How to Design Experiments for Your Product
Why changing button colors isn't enough Google Jedi Marissa Mayer allegedly tested multiple variations of the color blue until she found the perfect shade of blue to increase conversions at Google. This kind of experimentation may be reasonable when you have tens of...
How to Communicate with Your Engineers
Why communication with your engineering team is critical ‘We need to spend time refactoring the code for the next few weeks’, says the engineer. ‘Burn in hell’, says the product manager. How are you meant to go back to your stakeholders and tell them all the new shiny...
How to Master the Currency of Ideas
Become all powerful by mastering the art of ideas We create them, curate them, destroy them, idolise the people who generate them and cling onto our own as though they’re our children. To be known as the ‘ideas person’ is for some reason feels like the ultimate kudos...
Metrics that Matter to Product Managers
What are the metrics that matter to your product? As Product Managers, opening up Google Analytics and being confronted by the all options available can be a little daunting at first. But after a few tweaks here and there and a little trial error, we eventually get...
SQL Skills for Product Managers
How to get the data you need whenever you need it It’s painful, it’s brutal and it’s a little sadistic. But it’s wonderful. Data to product managers is like ammunition to an assassin; nothing gives us more pleasure than gently annihilating a loud, forceful stakeholder...
APIs Explained for Product Managers
Make sense of REST, GET, endpoints, headers and payloads once and for all The ‘techie one’. As product people, we’re often referred to as the ‘techie ones’ by business, sales and marketing stakeholders. We get invited along to external meetings to go through the...
The Product Manager’s Guide to Drawing on a Whiteboard
How to become the superhuman who can draw confidently on a whiteboard Are you terrified of whiteboards? Just the possibility that someone might hand you the pen in a meeting and say ‘go on then, draw it’, sends a shudder down many spines. A bunch of self-loathing...
What to do When Your Product Backlog Runs Dry
How to keep your engineers well fed when the food runs out It’s happened to us all. You stare smugly at your backlog. It’s perfect. It’s a work of beauty and you’re all set for sprint planning tomorrow. You pat yourself on the back, grab a coffee and make a few little...
6 Unconventional Trello Board Templates for Product Managers
We take a look at 6 less common ways you can use Trello as a product manager We all love a bit of Trello. As product people it permeates our existence like coffee and pretentious notepads. And we’re all used to using Trello in fairly conventional ways; typically for...
5 Essential Business Skills for Product Managers
Products are businesses. Having a solid foundation of business skills is critical as a product manager. As product managers we are expected to possess a combination of business skills, technical knowledge and UX / design expertise. It's a hefty list of qualities as we...