The Blog
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The Product Council Guide
How to establish an effective Product Council What’s a Product Council? Popularised by Marty Cagan in his book, Inspired, the Product Council is a forum which includes key business stakeholders. The purpose of the Product Council is to set the strategic direction of...
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GitHub Explained for Product Managers
Pull requests, merges, branching and all that jazz Look down at your keyboard. You’ll notice that the letters g, i and t are quite close together. You’ll also notice that the letters g,i and t spell the word ‘git’. In the UK, ‘git’ is a derogatory word, often used to...
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Why is Slack popular?
A product management perspective Go to any conference and you’ll notice 1 thing: a small, but substantial number of hyperactive humans aren’t fully present at the conference. They’re physically in the room but they are far, far away. Where are they? They are on Slack....
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Product Monetization Strategies
Bridging the gap between creative and commercial thinking Does generating revenue matter? A business is a repeatable process that makes money. Everything else is a hobby. —Paul Freet, Commercialisation Expert This is a neat way of summarising the definition of a...
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Product Roadmaps – an Essential Guide
Let's talk about product roadmaps What is a product roadmap? A Product Roadmap is a device which allows product managers and product teams to communicate the direction, vision and priorities of their product. The roadmap is a living, breathing, dynamic tool which...
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Writing BDD Test Scenarios
How BDD scenarios can make your testing more human The difference between BDD and TDD BDD stands for behaviour driven development. TDD stands for test driven development. Both BDD and TDD refer to the methods of software development employed by your engineering team....
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Backlog Grooming – An Essential Guide
How clean is your product backlog? 1. What is backlog grooming? Backlog grooming sessions are designed to help product teams improve development processes and ultimately assist the whole team in building better products. Backlog grooming is also known as sizing,...
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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...
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How to Communicate with 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...
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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...
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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...
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SQL Skills for Product Managers
How to get the data you need whenever you need it The power of data 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,...
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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...
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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...
read moreWhat 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...
read more6 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...
read more5 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...
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