» Achieving ambitious goals takes years of slog and perseverance — there’s no fast-forward button
» Successful companies such as IKEA use time as a strategic advantage
» There’s no single ‘right’ strategy — what matters more is choosing a good one and sticking with it long-term
» Define in an operating model team sizes, roles, and responsibilities
» Reduce single points of failure and promote shared accountability
» Establish a shared language around team and domain evolution
» Stay firm on the chosen operating model and evaluate it within a specific timeframe
» In time our use of genAI will balance out with the human touch
» Learn what genAI can and can’t do, and how far it can be trusted
» LLMs will most likely take over the routine writing that holds organisations together
» Highlights from 2024’s guests on Melissa Perri’s podcast
» Office politics isn’t always distasteful
» Applying common sense can by stymied by the organisational culture
» User research is a discipline — it requires trained practitioners
» Most read edition: ‘Showing your value’ — why to focus on high impact work
» Edition with most clicks: ‘Enough handwringing already’ — let’s not write ourselves off as a profession quite yet
» Most clicked article: ‘AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique’ — upending a long-held belief in forensics
» “This is what we learned, and here’s how we’re going to adjust our plan”
» As with strategy, studying and predicting the future isn’t an innate skill but a muscle you can build
» AI will eventually have its “plane crash moment”
» Product managers need a blend of skills, of which commercial acumen is a part
» Which does your company pay more attention to: the immediate or the long-term?
» Selling to everybody is selling to nobody
Off the back of his recent article for Mind The Product, Liam Smith interviewed me about my experiences in freelance product management.
I started as a freelance product manager in 2012 when I founded Product People Limited, and had been blogging about product management for a couple of years before that. (You can read my first ever blog post if you like.)
» Accept that some customers will never migrate to your new platform
» Products do not fail in vain if you learn something valuable in the process
» In 1979 Intel realigned its 2000-strong company around a new set of objectives in just 2 weeks
» Balancing opportunity with strategy in the midst of competing distractions is hard
» You wouldn’t let genAI write your product strategy without checking it, right?
» Product strategy discovery focuses on the problem space
