PRODUCTHEAD: Speed to market is now table stakes
» Make your principles explicit so you can make the hard trade-offs between things you value
» Your organisation’s strategy is the anchor that your culture – how you work together – is built on
Author: Jock Busuttil
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals.
In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS).
Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK.
He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
PRODUCTHEAD: Increasing and diminishing influence
» The art of influence is the highest-leverage skill remaining for product leaders
» AI agents require the same strategic clarity as humans do
» Building fast necessitates more human selectivity and expert judgement
PRODUCTHEAD: Putting the Product Operating Model into context
» There’s no one true version of product management, but there are 4 flavours
» Without support from the CEO, your product operating model probably won’t succeed
PRODUCTHEAD: Content design for humans and AI agents
» In a self-service world, good content design helps users do what they’re trying to do
» A content crit is a constructive, supportive peer review technique
» Poor content design diminishes the value of your product or service to users
PRODUCTHEAD: How work actually gets done
» Visible and invisible process both contribute to how work actually gets done
» Orgs should not rely on individual heroic efforts in place of designed-in capacity
» Accelerating the build reintroduces a bottleneck and results in wasteful overproduction
» Context comes from not just sharing information but engaging with it
PRODUCTHEAD: Reflections on the art and science of product management
» With appropriate context, those closest to the problem should make the product decisions
» Be outcome-focused and evidence-based regardless of what kind of product or service you work on
» Be careful not to automatically balance out a conflicting behaviour in others (such as a founder’s bias)
» “The obstacle is the way” – every setback is an opportunity to improve our condition
PRODUCTHEAD: The value of the human in the loop
» Semantic ablation is when language outliers and quirks are averaged away by genAI
» GenAI exposes the thresholds and grey areas in your service’s decision-making
» Being able to build fast necessitates more human selectivity, not less
PRODUCTHEAD: Forever problems and earning your keep
» Understanding cultural lenses is a must when working across geographical teams
» Financially viable products must earn back multiple times their ongoing costs
» AI may help to solve (or exacerbate) long-standing operating problems
» With digital transformation largely ‘done’ in UK public sector, the next challenge is coherence
PRODUCTHEAD: Down with the technocracy!
» Only having geniuses at the top of an org defining strategy for everyone else to enact is a relic of a bygone era
» The allocation of ‘time’ and the allocation of ‘capacity’ are very different concepts
PRODUCTHEAD: The science of stakeholder persuasion
» Bare facts by themselves are not persuasive; they must be “storified” in a way that triggers people’s sense of self
» A smaller initial ask can increase the likelihood of agreement to a larger, related ask
