Product Management Skills

I’m lucky enough to be able to say that I love what I do – but why? What is it that gets me up to go to work every day? Like many in our field, I fell into a product job somewhat by accident, but I count myself as very lucky to have done so. 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 »

Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, ranging from cross-functional, to customer-centric all the way up to iterative. But there’s one aspect which will soonish vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. The notion that successful product teams strictly need to operate from within Read more »

Summary: Communities of practice can be powerful tools to enable both individuals and organisations to increase their effectiveness. By bringing together people who share a common interest or passion, new skills are learned and developed. People are often put in situations where they’re empowered, but they don’t know how to move forward. Sink or swim Read more »

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of developing a product when you realize you’re going to miss the launch date. That’s never happened to you, right? Well, according to the Center for New Product Development, “the average new product development project exceeds its schedule by 120%.” So why does this happen, even to the best of Read more »

As a teenager in the 90s in the US Bible Belt, you didn’t have to look far to find someone wearing an iconic bracelet with 4 simple letters: WWJD. This was meant to remind Christian youth to constantly evaluate decisions in their daily lives against the question, “What Would Jesus Do?”. It was intended to Read more »

Have you ever worked in an environment where one part of the business didn’t talk to the other? Are your Product and Engineering teams pushing (or pulling!) in different directions? Does your Marketing team know what is happening in the Contact Centre? Does Logistics know what has been happening on the website recently? Does the Read more »

Once upon a time, designers were convinced that they were doing the right thing. They didn’t question outcomes because they thought their motives were sound. Recently the conversation has shifted to become much more focused on user safety, trust and ethics. While this is progress, it has led people to feel they work in an Read more »

Speaker diversity is an important discussion to have when organising a conference. We all work and live in international and diverse communities, so our conferences should reflect this reality. These days, everyone checks the gender ratio when they scroll through the speakers list. I’ve been part of the curation team for the first two MTP Engage conferences Read more »

The Mind the Product Training curriculum is written in collaboration with dozens of expert product managers from countries and companies around the world. One the most consistent and frequent lessons that we teach in different workshops is “test early, test often”, also known as lean methodologies. Two years ago, when I started as Director of Training Read more »