Product Management Skills

The standup meeting, or daily scrum, as a team information-gathering staple has evolved into dogma, and especially tech dogma, over time. Not only did it seem like everyone was doing standups as their default way of conveying project context, it felt like there wasn’t an alternative. This was the path of the agile startup, midsize business, Read more »

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Michael Sippey, VP of Product at Medium, shares some insights on how to think big and create clarity and focus for product management teams to unleash their full potential. The Power of Optimism At the start of his keynote Sippey says that: “Most acts of creation – live Read more »

Fitness and sport innovation today is a combination of digital and physical elements, whether it’s wearable fitness trackers or personalized digital coaching programs. But sports drinks, by their nature, are physical experiences. So when sports fuel producer Gatorade was looking for a way to develop its core product, my company, strategic design consultancy Smart Design, Read more »

In order to prepare for a talk I delivered at Mind the Product’s 2019 Leadership Forum in San Francisco I’ve spent the last couple of weeks applying the lens of psychological safety to the things I’ve experienced and witnessed in my product career. And I keep coming back to a messy but seemingly unavoidable conclusion: Read more »

Click CC for subtitles in English What do you need to be an outstanding product manager? This is one of the key questions for every product organisation and it is also one that this talk from MTP Engage Hamburg tries – at least to some extent – to answer. I share some of the issues Read more »

Messenger apps started as the simplest way to start a conversation online. Open the app. Select a person to chat with. Go. Today, those apps have seemingly endless ways for users to engage: video chat, send gifs, send emojis, send money, use a filter, buy and sell goods, play games, talk to bots, and more. Read more »

In this talk from MTP Engage Hamburg I look at how we can become blinded to the faults of our own ideas, and how a collaborative organization culture can help to overcome this. A desire to change the world can be a key driver of success for entrepreneurs and startups, but sometimes it also has Read more »

What’s so transformative about artificial intelligence (AI), anyway? Artificial intelligence (AI) is regularly breaking new ground, from DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero teaching itself to play Go and beating human champions to text-generating algorithms so powerful that their creators at OpenAI decided not to release them publicly for fear of malicious use. While these accomplishments are rightfully generating enormous buzz and Read more »

A nice bit of serendipity this week: this week’s guest, Josh Seiden, had his new book (Outcomes Over Output) recommended in last week’s episode by guest Rich Mironov. While we didn’t plan this, it’s no surprise – Josh is a respected author, speaker, trainer, and consultant, and the book is a fantastic read.  As a Read more »

As product management evolves, so do the challenges and questions facing product management leaders. At last week’s #mtpcon San Francisco Product Leadership Forum, senior product professionals got together to discuss the current hot topics of career paths, talent management, and psychological safety. Here are some of the insights that surfaced during this year’s forum. Theme Read more »