Now that I’ve been blogging regularly for several years, I thought it might be helpful to take a look at my blog’s performance and share the top 20 posts. I’m not doing this just to brag—since I’ve got quite a lot of content, I realize that new readers might be unsure where to dive in. This provides you a handy roadmap you can use to check out the most popular topics (or at least those that get the largest number of page views).

In this post, the final in the series, we’ll be reviewing the most important points for you to remember (I’m calling this your “Managing up cheat sheet”) as well as some ways to make sure you tailor your message to your manager’s communication style.

in the third post in the series, we explored what you can do when you’re experiencing conflict with other people or teams. In this post, we’ll be looking at another specific situation when you might need more support from your boss—when you’d like to develop your PM skills.

In this post, we’ll be looking at a specific situation when you might need more support from your boss—when you’re experiencing conflicts with other people or teams and when the boss competency of role clarity might be the missing piece of the puzzle. Need a refresher on all ten boss competencies?

In the first post in this series, I covered why managing up is an important topic, introduced the ten boss responsibilities and the ships vs. shipyard metaphor, and explained why your boss might be struggling in these areas. Want to read that post? You can find it here. In this post, we’ll be looking at one specific situation when you might need more support from your boss and I’ll share some tips and tricks for you to try out.

Hello there, lovely product people! I wanted to share a quick note to let you know that this article is a little different from what I usually share here. While my blog typically highlights work I’ve already done (e.g. frameworks I’ve developed, podcasts or talks I’ve given, clients I’ve worked with), this post actually represents a work in progress.

Is your organization dabbling in new frameworks or methodologies, but you’re unsure about their potential success? You're not alone. Many "trendy" frameworks often turn out to be underwhelming due to one major pitfall: superficial implementation.

In any role, your manager has the ability to make or break your experience. But perhaps this is especially the case for product managers because your job involves so much cross-functional collaboration and influencing without authority, so even more than other roles, you need a leader who will support and empower you. 
Whether you’re interviewing for a new product job or your company is hiring a product leader and you’ve been asked to participate in the interview process, you will occasionally find yourself in the position of choosing your new boss.

As the year winds down, many of us find ourselves immersed in personal retrospectives (I just published one myself!), reflecting on our current roles, jobs, and the paths we tread. It's a time when questions about career trajectories and the value of our work come to the fore. This moment of introspection often leads to pondering one of the most critical yet overlooked aspects of professional life: the true nature of the trade-off we're making in our jobs.

Storytelling is a critical skill for product people. And it’s often not enough to tell your story one time in one format—you need to experiment with sharing it many times in many formats to find what works best for your company and stakeholders. This is why I love this story from my coachee, Matthew Arnold, Director of Product at Brain in Hand. Matthew knew that he needed a way to communicate his product vision and strategy—or “stratevision” as he calls it—and he landed on a solution that’s both simple and effective: a comic.

Over the past few years, I've noticed a growing visibility of product coaches in our industry. They're at the conferences, they're prominent on social media, and their influence is making waves in the business world. As a result, many companies are beginning to recognize the potential value that a product coach can bring to their organization. This is a good thing!

I recently attended a product meetup and have to share an observation: Many of us could better introduce ourselves. So I’m sharing real-life examples with this post of how an improved introduction could look like.

One of the things that’s so exciting about developing a coaching tool is seeing how people adapt it to their own needs. And this post celebrates two incredible product people who have gone above and beyond in their adaptations. Not only have they created dynamic versions of the PMwheel, but they’ve made these updates available to anyone who’d like to use them. Meet Product Coach Lisa Mo Wagner and Product Director and podcaster Jason Knight.

When you’re working in product, there’s generally no shortage of ideas. And that is a good thing. But it can sometimes be overwhelming to collect and qualify all these ideas to see which ones have the potential to add value to your product. So how do you filter all these ideas and prioritize what to pursue? I will try to provide a pragmatic, hands-on answer to that question with this article, through a process I refer to as “opportunity assessment.” But before we start, let's talk about some prerequisites and the basic process.

As a product leader, it’s likely that you’re always searching for tools that will help you foster alignment, transparency, and focus in your product organization. Maybe you want to help your team work in a more customer-centric manner. Or perhaps you believe metrics could be valuable, but you don’t yet know how to use them properly. If any of this sounds like you, KPI trees might be the answer.

Storytelling is an essential skill for product managers and the key to evangelizing our products. But it's not one that comes naturally. In my Mind the Product London talk, I offer some tips for becoming a better storyteller.

So you’ve decided that you’re interested in product coaching? That’s great! But it’s a very broad ecosystem and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything that’s out there. So my goal is to help you navigate the different offerings and figure out what’s right for you.

In every product organization, you as HoP—along with your product managers—must constantly balance product discovery (what to build) and product delivery (build it). Do too much of the former, and you’ll never get anything built. Do too much of the latter, and you’ll fall victim to building the wrong products in a beautiful way.

Let´s assume you are a Product Manager and you know or have figured out what your next best development topic is (e.g. by using the PMwheel) you then should come up with something I would call a development plan. Something that helps you commit to small actions that get you closer to the competent product management personality you want to become.

The future-self framework takes the form of a document that you need to fill, and it has four parts: As-Is, To-Be, Actions and a Timeframe.

I have created the PMwheel back in 2016 to give my coaching sessions with PMs from all over the globe some more structure and I am using it ever since in my work with my clients.

And I figured out that it is a framework that many of my former coachees are still using long after they have left the initial company. They, in this case, are mainly using it as a tool for self-assessment in times where there is no line-manager helping them with their personal growth. It became a compass for many people that helps them navigate their product career. So I have decided to share it with a much bigger audience to help even more people with it.

Back in 2016, I was working with the product organization of a larger tech company. They asked me to help every product manager on the team “understand the role of the product manager better,” and to help the product managers understand what “better” would actually look like.

This was not an easy challenge and, although I had a certain take on what product managers should be responsible for, I lacked a clear framework—an assessment that I could have discussed with the individual product manager in one of our coaching sessions.

What is the job of a product leader? How should a Head of Product, a VP of Product, or a Product Team Lead behave?

Many articles have been written on this subject, most of them either by product consultants or people holding one of the above titles. But what if we ask these questions to the people they’re supposed to lead? What does a product manager think about this? What do they want from their boss?