Team Leadership

Product management is a cool job, arguably one of the most sought-after roles in business today. But, if you’ve been at it long enough, you inevitably end up hearing some version of this phrase at one time or another: God only knows when my product is going to be shipped!Frustrated Business Person (or product manager) Read more »

Having process transparency is a key element for the successful execution of any plan that involves people working together. Although product management is no exception, some leaders fail to recognize that. One of the most common mistakes for product managers to make concerning transparency is that they fail to connect the dots between the product roadmap Read more »

US-based technology companies are working at a fever pitch to recruit the best talent available. I live in Seattle where many Silicon Valley-based firms, including Google and Facebook, have opened offices to tap into the wealth of local talent that companies like Microsoft and Amazon enjoy here.  Another growing trend is to hire offshore talent Read more »

The consumer buying journey is changing, yet today’s product design doesn’t always reflect this. In the past, consumers typically read product reviews and bought the product that most reflected what they wanted. Products were simple, with a few buttons and straightforward directions. Today however, many products are accompanied by an app, which affects this buying Read more »

The Parable On June 26, 2017, English football team Crystal Palace enthusiastically announced the appointment of the great Dutch defender Frank de Boer as its new manager. Admittedly he was joining after a disappointing spell in Italy,  but his success with the Dutch champions, Ajax, with whom he won the Champions League four consecutive times, Read more »

Last week I joined the Mind the Product Leadership Forum in London. Among the speakers and panelists were Matt Walton, Julia Whitney, Roman Pichler, Arne Kittler, and Brant Cooper. It took me two days to get to London from Yogyakarta, Indonesia for the night before the sessions, but it was worth it. While I originally wrote Read more »

Jamie Parkins is a senior product manager at JustGiving, the online fundraising platform that enables people from all round the world to raise money for their cause of choice. It has been running for 17 years and has raised in excess of £3 billion to date. Jamie has worked at JustGiving for seven years. He Read more »

A friend, who’s recently become a product manager, asked me that recently. She’d inherited a technical product where the engineers already had a view of the direction and deliverables required. Even though it had been broken into phases, each phase was large in scope and involved a number of unconscious assumptions. During planning workshops the Read more »

Someone I know is about to kick off a big project with separate companies managing the design and development. I’m sorry to say I’ve seen this arrangement fail far more than I’ve seen it succeed because I’ve been the one called in to fix it. Design agencies and engineering teams are filled with talented and Read more »

I was invited to appear before an audience of tech recruiters for a panel called: “Everything you’ve ever wanted to know from a technologist, but were too shy to ask.” I realized I needed a good way to explain what it had taken me a while to see in the world of product management.   Read more »