PRODUCTHEAD: Beliefs and culture
» Changing behaviour and beliefs is crucial for people to adopt a fundamentally new org strategy
» Culture optimised without alignment has unintended consequences
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.
Startup to Scale-up Club - Product and Tech - 176
Startup to Scale-up Club Q&A – 13th Jan 2026
» Recommendations for automated infrastructure monitoring
» Safe presentation of medical data in Femtech apps
» Trade-offs of cloud versus local AI deployment for agricultural technology
and more
PRODUCTHEAD: Good OKR, bad OKR
» KPIs measure what you’re already doing, OKRs are for change
» Problematic OKRs are too big in scope, activity-focused and disconnected from strategy
» The Narrative, Commitments, Tasks (NCT) framework offers an alternative to OKRs
PRODUCTHEAD: A team can be greater than the sum of its parts
» Product duos and trios can enhance the team, but are never more important than the team as a whole
» If a team depends on an external decision-maker, could that person join the team to empower them?
PRODUCTHEAD: The most popular of 2025
» Most read edition: ‘Where does the time go?’ – a developer explains the work around the work
» Edition with most clicks: ‘The rift between design and product’ – reportedly designers covet the PM position
» Most clicked article: ‘How to structure a product organization’ – John Cutler and Leah Tharin talk product OS
Startup to Scale-up Club Q&A – 9th Dec 2025
» Why it’s important to check assumptions before embarking on a costly product build
» Keeping customer data segregated in the right way while avoiding over-engineering
» When on-premise servers are a more cost-effective bet than cloud services
PRODUCTHEAD: Product in highly dynamic markets
» Product-market fit is more elusive than ever in a dynamic market
» In deep-tech companies, it’s unrealistic to compete with your team on technical knowledge
» ‘Financial theatre’ occurs when the Board and product leadership aren’t communicating effectively
» There is room for both concrete and abstract thinking
PRODUCTHEAD: Tilting the umbrella
» Thinking purely in problems to solve can limit you
» The words you use to describe your proposition are really a test of how well you know your target users’ needs
» Find ways to ‘tilt the umbrella’: small considerate features for your users
PRODUCTHEAD: Building, wayfinding and landscape architecture
» Too often, ‘building’ becomes the default state for a product team, at the expense of other valuable ways of working
» An product team should not be so rigid that it cannot cope with the occasional mandate from above
PRODUCTHEAD: Rejecting extreme work
» Extreme work as a product leader is a systemic issue, not a failing of individuals to set boundaries
» Define performance expectations for your product team clearly using customer value, velocity and quality
