Are You a Product Manager Selecting a New Boss? Here’s How to Assess Product Leaders
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.
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Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?
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.
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KPI Trees: How to Bridge the Gap Between Customer Behavior, Product Metrics, and Company Goals
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.
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The Future Self Canvas in Action: A Conversation with Tim Lukas Leinert, Product Lead at North Kingdom Design & Communication
What are your product managers hoping to achieve in the future? Sometimes it helps to look at what they’ve done and where they’ve come from before helping them chart a course toward the future. Learn how Tim Lukas Leinert approaches this with his team and how the Future Self canvas guides those conversations.
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Why There’s No Such Thing as Perfect (Agile) Transformation
Are you looking for a case study of a company that successfully managed the transformation to become more agile, customer centric, or product led? If that’s the case, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t find the one that tells you exactly what to do to successfully transform your organization.
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Defining “Good”: A Guide to Competency Levels
What does it mean to be “good” at something? This can be a tough question to answer. But if you’re trying to coach your product managers on their professional development, it’s essential to help them conduct an accurate self-assessment.
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Curious about Product Leader Group Coaching? Hear from Past Participants
As a product leader, you face a number of challenges. You might lack confidence in your coaching abilities, struggle to get stakeholders on board, or simply feel overwhelmed by meetings that creep across your calendar and prevent you from getting any real, strategic work done. So how do you take charge of your own professional development as a product leader?
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The PMwheel Goes Global!
Hola and olá to all my Spanish and Portuguese-speaking product colleagues. I have some great news to share: The PMwheel is now available in both Spanish and Portuguese!
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Tips for Developing as a Product Manager
Did you know that only about 25% of product managers say that their company supports and values self progression? This means that 75% of product managers aren’t receiving the optimal level of support when it comes to personal and professional development.
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A Few Simple Ways to Make the “Working Backwards” Press Release Work for You
One of the not-so-hidden secrets for developing new products or features is called “working backwards.” This practice involves writing a press release before you even start to develop a new product or feature. The idea is that the process of writing a press release will help you to put your customers first and focus on the most essential aspects of your product.
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The Product Leader’s Guide to Balancing Product Discovery and Product Delivery
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.
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The Lack of Gender Parity in the Workplace: A Must-Read Guide
In my time as a product coach, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of great product people, and around half of them have been women. My work with leaders and aspiring leaders in the product world has given me insight into many companies and industries. If I’d been an employee, I might have only had experience with a handful of companies, but as a coach I get to work with dozens.
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Why Leaders Shouldn’t Eat Last
Even if you haven't read the book Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, you might have seen the title. And if you are a product leader, chances are you believe in servant leadership or the fact that you should prioritize your team’s happiness, health, and motivation above your own.
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A lightweight way to create a development plan for PMs - the Future Self
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.
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How to use the PMwheel as a Self-Assessment Tool for Product Managers
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.
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The Secret Weapon of Retrospectives – the Team Radar
You know that moment when you realise that something is not quite right in the team? Often you think you know straight away what needs improvement, but for some reason the team can’t see what you’re seeing. What’s wrong with them? It’s so obvious!
There’s nothing wrong with them. There’s a saying from the world of coaching that springs to mind here: “You can’t push the car you’re sitting in.” It’s the same principle.
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