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.

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» Identify the key stakeholders whom you need to trust you and collaborate with you regularly

» Understand the real reason for anger – whether in others or ourselves

» Remember where stakeholders’ help starts and ends

» To be trusted, you need to demonstrate your competence

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» Problems come and go, but culture is forever

» Psychological safety presents a new set of social norms

» Product managers should be at the forefront of helping organisations to do things better for people

» The corporate vision explains why the company exists

» Open forums and communication lines between teams helps to maintain alignment

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» Customers are seeking more value from digital technologies — “liquid experiences”

» Services by nature don’t always fit current organisational structures

» Service design and business analyst roles require a different type of focus and mindset

» Key to becoming a service designer is not finding a new job, but transforming your current job

» “Seamless services” means bringing together people from across professional boundaries

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» Product managers must understand the impact of their products on society as a whole

» Now is the time to push for broader product management accountability

» No company, individual or set of activities, yet provides a clear-cut example of ethical best practice

» What we build must not be at the cost of another group’s needs

» Nothing in traditional product training prepares you for making ethical decisions

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» Avoid waste by by first researching “shallow” user personas then progressively elaborating as needed

» Product managers can and should conduct user research when demand outstrips the researchers available

» Connect user personas to people’s actual goals for more emotional impact

» Good interviewers listen, not talk

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» Keeping your users’ attention means minimising cognitive drain

» Customer onboarding is a continuous process

» Video games use contextual nudges to teach players how the game works

» A new customer success team builds trust by prioritising people, then process

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» Use sensitivity analysis to identify the make-or-break metrics for your business

» Your analytics approach needs to change over time to keep up with your evolving product

» Blindly copying best practices results in an imperfect copy

» Analytics tools don’t do the thinking for you

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Imagine you’ve just been told that you’ll be a member of the team responsible for the first manned mission to Mars.

Now imagine someone asks you how much the mission’s going to cost. The whole thing. There and back. By close of business on Thursday.

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» A milkshake is really just a way to pass the time and stave off hunger on a long drive

» Users struggling to use your product to complete their tasks have unmet needs

» Christensen emphasises the higher order goal, Ulwick the task at hand

» Jobs To Be Done is often misunderstood, making it difficult for some to begin applying it