» Speak the language of C-level by focusing on revenue, customer benefits, and financials
» Without understanding, there can be no empathy
» Product managers need to be able to communicate with a wide range of people using different languages
» The worst product managers only speak in the language of product management
» Good product managers amplify the ability of an organisation to generate value
» Successful companies have figured out how to align quality, customer value, and sustainable velocity
» With no formal entry requirements, many people have piled in to product management with little care for the craft
» Be involved and interested, but not on the critical path
» Talk about the ideas you threw away, in commercial language
» Founders are rejecting the generic advice to delegate everything — this evolves the product manager role
» For better alignment, leaders should only communicate the why and what of the goal to their teams
» Auftragsklärung facilitates alignment through both top-down and bottom-up goal setting
» Try to communicate your work’s value to stakeholders in terms they will understand
» Alignment is a system in dynamic equilibrium
» One definition of value is the impact of a product team’s work on the company’s success
» To deliver value quickly as a new starter, understand people, problems, context, process and culture
» We rarely show value to users, the business and others affected by our product on the same journey map – why?
» The Prisoner’s Dilemma shows us that cooperation is a winning strategy in the long term
» Faciliate more rational decision-making by helping stakeholders to understand the context better
» A mental model is a compression of how something works, keeping key information and ignoring irrelevant detail
» Common challenges leaders encounter are a lack of trust for their teams and executives, a lack of coaching, and letting go of control
» How others perceive the value and effectiveness of the product team’s work holds immense transformative power
» Have a bias to test, learn, and to put code in production
» Feed what you learn from exploring solutions back into your understanding of the problem
» Help stakeholders visualise their ideas to make them easier to challenge, assess risk and test out
Stepping up to a CPO or VP Product role doesn’t so much change what you do. Rather it amplifies everything. This guide lets you know what to expect.
» Customers care about your mission, less about how you’re achieving it
» For rapid feedback in discovery, ship and learn from more users, earlier
» Changing something that’s been that way for years is hard because of the inertia behind it
