The work to build a great team is never done. The team never ”arrives”, they just continue to morph and change because you’re dealing with people which is wonderful and messy. Patrick Lencioni’s book, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, captures some of the pitfalls a team can fall into, and I don’t know about you, …
Rework is Agile
Rework or change requests are the enemy to a project manager. But to the Agile Product Manager, they’re the result of learning. I don’t believe we are truly Agile if we only plan to build and release each feature once. To me that’s gambling. To be Agile, we must admit that we need to learn …
Become a Lifelong Learner
We all tend to agree that being a lifelong learner is key to succeeding in our careers. And for our teams to succeed, we need each of them to do the same. Despite this, too often our “lifelong learning” ends at attending an industry conference once a year and possibly reading a few articles from …
Are you achieving failure?
Eric Ries describes the idea of achieving failure in his book The Lean Startup as, “successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere”. As product leaders, we need to find ways to prove out that the plan we are executing on is leading us somewhere valuable, and be bold enough to accept that sometimes we’ll find …
Are you ready?
A few weeks ago I came across this video about some “preppers” At first, they might seem over the top in their preparations. But what if their fears come true? Then we wouldn’t look at them as being crazy, but prepared. What if rather than what you feared coming true, what if what you hoped …
The Illusion of Progress
Clayton Christensen in Competing Against Luck calls out how many companies have activities that give the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. To use Yogi Berra’s word, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” This happens when we fail to understand the “why”. Why do our customers choose our products? Why do they choose …
The Illusion of Control
We create detailed plans with dates and dependencies mapped out. We plan for risks and pad our estimates for the unknown. And each time we fail to accurately predict the future. We can’t help ourselves though. We’re so consumed with the illusion of control. We’ve convinced ourselves if we just go into more detail, get …
What are you invested in?
I’m in the process of selling my car, and making a 20-year old truck my dad gave me my primary vehicle. The car was paid off, reliable, comfortable, and I really enjoyed driving it. So why get rid of it? Because I realized I didn’t want to invest my money in it any longer. I’m …
Pick it up!
“Don’t just walk by that trash, pick it up!” As a kid, my dad would yell at me for walking past a piece of trash on the ground in the yard or the house. I’d argue that it wasn’t my trash, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t being mean, he was teaching me to take …
What if it all changed?
Despite years of “digital transformation” many companies have found themselves unprepared to actually operate and thrive in the digital only environment we’ve found ourselves in this year. The video conferencing tools that were “good enough” while we were mostly in the office, are now showing their weaknesses. Those collaboration tools from IT, now seem clunky …