Product Strategy and Marketing
As product leaders, if we want to build great teams, we need to do more than assign tasks and deadlines. We need to create a culture of ownership that empowers and accountables our team. Three areas we need to look at as we lead others include: How can we help create this sort of team …
As a product leader do you want to have a team that is there for the paycheck or the product and the customers? Does the product team you lead consist of missionaries or mercenaries? As Marty Cagan puts it: “Teams of missionaries are engaged, motivated, have a deep understanding of the business context, and tangible …
As I was walking down a trail outside of Vancouver, I encountered this warning sign. It was one of several signs highlighting the risks some cliffs ahead posed to life and limb. Clearly, those who came before us failed to consider the risks, and they installed both a fence and numerous signs in the mild …
Why is having a great team so important to a successful product and company? Because sometimes our ideas as product leaders aren’t the best! “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or …
Product teams launch mediocre products when we fail to learn as we build. We build for months, even years, never truly learning if we are building the right thing. “What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of …
Vulnerability is one of the secrets to a successful team. Teams without vulnerability struggle to work together because they don’t know or trust each other. Achieving vulnerability-based trust is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It …
“True greatness, true leadership, is found in giving yourself in service to others, not in coaxing or inducing others to serve you.” J. Oswald Sanders What I love about servant leadership is how it multiplies our impact. A group led by a servant leader produces results greater than what any of the individuals could have …
Was the iPod a successful product because it was the best MP3 player on the market in terms of specs and features? No, the iPod succeeded because it combined a great technology (iPod) with a great business model (iTunes). Being a great digital companies today means no longer treating software development as separate from the …
What exactly is an MVP for your product? Some see it as a way to avoid feature creep. Others as a way to phase out development. Still others will argue it’s a prototype or a mini finished product. I’ll leave the definitive answer to someone else, but one thing must be true. You need to …
We can be tempted to create complex models, processes, and solutions as Product Managers, but this is antithetical to the what it means to do Agile. As the Agile Manifesto points out – “Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.” Steve Jobs shared a similar idea when he said, “Innovation is …