I often got asked how a product manager could get promoted to a more senior level. The truth is, getting a promotion is often a complicated game. Yes, your skills and achievements play a role, but so do other factors such as how much your manager cares about developing talents…

I always thought OKR was a bit pointless. My first introduction to it was back in 2018 at Facebook. I already knew the projects I wanted to do that quarter. My manager reviewed the projects and said, “Can you frame the goals in an ‘OKR’ format?” I googled ‘OKR’, familiarised…

As a Product Manager, it’s your job to make your customers and the business more successful. To do this, you need an appropriate level of Engineering resources to have an impact. In a non-product-led business, it can be a battle to justify the need for more. As a caveat, you…

Great workshop facilitators extract the best insight from every participant, regardless of confidence or role. Here are 5 lesser-known tips to run outstanding workshops and to make you more successful. Don’t rob people of their contribution As a facilitator, if you reframe input into your language, you rob that person of their contribution. …

Product Management is hard. I’ve made more mistakes than I can count both in managing products and managing the people managing products. If I’d have known these 5 lessons, countless hours of frustration, stress and poor results would have been saved. The importance of focus On more than one occasion I’ve operated as a…

Congrats, you finally got your dream PM job! But… what now? Here are some pointers to plan your first few weeks — and beyond. — People come to product management from various career paths. It’s not an entry-level role, so you’ll typically have a few years of experience somewhere else, bump into product one way or another, and get hooked. Many PMs, including myself, have never gone through any formal training.

Product management is a mentally taxing job. Whilst software engineers can afford to put their heads down and focus on one task at a time, PMs have to juggle different things, maintain different points of view, and deal with many different functions. There are plenty of articles about being more…

tl;dr Stop falling in love with your problem, and definitely don’t fall in love with your solution. — If somebody had asked me years ago to distil product management in two words, I’d have answered: solving problems. Isn’t that our main job? Find out what the customer’s problems are and solve them. Bam, job done, give me the applause I deserve! Now, the problem with being passionate about…

Many years ago, I interviewed at a startup in Berlin. I still remembered how the hiring manager described what a PM’s job was: “You’re there to unblock the Engineers. So if they’re hungry, it’s your job to buy them pizza.” I was young and impressionable back then, so I only…