A product management blog by Jock Busuttil
100 Things I’ve Learned About Product Management
I heard a story of an octogenarian who drove himself to the hospital for his eye cataracts operation. (Just let that sink in a bit.) On his surprisingly safe return home, his relatives queried the sense of his actions. He replied that what he lacked in sight, he made up for in driving experience.
The other day, I was asked how to launch a product successfully. Two competing responses sprang to mind: the way I would have answered a couple of decades ago and the way I actually suggested.
Okay, okay, so maybe likening the Project Management Office (PMO) to the Empire hunting down the Rebel Alliance is perhaps a teensy bit combative. But it’s how I feel sometimes. Just don’t let my desire for a weak pun give you the wrong impression. Let me explain.
In the UK government digital teams, you don’t see project managers or even Scrum masters. Why? Because they have delivery managers instead. In this article, I’m going to convince you why you need delivery managers on your teams.
I perhaps naïvely assume that a company’s stated product vision and corporate mission are what the organisation is actively working towards. Disappointingly, this is not always the case.
More often than not, user personas are just a laborious way to decorate the walls. Are you making these common mistakes?
Building or changing a product culture in your organisation isn’t just about having the right ingredients, it’s about knowing how to combine them successfully.
‘Show the thing’ sessions encourage a culture of openness, of sharing information. They create opportunities for peers to learn from each other, thus multiplying the value of the thing created or learned that someone shows.
Product managers often struggle to keep on top of their product roadmap. I recently gave this talk at Landing Festival Berlin to explain where people often get lost and show you how to make your product roadmaps more meaningful, user-centric and measurable.
What does it mean to be a good product manager in 2018? It’s not just about being agile and creating products users need – we need to be more human.