5 Visual Design Principles for Product Managers
Practical ways to improve your design skills when you're not a designer As a product person burdened with the pressure of building valuable things people want to use, you’re expected to juggle multiple hats and skills without having the time and space to become a...
How to Make Cross Functional Teams Work
Getting the most out of groups of multi-disciplined team members'Cross functional team' is really just a fancy way of saying groups of people with different skill sets working together to achieve common goals. And that’s what business has always been about. Despite...
How to Build Better Internal Tools
Celebrating the product teams nobody's ever heard of The unsung heroes of the product world are the product managers and teams who work on internal tooling and non-customer facing parts of the product stack. Sure, internal tools aren’t necessarily the sexiest thing to...
Scope Management is Product Management
Defining the boundaries of your first iteration using the scope box modelWhere does the scope of a new product feature start and end? For product teams, figuring out where to draw the line that determines what should constitute the first version of a new product or...
Visual Communication templates for Product Managers
Holding people’s attention is difficult. But adding visuals into the mix will help.
The 5 types of Product Differentiation
How to fight your natural instinct to copy othersThe allure of copying competitors The gravitational pull towards copying competitors is real. In crowded markets, the more competitors, the more certain we are that what our competitors are doing must be the right...
Presentation skills for Product Managers
How to excel at the activity we dread the mostSince product managers have no direct managerial responsibilities over team members and no tangible outputs in the same way a designer or developer might be able to say ‘here’s what I built this week’, PMs must instead...
How to Create a Product Content Strategy
Content is perceived as something that can be slapped onto a design at the end of the product development process. But in the best companies, content is the design process, not an afterthought. A product that has invested in heavily integrating both design and content into the overall experience oozes quality. You can feel it.
Product survey 2020
The Department of Product’s 2020 product survey was sent out the survey to our product community of over 10,000 product and tech leaders to find out how the product community is adapting to the new ways of working and to get a sense of what it means to be a product person today.
Technology Skills for Non Technical Product Managers
The most useful technical concepts to understand when working with engineersHow technical should product managers be? As with most things in life, the answer to the question of ‘how technical should product managers be?’ is ‘it depends’. It depends on the type of...
Unconventional advice for transitioning to Head of Product
From Product Manager to Product LeaderThis is not going to be your typical ‘how-to’ article for moving up into a Product Leadership role. I’m not going to cover the things you normally hear, like advice telling you to be a better PM, to be a better leader, to think...
Why product features matter
Feature factories is the term people use when they’re working at a company who’s idea of product strategy is putting a spreadsheet together with a shopping list of items that need to be delivered with a few dates slapped next to them. But as real as these frustrations are, it’s also worth asking: what if features actually do matter?
Component Oriented Thinking for Product Managers
Components mean many things to different members of a modern product team. For a product manager, using components means building reusable pieces of value which cut down future development time and leads to shipping more value faster.
5 Ways to use Post it Notes as a Product Manager
They’re a tech company cliche. And here’s 5 ways you and your product team can use post it notes effectively.
How to Agree Ways of Working as a Product Team
Things feel a little stale. You’re stuck in a bit of a rut. The team’s energy isn’t quite what it used to be. And you’re not able to quite pinpoint exactly what has led you to feel this way. This can – and probably will – happen to all product teams at some point. A ways of working session might be just what you need to get you back up and running, feeling energised and rebooted.
Radical product strategy
In 2011 when I founded Likelii, we had a clear vision: To make it easier and fun for wine enthusiasts to find wines they were likely to like. But despite having a clear vision, I had caught what I now call the Iteration Epidemic where we try to copy the success of companies that found their success through iteration, trying one strategy after another to find the nirvana of product-market fit.
How to measure product market fit
As we look to challenge ourselves to make the best decisions possible, we often judge our decision making skills on the outcomes we achieved. This isn’t quite right since the outcome itself will always be unpredictable; the results achieved are different to the decision making process which led to a decision being taken. This is known as ‘resulting’ – where you assess the quality of your decision by the outcome it achieved.
Managing UX debt
Why tension between product designers and managers is healthyI was recently asked by a colleague what I found to be the most challenging aspects of product management. Without much thought, I blurted out a response which surprised me a little. ‘Managing the...
Tools for making better product decisions
A good decision can lead to bad results, but so long as the steps you took to make that decision were sound, you can sleep safe at night knowing that you took the best action based on what you knew at the time.
How to run Product Strategy Workshops
Practical ways to get the most out of workshops Creating (and sometimes attending) workshops can be both a fun and stressful experience. When a group of humans are put into a room full of post it notes with no structure for hours on end with no set agenda or purpose,...