I heard someone once say "the level of conflict you're willing to endure will be the level of change you inflict". 

This really stuck with me over the years and I come back to this notion regularly.

Jeff Bezos once said in an interview with Forbes "Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter.' And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.'" As the saying goes, "It takes 10 years to be an overnight success"

If we can all agree that the outcome is important, not the output (i.e. a feature) then we shouldn't consider any item of work as 'done' until it's created the desired outcome.

We are told that great Product Managers are great storytellers but the preaching often lacks actionable guidance on how to become good at storytelling. It’s time to change that!

Building products is messy, uncertain, and non-linear. I’ve always found trying to explain this to someone who hasn’t experienced it difficult.

KPIs = measures of health. OKRs = things we want to change.

The words we use matter. As the old adage goes: "'Watch your thoughts, as they become your words; watch your words, as they become your actions."

When I've helped organisations become more outcome/product orientated, more often than not, I've moved them away from 'epics' and 'user stories' and towards things like one-pagers, opportunities, hypotheses, etc. Why? Because they’re are better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation.

You might have heard of them. Often attributed to Warren Buffett, who is believed to have coined the term 'moat'. A moat is the ability for a product or company to maintain a competitive advantage and fend off competition to maintain profitability into the future.

The first rule of scaling agile is DON’T. Instead, descale the work and organisation instead. But how? you ask. One of the best books on building an agile organisation is not about agile at all. Instead, it’s a story about building an adaptive and responsive organisation. Free from jargon, buzzwords and trying to shove the latest ‘model’ or methodology down your throat.

In 2019 an HBR article stated that of the $1.3 trillion spent on transformations, $900 billion was wasted. More interesting is that, Digital and Agile transformations alike are seldom seen in product-tech companies (e.g. Canva, Google, Amazon, etc). Moreover, one job search for ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Agile Coach’ role, and you won’t find them at these companies either — why?

A deep dive into managing user states to reduce disengagement and churn.

Pre-Mortems are among the most underused tools in a Product Manager’s and team’s toolkit.

Unlike Post-Mortems, which most people are familiar with, rather than waiting until the end when everything has already gone wrong. A Pre-Mortem is done at the start of a project or item of work to mitigate against avoidable issues.

Did you know that the top-performing CEOs in Fortune 500 companies spend significantly more time thinking strategically and long-term?

If unbalanced, you often see a high-level strategy but nothing connecting it to the day-to-day work.

Perceptual Mapping is perhaps one of my favourite competitive analysis and Product Positioning tools. Product positioning as defining where your product fits in the market relative to its competitors as it is perceived by your customers.

The optimization problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions.

But what does the optimization problem look like in companies?

I often find where places struggle with prioritization it’s not a ‘prioritization’ problem per se, but rather a strategy one.

Either their product or organization strategy is vague or missing. Or they’re misaligned creating friction between the product and organization goals.

Let’s start with what being Product-Led is not… It’s not: Product Management-led, Product Managers are the boss, Where product makes all the calls, Something that only engineering and product do…

Early in my career as a Product Manager I soon found myself also being the release manager — having to organise and manage the release and tasks associated with it. This didn’t feel like the best use of my time.

A step-by-step guide (with templates) to level up your Product Discovery. A common question I get when I coach Product Managers is, "I know what I want to do discovery on, but how do I get started?" Although there are many ways to start discovery, I have two tools that are my absolute go-to for kicking off and structuring Product Discovery.