Category: Product Management
-
“The Fearless Organization” (Book Review)

Before you read this review of “The Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson, I’d encourage you to watch Amy’s TEDx Talk in which she talks about how to build psychological safety. Edmondson is a management professor at Harvard Business School and has done a tremendous amount of work in the area of psychological safety. In her…
-
“The Messy Middle” (Book Review)

I’m sure a lot of us have common misconceptions about successful entrepreneurs and their companies. It’s easy to look at people who’ve ‘made it’ and think that their journey has been all plain sailing. Scott Belsky is such an entrepreneur, having founded Behance, a platform for creative professionals to show off their work, which eventually…
-
My Product Management Toolkit (35): Effective One-on-One Meetings

Like all meetings, it’s easy to get little out of one-on-one meetings. Ineffective one-on-one meetings affect both managers and their direct reports. Ineffective one-on-one meetings are characterised by at least one party feeling that it’s been a waste of time. These are two examples of ineffective one-on-one meetings that I’ve observed over the years: ‘The…
-
My Product Management Toolkit (34): Product Principles

“Values are like fingerprints. Nobodies are the same but you leave them all over everything you do.” Elvis Presley “Values” – each organisation has got them. Whether they’re explicit or implicit, strong company values underpin everything a business does (and doesn’t do). “Serve Our Users” for instance is a core value articulated in the Google…
-
My Product Management Toolkit (33): Launch and Learn

“Build it and they will come!” I used to work once with a senior executive, who was of the opinion that a product or feature should just be launched, without any testing with customers beforehand. “I know that once it’s out there, people will want it” she’d explain to me, adding that “it’s what people…
