then members of the product team will continue to earn their paychecks. But what happens when product leaders want a Read more »

How Going Part-Time Made me a Better Product Manager

BY Jonathan Waddingham on April 18, 2018

In 2013, before Shared Parental Leave was a thing in the UK, I decided that I wanted to change my work-life balance from full-time to a four-day working week with one day of childcare. Here’s how it made me a better product manager. Read more »

Solving Product Development Challenges With Product Review

BY Lisa Long on April 10, 2018

Have you ever worried about knowing what to do next for your product?  Often, the qualitative and quantitative data you have on hand about your product can provide only a fuzzy outline of what is happening and it can be challenging to know if you’re heading in the right direction. While product managers have a Read more »

Pizzas, Minivans, and the Innovation Core Team

BY Noel Sobelman on April 3, 2018

We’ve all been aware of the benefits of organizing your team with a small, cross-functional core team structure since the early 1990s when Wheelwright and Clark published their seminal research in “Revolutionizing Product Development”. My colleagues and I used to joke that your entire core team should be able to fit inside a minivan. Today, Read more »

If You Don’t Feel Like an Imposter You’re Doing Something Wrong by Rik Higham

BY James Gadsby Peet on March 29, 2018

Summary:  You’re not expected to know everything. The best way to help you and your team progress is to stop thinking about failure or success and to start working out how you can learn together. Seventy Percent of us Worry we Don’t Know What We’re Doing We’ve all been in meetings where you feel like Read more »

Manage Conflict by Building Your Product EQ

BY Kate Leto on March 16, 2018

I introduced a concept called Product EQ when speaking about managing conflict at work at a recent ProductTank London. It’s a term that focuses on the emotional intelligence / emotional quotient competencies that were introduced by Daniel Goleman and remain essential to our craft such as influencing, teamwork & collaboration, leadership, organizational awareness, and empathy. All Read more »

Creating Good Roadmaps: 6 Practical Steps for Product Leaders

BY Matt Walton on February 15, 2018

Much has been written about the process of creating product roadmaps, not least the six great articles written by my own team. But there has been surprisingly little written about a product leader’s role in the process. I believe the actions of a product leader all too often are the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without Read more »

Techniques to Help you Build a High-Performing Team

BY Anna Goss on February 8, 2018

I think of high-performing teams like a personal best on a run: they don’t happen overnight or by accident, but they’re worth it. As product managers, we’re often on point for building team culture. And we really feel the benefit of it when teams are working well together: a team that can move fast, understand Read more »