A while ago, I was interviewing a VP of Product candidate for a client. They were on the case study portion of the interview, where they had to prioritize major initiatives for the company. We explained that the objective wasn’t to get the prioritization completely right, and it was more for us to understand their thought process. They had access to any people or any data they needed from the company.

The candidate first went to the CEO and talked to him about the short term and long term goals of the company, which ended up being something like…

I met Martin Burns in 2013 at Lean Agile Scotland. It was only the second conference I had ever talked at, and I didn’t know that many people. He welcomed me into the Lean Agile Scotland family with open arms.

I’ve read two tributes about him online now and laughed when both of them said “he was an amazing friend despite our differing beliefs”. That was so Martin. A staunch supporter of SAFe, he’d always be the one to poke on twitter or ask the hard question at the end of your talk.

The thing was, Martin just loved debating. He loved sharing his ideas, furthering the agile community, and bonding with people, whether or not we all shared the same ideas. …

46.8% of product decision makers cite lack of quality data as the main challenge they make when making decisions and only 21.9% always or almost always use data to back decisions.
Source: How Decisions Are Made by Alpha

Everybody in Product has subscribed to the importance of data as a driver of high quality decision-making by now.

But tragically few are able to do it. 😫

Enter: Product Operations — the art of removing obstacles from evidence-based decision making. Done right, it fuels a virtuous cycle of benefits that’ll empower everyone from the executive team all the way to each individual contributor responsible for building the products — whether Engineers, Designers or Product Managers. …

The process is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Over the past five years, I’ve trained over 5000 Product Managers who were new to the field. These have been at large companies, small companies, online, in person. The works.

While the work has been incredibly rewarding, it’s also left me conflicted.

Why?

Because year after year I get the same questions.

“How do I put this into JIRA?”

“What is a user story vs a task.”

“Why would I care about my user’s happiness when I’m building a product they have to use?”

A great Product Manager I trained at one of my clients the other day told me:

“My peers are using your training as a weapon against me. Everytime I try to move us forward they come back and condescendingly say, Well, have you actually written that in proper Jobs to Be Done format? I know what the problem is. We’ve researched it. I experimented. I have data. I validated it. …

I’m very excited to announce a new division of Produx Labs, specifically focused on growing future Chief Product Officers for growth stage companies.

In late March of 2018, Insight Venture Partners reached out to me about an opportunity. When they asked me what I was passionate about, I said developing great product leaders. Little did I know that would soon become a reality.

Over the next few months, Produx Labs and Insight Venture Partners created a partnership that was two-fold: provide right-sized services to scale Product Organizations at their growth stage companies, while growing future CPOs for those companies.

The partnership is founded on the principle that product drives growth. Solving the right problems, in the right way, is what makes companies win in market. To do that, we need the best product leaders who really get the field. Product is the only position that touches everything across the organization and helps pull it together to create a compelling offering for its customers. …

“What have you tried to fix that problem?”

Over the past year, I’ve spent most of my time working with Product Managers, UX Designers, and Leadership of companies going through some sort of change. Change in process, change in roles, and a lot of change in expectations. Usually this is branded as an “Agile Transformation”, but whatever you want to call it, it’s change.

With that change comes a lot of uncertainty, and resulting from that, angst. …

When I first started in Product Management, I was told that my job was to keep my stakeholders happy. My stakeholders were members of the sales team. I understand that many Product Managers are taught better today that stakeholders include customers and users, but I was taught the term was reserved for internal folks who had a say in our product. Customers and users were considered separately, and handled differently. So for the purposes of this article, I’m just talking about the internal stakeholders of your company.

Part of my job was “managing” these stakeholders. I kept them informed of our progress. I took their requests and figure out when we could get them done. I got their approval before we launched anything. While we listened to our customers as well, they were not dropping by my desk every day asking for things. Stakeholders were seen as a conduit for the customer, expressing what was best for them. …

“What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?”

It’s an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack. Let’s look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them.

When I started my career, I was called a Business Analyst. I did very little “business analysis” as we would look at it in traditional IT companies. Honestly, I did very little of what I teach as Product Management now either. I was tasked with gathering the requirements from sales, coming up with a solution, designing it, and then shipping the specification document to development to be built.

I went on being called a Business Analyst as I worked at banks and other financial services companies. I wasn’t called a Product Manager until I bailed out of that and landed in a startup. It was all the same work I had been doing before, but now it had a different name. I liked this name. “Product Manager” seemed to have gravitas to it, and when I looked at other tech companies in the Valley, I could see a clear career path carved out for me whereas Business Analysts were different at every company. …