Product Leadership

Today, attention is our new currency. With endless distractions, how does anyone get anything done? For product managers leading the execution of a product, working with an inattentive, context-switching development team is a struggle. This is why developing strong influencing skills is crucial for product managers. While many articles provide advice on ways to influence, they 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 »

Product managers have a unique view on what’s happening across the business, provided the relationships are working well. They work at the intersection of the User Experience, Business, and Technical teams, and have the opportunity to tap into the collective knowledge of these teams, in addition to their own interactions with the market. Being in this Read more »

Organizational Awareness: The Leader’s Sixth Sense In our product management community, we rightly place a great deal of attention on the people who are going to use our products. We are constantly answering that seemingly basic (yet challenging) question: What problem are we trying to solve for customers?  We test our ideas again and again. Read more »

Product managers are problem finders and problem solvers. But what happens when we become problem creators? In her talk from #mtpcon San Francisco, Mariah Hay, VP of Product at Pluralsight, challenges us to think about our ethical responsibility as product managers. Read more »

TL;DR: James Chant, formerly Head of Product at Spacehive, talks to ProductTank London about a social entrepreneurial marketplace, how this ecosystem can driven by the network effect and fed by non-product functions, and what influence “social tech for good” can have on a wider society. What is Spacehive? Spacehive is a UK-based crowdfunding platform where Read more »

I’ve worked for more than a decade in product management with Fortune 500 companies and startups, and I realize I’m seeing a scary pattern.  Product managers are only hired after the innovation or startup teams get concepts or funding approved.  This means that product managers are thrust into developing a product or service concept they Read more »

Michelle Chu began her career in publishing as a sales assistant at Backpacker, before working in advertising, layouts, and packaging design. She then moved to digital products and eventually to her current role as Senior Product Manager and Head of Design at Alpha. Start-up Alpha is a user insights platform for use as a tool 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 »

I recently came across a piece by Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, titled Design’s Lost Generation, in which he makes the case that designers should require a licence to do their job. Mike got me thinking; should product managers also require a licence do their job? After all, we’re a sizeable Read more »