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
Tag: behaviour
PRODUCTHEAD: When empowerment is a façade
» Defend against short-termism by making your team’s strategic thinking visible
» People are increasingly working to live, not living to work
» Teams should only split their Decision Stack when their answers to “How?” diverge
» Repetition and reward are intrinsic to behaviour change in teams
PRODUCTHEAD: Pragmatism versus idealism
» There’s a balance between motivating people to a goal and killing their enthusiasm with the gory detail
» Just as with users and customers, we need to meet our peers where they are
» In most complex organisations, product supports the organisation’s goals, not vice versa
PRODUCTHEAD: The right kind of conflict
» Conflict in product management is unavoidable
» Some conflict is actually desirable and healthy
» You can learn to assess and manage conflicts more constructively
PRODUCTHEAD: I’ve solved the whole genAI problem
» Comprehensive introductory training on large language models (LLMs)
» Nonverbal communication can make assistive robots more effective
» Practical suggestions to foster greater alignment between product and go-to-market teams
PRODUCTHEAD: Strategy toolkit, disappointment and behavioural change
» Strategy is a coherent set of choices about what we’re going to do to achieve our vision
» Negotiating estimates ultimately leads to disappointment — it will still take as long as it was going to
» The necessary conditions for any behaviour to be enacted include capability, opportunity, and motivation
PRODUCTHEAD: Personal user manuals
» Written well, personal user manuals can build psychological safety
» However, they can also be abused to excuse certain counter-productive behaviours
PRODUCTHEAD: Empathy with engineering (or avoiding developer disengagement)
» Rather than focusing on engineering team productivity, examine the causes of their low / negative value work
» When asked for development estimates, ask why they need the information and what they’ll do with the answer
» Different development tasks need varying amounts of user story detail
» Treat your developers with the same thoughtfulness as your users
PRODUCTHEAD: Empowered teams can’t simply do whatever they like
» Empowered teams can only succeed if the leadership team is on board
» Leaders can’t scale or have all the answers; empowered teams stand a better chance
» Leadership needs to be open and transparent when issuing a “must-do” edict to an empowered team
» Product leadership is continually striving for coherence of approach and clarity of purpose
PRODUCTHEAD: Training wheels and learned helplessness
» Motivation comes from making progress in meaningful work
» A mission-focused team tackling poorly understood problems may appear unproductive to outsiders
» It is everyone’s responsibility to act upon negative behaviour / thinking, but without assigning blame
» Even in the most controversial negotiations, the other party is just like you and aims to walk away happy
