Team Leadership

As product managers, our job is to determine what matters most to our customers. At any given time, there could be 100 really great ideas that need implementing, but realistically we can only complete two or three per month. We have to ask ourselves: which three do we build? How deep do we go? And Read more »

Opening #mtpcon in San Francisco, Christina Wodtke turned our focus to our teams. Among the many jobs product managers perform, team coordinator is often added to the list. This isn’t a job that product managers should have to do, but like many other tasks, “if it ain’t happening, you’ve gotta fix it.” Christina told us Read more »

Technology companies are developing products which shape the world we live in and the way that we experience our lives, but this is largely closed off to people from low-income groups. Barriers, both explicit and implied, exist to stop those with less from accessing these opportunities. How can we spot the potential to be exceptional Read more »

Lateral leadership describes the art of efficiently influencing others around you without formal authority. It is essential for succeeding in the implicit leadership position that product managers find themselves in. In this talk from this year’s MTP Engage in Hamburg, I share some advice on how product people can use lateral leadership in managing agile 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 »

Conflict can be a productive way to collaborate as a team, ensuring a variety of perspectives are brought into a solution. It can also push teams apart, when it is focused on personal attacks rather than ideological disagreements. Improve your team’s conflict capability and you’ll see better decisions, more intense commitment to them, people holding Read more »

At one company I used to work for, I had three standups every morning. It should have been five because at one point I worked with four squads (making five with the design team) but I simply never joined them all. This is how my usual mornings went. I’d get to the office at around 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:  You’re not expected to know everything. The best way to help you and your team progress is to stop thinking about failure or success and to start working out how you can learn together. Seventy Percent of us Worry we Don’t Know What We’re Doing We’ve all been in meetings where you feel like 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 »