Team Alignment

TransferWise was formed in 2011 out of frustration with the expense of sending money overseas. Unlike the banks, we display our fee upfront and deduct it before currency conversion. We use the mid-market exchange provided by Reuters with no mark-up, so there are no nasty surprises for customers. We’re happy to boast that the service Read more »

Product management is still a young discipline, and the methods that we use are evolving all the time. Currently in the product community, topics such as product discovery, theme-based roadmaps and outcomes vs outputs are all very much in vogue, and rightly so. These are all helping to move our craft forward, and enabling teams Read more »

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 »

What does culture have to do with building great products? In my opinion, everything. I’m a group product manager at Yelp, and in this presentation from MTP Engage, I look at why it’s so important to create a supportive culture where product people and engineers collaborate and trust each other. I manage a team of Read more »

Having worked on teams using agile methodologies for several years, retrospectives are a major part of my life as a product manager.  Retrospectives (retros) are held at the end of each sprint cycle, at the end of the overall release, and sometimes to review other meetings or processes. Retros are intended to review your team’s Read more »

Empathy is the foundation of the whole Design Thinking process. Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes enhances our ability to receive and process information, which helps us understand how other people experience the world. As a product designer, I know that empathy helps me to recognise the difficulties that people face, alongside their needs and Read more »

Summary: A  ProductTank London talk that advises you accept that you are part of any failure that happens and be specific about the issues that you face. This helps you to work through them as a team and sets an example for others to follow. When success does come, make sure you expose the specific Read more »

Summary: Apply the same discovery processes to legacy products that you would if you were starting from scratch. Pocket-sized principles can guide the way your team works and the way you deliver value to your users. Legacy Products are Like Elephants – They’re not Very Agile There are lots of opportunities to have an impact Read more »

As both a keen sailor and product manager, I have come to realise that there are some interesting lessons to be learnt from sailing that could also be usefully applied to product management. Both disciplines are a blend of art and science, both have built-in constraints, and both require continuous learning because their environments are Read more »

At the #MusicMonday edition of ProductTank Oslo, Davide Vitiello, then the director product – listener experience at SoundCloud, talked about his experiences on the topic of focus. For organizations, finite resources translate into need for focus – a challenge that frequently affects product managers. In addition to describing three key steps to achieve this, he outlined a few ongoing experiments with ways of working at SoundCloud. The Read more »