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My Product Management Toolkit (20): The Art of Saying “No”
Saying “no” is possibly one of the most challenging parts of being a product manager. There are so many great business and product ideas out there and ideally we’d like to do all of them. I can, however, only refer to one of the greatest product people and his views on the importance of saying…
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Learning more about what’s coming under PSD2
The second instalment of Payment Services Directory, “PSD2”, will come into effect on 13th January ’17. By that date, EU member states are expected to have implemented the new payment rules as outlined in PSD2. I recently listened to a radio programme where ex Barclays boss Antony Jenkins described PSD2 as “an opportunity for third parties…
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My Product Management Toolkit (19): Socratic Questioning
One of the first things that I learned when I started out in product management was the importance of asking why, using the ‘5 Whys’ to truly understand a problem or a situation: The ‘5 Whys’ technique, however, only got me to a certain point, especially in situations where I wanted to encourage other people…
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“Yes To The Mess” (Book Review)
In May last year, I attended a great talk by Ken Norton – partner at Google Ventures – titled Product Managers: Make Yourself Uncomfortable. In his talk, Ken talked about the book Yes To The Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank J. Barrett, a management consultant and jazz pianist. Ken talked about feeling uncomfortable, his point being that…
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Cobalt uses Blockchain tech to process FX trades
It was around this time last year when I first started looking into blockchain technology and its capabilities. Even though blockchain technology was initially developed to accommodate Bitcoin transactions, my personal interest has been much more in its potential to act as “shared ledgers” for a wide variety of transactions or ‘contracts’: In the past year,…
As I learn ... 