On the impact of effective coaching conversations at work — For a long time the maxim “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” ruled the world of organizational leadership. While a quick search for the phrase reveals it has fallen out of favor in most management circles, within organizations the ethos seems alive and well. To a degree this makes…

For years now, I’ve led or sat in on brainstorming sessions with many different types of company in my angel portfolio and network — from virtual student study startups to web3 gamers to data storytelling nonprofits to venture firms — where each is trying to answer the same question: How…

I’ve never understood the concept of “product led growth”. There’s something about how the phrase centres the product that makes me imagine a gleaming white box out there, alone, doing the selling of itself for us. In real life, that’s not how things work. It’s people that use products; people…

One of the biggest challenges a product manager will face (or an organization for that matter) is trying to elevate thinking and culture from a project level to a product level. Project Thinking Project thinking is fairly pervasive. Many folks, especially in software development, have spent a lot of their…

If you are someone who is overwhelmed with the usage of the term ‘Product Thinking’, the way it is used and thrown at in conversations and always wondered what it really means? then this article is for you. by Naren Katakam “In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice…

If I had a penny for every time I fucked up a management decision, I would be rich and not sitting here writing this. Jokes aside, if there is something I can extract from my — short but proficient — product leadership experience is a list of red flags that…

What actually is Product Strategy? If you’ve been in the industry a while, you may have heard the term thrown around, whether or not it was used in a correct fashion (to be honest, we could debate if there’s a canonical way of using the term at all!). And if…

How any company can build a visionary product strategy, using purpose as their lens. — Around 40% of products launched each year fail. Most code that is written in organizations is never used. Developer chats on forums like Stack Overflow are overflowing with threads lamenting wasted work. And even the largest companies fail to pivot when the market is moving away from their core product…

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. A persistent problem I keep seeing is that some long-standing practices tend to take the place of better ways of doing things. I wrote about the example of product thinking and project thinking…

One of the greatest challenges I’ve faced as a product designer at tech startups is learning how to balance short and long term product thinking. If the type of products I’m designing are always growing and changing, I often wonder, how do we best iterate on products with both the…

In 2005, I took on my first product management job, developing data management tools for CNET. Wisely, the company put me through agile training. While the agile philosophy resonated with me, I quickly fell into a waterfall trap in my first large project. The objective was to create a tool…