PRODUCTHEAD: How is your work perceived?

i might be wrong #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Do you actively encourage people to tell you when your strategy isn’t working?

How others perceive how product management is working is just as important

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hello

This week I’ve been reading Martin Eriksson’s latest piece on the assumptions that derail us. In particular: assuming that people will pipe up to tell you that your strategy is doomed. The people who are most likely to see the mismatch between ambition and execution are the ones closest to the customers and users, however they’re often also the people least likely to have a direct line to the CEO. Although it shouldn’t be so, it’s rarely career-enhancing to tell the emperor he’s wearing no clothes.

Continuing the theme of how things are perceived, in a keynote for Mind the Product, Randy Silver proposes that success in product management is based on our ability to prioritise effectively, to ensure the right people are in the right roles with the right mandate, and that whatever process we use is fit for purpose. Later, he came to realise that how people in the organisation perceived how those three areas were working also played a meaningful part.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

Assumption #3: If we were wrong, somebody would tell me.

Somebody already knows. They’re just not telling you. Why evidence a strategy is failing never climbs, what it cost Netflix, and how to fix it.

Farming for dissent

[Martin Eriksson / The Decision Stack]

Getting aligned with your exec team

For years, an idea kept niggling away at the back of my brain: if I know so much about how to do the Product management job, why is it still so hard? And why do all of my peers seem to have the same challenges?

[VIDEO / ARTICLE] How others perceive what you’re doing

[Randy Silver / Out Of Owls]

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recent posts

Control your narrative

Years ago, someone once told me that “perception is reality” when it comes to reputation at work. Many years later, I’ve come to understand better that this means that there will always be a narrative about how someone works at an organisation.

One of the hardest career lessons I’ve learned

[I Manage Products]

Chess is easier when you can see the board

A Wardley Map is to corporate strategy what a chessboard is to players: you can absolutely play the game in your head without seeing the board, but if you can it’s a lot easier to play, and you have a massive advantage over the people who can’t.

Know what moves you can make, and why to choose this move now

[I Manage Products]

How to form a go-to-market strategy

A go-to-market strategy isn’t something you tack on as an afterthought to an upcoming product launch. Instead it’s about understanding where value exchanges occur, and figuring out how to make them more frequent, consistent and predictable.

Go-to-market emerges from your discovery

[I Manage Products]

PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from some planned holes.