Product Management Skills

Federico Selmi started his career as designer and now specialises in product management, customer validation and user centric design. Having worked at companies such as Education First, Shopa and Mindshapes, Federico has got a lot of experience with implementing best practices around lean customer development. In this warm and insightful talk from at ProductTank London Read more »

Ron Lichty was first a product manager at Apple 25 years ago, then managed development of Apple’s Macintosh UI. Since then, he’s mostly focused on the development part of the team. His fifth book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools and Wisdom for Managing Software People and Projects, was published 3 years ago and it turns out Ron has Read more »

The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has decreased from 67 years (1950s) to about 15 years (today). The market is changing faster than ever, and an organization’s ability to move at the speed of the Internet is the only chance at surviving and thriving. For the enterprise world, the rallying cry is similar Read more »

David Cancel recently stirred up some controversy by arguing that when it comes to hiring Product Managers (tl;dr) “Experience doesn’t matter. Mindset and hunger do.” While I understand that this is his personal experience and not a hard and fast rule for everyone, I think some of the reasons he outlines are outdated and no Read more »

Everyone gets pleasure from ticking tasks off of the todo-list, right? At least, I do. But it’s no longer fun when you feel like you’re drowning in work with too many things to do, or feel like you’re trying to juggle too many balls at once. That’s what kills motivation and creates unhappy employees. But Read more »

The top 3 (work-related) things that make me feel jealous: Friends talking about the cloud/remote/open-source tools that they use Co-located teams Launching new features in 2 – 3 months rather than 2 – 3 quarters… or years That’s because I’m a Product Manager at an enterprise, and things are different here.  Not bad – there Read more »

We all have that one senior colleague – whether it’s the experienced number crunching data analyst, or the product manager who just joined from a Fortune 100 tech firm, or our manager – who has a few words of advice for the new feature we are working on. Does their input suddenly change your opinion, or force you to twist Read more »

There are two paths to being a product hero – bringing new skills back to your team or sharing your hard earned lessons with the wider product community – so we’re putting together a weekend in London where you can do both! Join us in April to hone your skills with one of our awesome Read more »

We are confused and speechless (in the literal sense) when it comes to leadership. Or shall I say management? After all, we generally call ourselves “product managers”, not “product leaders”. Maybe “product directors”? Or “product owners” who need to lead laterally, as they don’t really have the power to call the shots (contrary to those Read more »

Behaviour design is, in a nutshell, a set of techniques and patterns you can use to change the way people behave and make decisions, or “design that draws on behavioural psychology”. In this ProductTank talk, Kat Matfield points out that we’re all almost certainly already using elements of behavioural design, but accidentally and without necessarily knowing Read more »