In my last article I spoke about the concept of an empowered engineer, which I consider the single most important concept for companies that want to move from feature teams to product teams. Overall my sense was that most people...
During these work-from-home times, I’ve been doing a lot of video-based AMA’s (Ask Me Anything). It gives me a break from my writing, and I enjoy the questions. Every so often I get a question that really makes me think,...
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...
Certainly there are disadvantages to being physically separated from your colleagues, and those are well known, but in this article, I’d like to focus on the potential advantages of working from home (WFH), and encourage you to make the most...
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...
Continuing on our series on team objectives, once product teams have their team objectives for the quarter and are pursuing, active management will still be needed. Much as the product strategy requires ongoing tracking and managing by the product leaders,...
We have now assigned one or more specific problems to solve to each product team, but we’re not quite done providing the necessary context. When leaders ask a team to work on solving a problem, it’s important to be clear...
Keeping in mind the principles of empowerment that team objectives are designed to encourage, we are ready to have the product teams get to work. So let’s discuss the mechanics of assigning objectives to product teams. Assigning Objectives To Product...
NOTE: There is so much widespread confusion out there on OKR’s, it’s a very difficult topic to discuss because everyone brings their own very different experiences and perspective to the conversation. If your company is using OKR’s today and you...
After many years of being a very vocal advocate for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique, in the majority of companies I meet, I have stopped recommending the practice. That’s because, in so many companies, even though conceptually the...
As many of you know, most articles I write begin their life as a hope-to-be chapter in a future book. I use the blogging format, combined with the product community, to test out my thoughts on specific topics. The feedback...
To continue with our series on coaching, in this article I will be covering a different aspect of coaching, which has to do with ensuring the product manager has the necessary understanding of the broader business context in which her...
Our job in the product organization is to create products that can sustain a business. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products. Without these strong products, our marketing programs require customer acquisition costs that are too high;...
In my last article on Inspiring Product Leaders (see www.svpg.com/inspiring-product-leaders) I wrote about executives that are deeply involved in the company’s products, and I talked about how these are my favorite types of leaders for tech companies. Several of you...
Marty’s Note: Today we refer to this technique as the Customer Discovery Program, or sometimes Customer Development Program. But when this article was first published, in 2007, the technique was called a Charter Customer Program. Different names but same concept. ...
