Note: This is an article intended for those considering writing a non-fiction book. Notes on Authoring Non-Fiction Books WHY ME? Why should I write about publishing? I have now published four books, and the first three have sold well over...
In my last article I highlighted one of the major pathologies leading to weak product managers and weak products. While the CSPO pathology is large and growing, it is relatively new compared to the MBA pathology. I have not written...
Fair warning that this and the next article will be a tough read. It was a tough one to write, and I expect for many of you, it will be a tough one to read. But in my view, we...
I introduced the term product discovery about 15 years ago, and I’ve loved watching the industry gradually broaden its mind from the concept of someone – either an old-school business analyst or a product manager – defining requirements, to the...
There has never been more interest in becoming a product manager. There has also never been so many strong and helpful voices that can help these aspiring product managers (at the end of this article I’ll share several of my...
Now that more people have a clearer understanding of the differences between feature teams and empowered product teams, by far the most common question I get is how to move to true product teams? This is essentially a question of...
I thought I was done with the series of articles on the importance of empowered engineers, but then an article came out a few days ago criticizing the Spotify model of Agile at scale, and I could not pass up...
I’ve been spending a good amount of time this past couple of years – and especially the past few weeks – thinking about the root causes of the chasm between the best product companies and the rest. Most of you...
We need some way to assign and manage work to product teams, and we want to do this in a way that is empowering and executes on our product strategy. This is the purpose of Team Objectives. Assuming you have...
While most objectives are meant to be aspirational, where we aren’t sure which will succeed and to what degree, and we can vary the degree of ambition the team strives for, there are always certain cases where we need the...
Returning to our series on coaching, this article and the next are tackling two of the toughest yet most crucial aspects of successful product management. In this article I will address integrity, and in the next we’ll discuss decision-making. These...
In this article, I continue the series on coaching product managers by talking about another critically important skill that is so often misunderstood or under-appreciated, and that is collaboration. Collaboration is one of those words that is used so often...
Note: This is the narrative article version of a talk I’ve started giving recently at conferences, product meetups and corporate leadership teams. It is a long read, but I believe it’s a critically important topic, and it lays out for...
Apple is probably the most secretive company I know. Especially given that they’re the most valuable company in the world, it’s remarkable how little has been written about how they actually discover and develop the technology-powered products that fuel their...
In my last article, Revenge of the PMO, I shared my views on the product development process called SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). It was a bit of a departure from my normal areas of focus, and the article caused a...
