After years of coaching product leaders, I’ve distilled my best tools, questions, and frameworks into a 52-week email course.
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Show Me the CourseWelcome to my blog. You may want to filter posts by your role for your convenience. Click here if you are an individual contributor in product (aka. PM) and here if you are leading a product organisation (aka product leader).
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.
Read MoreGood employee performance is critical to the success of an organization and the products it builds, and feedback is one of the most important factors in employee performance for good reason. As management professor Christine Porath points out in Harvard Business Review: “High-performing teams share nearly six times more positive feedback than average teams.”
But most of us are guilty of not giving enough feedback to our peers, colleagues, and direct reports. Why is that?
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreHow much time do you spend communicating with the other people in your organization? Chances are, it’s not enough. Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar, told the MTP Engage Leadership Forum that she spends 50% of her time on internal communication. This was such an important tidbit that I called it out as a key learning in my blog recap of the event.
Communication is one of those tricky skills. Since we all do it all the time, we tend to think we’re much better at it than we actually are. But there’s often a gap between the way we view ourselves as communicators and the way our teams view us. Here are a few of the most common communication problems I see in product organizations.
Read MoreLeaders often find it difficult to get feedback, especially in a structured and actionable way. That’s why I started to offer 360° Leadership Feedback, where I schedule and conduct interviews with your employees and colleagues and package what I learn into an easily digestible format. I believe this will provide you with a solid basis for your self-progression journey. But what is it really like to participate in 360° Leadership Feedback? I figured you’d like to hear directly from a past participant.
Read MoreAs 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.
Read MoreOne of your core responsibilities as a product leader is growing your team. And this is not a passive activity where you let the recruiter do all the work and you just watch the candidates roll in. As a thoughtful and engaged product leader, you should be an active participant in this process. After all, this is the future direction of your team we’re talking about.
For this blog post, we’ll be focusing on one aspect of hiring: writing job ads (also known as job posts or job listings) for your open roles.
Read MoreOccasionally, people ask me if there are any alternatives to the PMwheel. While I have a strong bias toward the PMwheel (I created it, after all!), I’ve begun to compile a list of other product manager assessment resources that are out there.
Read MoreWhat usually happens in June happened at the end of September this year. Due to the COVID situation, our MTP Engage Leadership Forum made its first autumn premiere. Arne Kittler and I are the organizers of MTP Engage Hamburg and we had the pleasure of hosting the first Mind the Product in-person event since the pandemic hit.
Here are my key learnings from this half-day event.
Read MoreWhen it comes to offering development opportunities, some companies struggle with doing this in a strategic way. They essentially throw money at the problem, opting to pay a premium for coaching and training. So what’s wrong with this approach? As a coach, shouldn’t I be happy to take money from any potential client who would like to pay me?
Read MoreIf you have been following my work for a while, you already know that I think the right question at the right time can do magic. Powerful questions can come up at any time: in a team meeting, during a quick chat at the water cooler, or in a proper 1:1 employee feedback situation.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreSo 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.
Read MoreAre 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.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreOne of the things that’s so exciting about developing a coaching tool is seeing how people adapt it to their own needs. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Arne Kittler, VP of Product at XING and co-organizer of MTP Engage Hamburg. In this post, you’ll learn how Arne has customized the PMwheel for his team.
Read MoreAs 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?
Read MoreOne 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.
Read MoreHow can you help your product managers meet their goals? It helps to translate big, lofty ideas into specific plans of action. And one tool that can help you achieve that is the Future Self template.
Annu Augustine is the founder of product management training and consulting company NedRock in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Annu has also found this framework useful in her training and consulting work.
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