Consulting
- celebrating the wins
- learning from the challenges
- documenting the outcomes and value delivered
- Who’s the intended audience?
- What do I want them to take away from this?
- What would be the outcome if this was published on the Internet?
“It may seem like most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions. And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.”
-Charles Duhigg
#Quotes
“Bureaucracies form when people’s jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.”
-Scott Berkun
#Quotes
Good hybrid meetings are such a balancing act.
You need to maximize the humans who are in immediate proximity to each other - without accidentally alienating everyone else.
And that means ensuring that most everything that happens gracefully degrades to the lowest common denominator connection.
Top 10 Books that made me a better Product Manager in 2024
A recommended reading list culled from my recent bookshelf. Highlights include essential books on user experience, productivity, AI’s societal impact, the history of computing, and leadership during these chaotic times.
“If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there.”
-Frank Gehry
#Quotes
(Last working day of the year today.)
No loose ends, no ambiguity.
Pickup and put away all your toys.
Finish what you started and do it with style.
The thing is, with any new products or services, you’re going to experiment.
This is an unavoidable fact. You may chose to blissfully call the activity something else entirely.
The question really becomes, exactly how costly or intentional or actionable does your company want this process to be?
The year is wrapping up.
After a string of successful releases, my latest work is gracefully winding itself down.
Wrapping things up always needs to include:
This podcast about how Will Guidara made his restaurant best in the world using “unreasonable hospitality” is worth a listen.
One of the best bits - how instead of dreading the unexpected arrival of the food critic, he and his team gamified the process by practicing for it nightly.
Time is your clients’ most valuable currency.
It’s yours too.
Instead of asking “what went well / what needs improving” during your next retrospective, try giving everyone the chance to talk about how they were challenged, what they learned, and how they personally grew during a sprint (or project, or…)
Changing the framing can make all the difference.
Your product is not for everyone. This is a totally acceptable state of affairs.
Define your personas. Know who the product is for and - equally important - who it’s not for.
BONUS! This will also help figure out how to talk with those humans about the value you’re creating.
“But we’ve always done it this way!”
Some of the most frightening words to hear… but so very ripe with opportunities.
Listen, listen, listen to your clients - but remember: they’re experts in their problems, not your solutions.
Your job is not to build what users ask for but to understand why they’re asking for it.
Don’t wait for the perfect moment to reach out - build your network consistently.
Don’t just ask for favors - add value whenever you can.
The relationships you cultivate today will shape your tomorrow.
Everyone expects you to be dependable.
Everyone expects you to know what you’re talking about.
Exceeding expectations is hard - and it gets harder to repeat as expectations rise over time.
But it is SUCH a powerful way to build a relationship with your customers.
As I write this, it’s early Monday morning and - reminder - now is the best time to go ahead block some uninterrupted Focus Time on your calendar for the week ahead.
As a knowledge worker your thinking is your primary product. Tackling complex tasks effectively requires dedicated time and space.
When working on a new roadmap, here are my 3 starter questions:
The needs of your audience and the realities of the market environment should shape the content.
The power of externalizing your thinking
In which I opine on the intrinsic value of writing stuff down
Repeat after me: Words like “users” and “clients” and “customers” are describing actual human beings.
Understand their goals, their needs, their hopes, and their pains.
And how do you do that? Empathy.