I always believe in learning and sharing experiences. As a community, we can all level up to be great product managers. The Product Hero I gave a talk for ProductTank in Amsterdam where I believe that the core of product management is us, the product manager. Our stories are similar to a comic…

The core of product management is you! In the UK 1 in 6 have a mental illness. In the world, 1 in 26 suffers from depression. We are not immune to this as product managers. Our job was reported to be overwhelming and emotionally taxing in the latest ProductPlan survey. I want to strip away the tools…

The core of product management is you! In the UK 1 in 6 have a mental illness. In the world, 1 in 26 suffers from depression. We are not immune to this as product managers. Our job was reported to be overwhelming and emotionally taxing in the latest ProductPlan survey. I want to strip away the tools…

I applied for a Product Management role where the focus of the interview was on User Stories and how to manage them. What makes a great user story? How would you define the criteria of a user story? How would you manage hundreds of user stories or thousands of them…

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.” ― José Saramago “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered” (a line from José Saramago’s The Double) suggests that we are able to make sense of things that seem chaotic. We just have to learn how to decipher it. In my…

My first lesson as a product manager was to focus on the problem, not the solution. However, as product manager, getting the solution right is still the key to success for a product. Have you ever had too much conflict on building your chosen solution with the team? Have…

In a previous company I worked for, the VP of Sales approached me and asked me “our developers are too slow… how do we make them faster?” I had observed how their product development worked and I answered “Well, if we build the feature right the first time, then we…

Previously in “Trust our Developers as Problem Solvers” and “Confessions as a Product Manager” I touched upon focussing on the problem since developers are natural problem solvers. However, I didn’t go into detail about why. There are two sides to this problem, giving information, and receiving information. Influencing your team

During my training with other Product Owners, the most difficult discussion we had was to do with Story Points. Why do we need them? Why not use ideal days? Do they even work? What is a Story Point? A story point is a unit of estimated effort needed to complete an item. …