Simon Sinek said, “you can’t incentivize performance, you can only incentivize behavior.”
Elegantly put, I do believe this to be true.
You can reinforce behaviours through incentives. This may lead to positive outcomes — we hope that the right inputs lead to the right outputs, which hopefully lead to the right outcomes. But this is not always the case.
There’s a phenomenon referred to as “regression towards the mean” where extreme outliners are followed by a more average result.
Amazing players follow a great game with a less-so one.
A winning streak inevitably comes to an end.
The opposite is…
You have a strategy AND a roadmap, they’re two different things.
Often I hear that roadmaps are part of your strategy layer. I’ve for many years struggled with this notion. Rather to me, they are a translation layer that sits between your strategy and your day to day work.
One google of the term ‘Product Strategy’ and you’ll find a dozen articles all stating that your Product Strategy is your “Product Vision and Roadmap” — this is both incorrect and misleading.
It’s, therefore, no surprise that so few companies and Product Managers have actual strategies defined — this leads to all kinds of finger-pointing, such as the common “prioritisation problem”.
Rather…
A question I get often is the difference between a Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager and a Growth PM.
Product Management can be confusing enough let alone trying to navigate the many different flavours.
However, understanding the nuances can be beneficial for those who might be more suited to these roles.
I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time in this article defining each of the roles (I’ll however have links to articles that dive deep into each role), rather what I want to focus on are the differences.
So where do the boundaries between Product Manager vs…
Note: Being a Product Person examples in this article are biased towards Product Teams however these techniques can be used for any roles 🙌
As part of my job, I’m fortunate enough to see and experience many different companies and teams. I regularly see Product Managers and teams face similar problems when it comes to navigating the boundaries between different roles.
Either it’s the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc where Product Managers suddenly find themselves confused.
Or it’s due to the messy nature of Product work and working in a team causing the…
Check out these Product Companies and their Public Roadmaps
Are you considering making your roadmap public?
Or perhaps you constantly have customers asking about what’s coming up, where things are on the roadmap, etc.
Making your roadmap public might just be a perfect solution depending on your goals.
Many companies have made their roadmaps public and it is a trend that seem to be gaining traction.
There are many benefits to making your roadmap public:
- It builds trust with the market and your users.
- It provides transparency.
- An avenue to communicate with the market and your users.
- It can help compliment your brand.
- It can facilitate more self-service —…
An unconventional view of what it takes to be a Product Leader
*Note: this is a revised and updated version of a guest blog I did for Department of Product, titled: ‘Unconventional advice for transitioning to Head of Product’ — check it out!
As someone who’s been fortunate enough to have coached dozens of Product Leaders and have walked in their shoes, I have found that there are several under-appreciated ways things change when you move into a product leader role.
Often we talk more about the technical skills, like, portfolio management, being more strategic, etc but being good at those things mean nothing if you can’t build a culture conducive to…
A recent survey conducted by Product Management Festival found that the number one reason why PMs leave their roles is because of a lack of opportunities to grow. Worse only 15.5% of respondents stated that developing people and capabilities was a top focus of their organization.
Couple this with 35% of Product Managers stating that a ‘lack of role clarity’ was one of their top 3 challenges it would suggest that one of the most impactful things you can do as a Product Leader for your team and organization is to provide clarity around roles and career progression.
One of…
Last year I finally got around to taking John Zeratsky’s and Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint 1 day workshop. Prior to this much of what I’ve had learned about Design Sprints had been from reading their book and via osmosis from participating in Design Sprints.
Despite their popularity and the fact that I’ve been a part of numerous Design Sprints, there have been two things that never sat quite right with me about them.
Firstly, I find 5 days to be a bit too rapid for a large number of problem spaces. What I’ve found, and this ties into my second…
Originally a late-night brain dump on Twitter, I thought it’d flesh some of it out a bit here.
Product Management is complex. Complex because it’s situational which makes being a good Product Manager about being adaptive.
More than that. It's being able to contextualize and read the situation in order to adapt appropriately.
A struggle that many of us have after being in the profession for some time is the realization that the craft is not black-and-white — sweeping statements about product management like “Product Managers are the CEO of the product” are generally only half-true. …
“adaptable CEOs spent significantly more of their time — as much as 50% — thinking about the long term.” — HBR, ‘What Sets Successful CEOs Apart’
Did you know that the top-performing CEOs in Fortune 500 companies spend significantly more time thinking strategically and long term?
Part of this is a by-product of running larger companies successfully — as the company size grows you need to elevate yourself up out of the weeds and towards a more long-term view.
But another part is the importance of balancing the short-term, tactical work with long-term strategic intent.
Although the best performing CEOs…
