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.
Product owners can take on too many responsibilities, become too tactical and inward-focused, and lose sight of their main job: maximising the value a product creates. Instead of managing the team or establishing the right process, product owner should manage the product and exercise product leadership, as I explain in this article.
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.
The sprint review is maybe the most important Scrum meeting for product people. Applied correctly, it increases the chances of creating a successful product. But I find that the meeting is not always used effectively. My article addresses this issue and shares practical tips for getting the most out of the sprint review.
As a product owner, you look after a digital product and work with a development team. Does this mean that you require technical skills? Should you be able to program and write code? Or is it sufficient that you take an interest in software technology and leave the rest to the team? This post shares my answers and recommendations.
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.
The Daily Scrum is an important meeting for agile development teams: It facilitates self-organisation and helps maximise the chances of reaching the sprint goal. Despite its importance, the meeting is not always effective. This articles share my recommendations on how you as the product owner can help make the Daily Scrum a success.
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.