Listening to users, customers, stakeholders, and development team members is crucial for us as product people. It allows us to build rapport, generate new insights, and make effective decisions. But listening deeply can be hard, especially when we are tired, distracted, or stressed. This article shares 12 techniques to help you improve your listening habits and become even better at understanding others.
Working in product management is rewarding but demanding. As product people, we have a large set of diverse responsibilities, which often translates into a high workload. But continuously working too hard carries the risk of becoming chronically tired and stressed and sacrificing our health. This article discusses techniques that help you achieve a healthy, sustainable pace and avoid the danger of being constantly overworked.
Developing a successful product is not down to luck or trying hard enough. Instead, product success starts with making the right strategic decisions. But as product people, we are often so preoccupied with the tactics—be it dealing with an urgent support request or writing new user stories—that we sometimes no longer see the wood for the trees. In the worst case, we neglect the strategic work and end up with an unsuccessful product. To avoid this pitfall, you should establish an effective product strategy process, as I discuss in this article.
Digital transformations often focus on new technologies, agile practices, and new business models. While these are undoubtedly important, a further success factor is sometimes overlooked: product management. In this article, I share my tips for establishing an effective product management function to achieve a successful digital transformation, offer the right customer experience, and help unlock the organisation’s innovation potential.
As product people, we can be very fond of the products we manage. While it’s good to care about them, we must not forget that they are a means to an end: Products only exist to create value for their users and the business. It is therefore important that your product helps your company move forward and supports the overall business strategy, as I discuss in this article.
Being an effective product leader is not easy: It requires embracing people’s ideas as well as saying no, being neither too accommodating, nor too assertive. This post helps you recognise and overcome two common, ineffective leadership styles, feature broker and product dictator, and develop a balanced, successful leadership approach.
Ensuring that development teams and stakeholders are moving in the same direction is crucial to achieving product success. But aligning people can sometimes feel like herding cats. In the worst case, they go off in different directions and create work results that don’t fit together. In this article, I describe my framework for setting effective goals to help you guide and align the stakeholders and the development teams.
Experiencing disagreement and conflict is part of our job as product managers and product owners. We work with a broad range of people from different departments, and it’s only natural that we don’t always agree and sometimes clash. But constructively navigating conflict can be challenging. This article shares my recommendations for dealing with difficult people and successfully addressing conflict.
Product management is a multi-faceted discipline. This makes our work interesting and varied. But it can also make it hard to see which skills we need to develop so we can do an even better job or take on more responsibility. In this post, I discuss balancing product-specific skills with generic product management capabilities. I suggest developing a t-shaped skills profile that ensures that you have the necessary deep skills to progress your product, as well as the broad skills required to systematically deal with common, recurring product management challenges.
In this article, I explain how you can increase your ability to influence and guide others and boost your level of empowerment as the person in charge of a product.