Tag Archives: teamwork

Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews

| December 3, 2019

The product strategy describes how you plan to achieve product success. It typically covers the product’s value proposition, market, stand-out features, and business goals. While a strategy is key to creating a winning product, it would be a mistake to blindly execute it and assume it will always stay valid. As your product develops and grows, and as the market and the technologies evolve, the product strategy has to change, too. You should therefore regularly review and adjust it. The following tips will help you with this.

Empowering Development Teams

| September 3, 2019

An empowered development team owns its work, is authorised to make the right decisions, and is able to work independently. Empowered teams are happier, create better products, and allow you, the person in charge of the product, to spend more time on product discovery and strategy. This article shares five tips to help you empower your development teams.

Tips for Growing a Product Management Team

| July 9, 2019

Growth is something wonderful: It means that individuals, teams, and products prosper. Growing a product management team, however, throws up a number of challenges: How big should the team become? How fast should people be added? And how should the individuals work together? This articles discusses how you can address these challenges and it shares my recommendations for growing in an effective manner.

Listening Practices for Product People

| February 4, 2019

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.

Establishing an Effective Product Strategy Process

| October 2, 2018

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.

Be a Balanced Product Leader, Not a Feature Broker or Product Dictator

| March 12, 2018

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.

Leading Through Shared Goals

| February 6, 2018

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.

Product Strategizing Tips

| January 9, 2018

Product strategizing refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed. Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product that users want and need. In this article, I share my recommendations to help you improve your product strategy work.

Do Product Owners Need Technical Skills?

| August 9, 2017

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.

Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders and Team Members

| July 3, 2017

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.