75: The dirty little secrets of decision making
I’ve been thinking about decision-making. What makes one decision better than another?
Category: 100 Things I’ve Learned
My series of 100 things I’ve learned about product management
74: The black art of designing content
This week I learnt the phrase ‘black art’ comes from the world of printing presses. Eventually I found a product management angle.
Tagged with: content design, design, fonts, Government Digital Service (GDS), procrastination, users first
73: You wouldn’t drive blindfolded
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.
72: All the world’s a stage
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.
71: The PMO strikes back
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.
70: You need a delivery manager on your team
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.
69: It matters what you say and what you do
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.
68: 4 common user persona mistakes
More often than not, user personas are just a laborious way to decorate the walls. Are you making these common mistakes?
67: Why cake is important for product leaders
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.
Tagged with: agile, autonomy, community of practice, culture, multidisciplinary, show the thing, user research
66: Show the thing
‘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.