I regularly see Product Managers and teams face friction when it comes to navigating the boundaries between different roles.

Either it’s the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc where Product Managers suddenly find themselves confused…

An unconventional view of what it takes to be a Product Leader. Shifting to a Product Leader can often be a drastically different role. Here are 5 under represented ways that product leadership is different from being an individual contributor.

Originally a late-night brain dump on Twitter, I thought it’d flesh some of it out a bit here.

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to write a good vision statement, many will point you to the popular ‘Elevator pitch’ format (among others), but personally I’ve never felt those frameworks were suitable for my final vision statement — you sure don’t see the likes of Telsa, Apple, etc using these kinds of formats for their vision statements, do you?

“Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development” was the title of a post by Jeff Gothelf at the beginning of last year. If there was the battle for the most ambiguous term in product I’d have ‘value’ take second place to ‘MVP’ but as far as single words go, ‘value’ takes the podium.

Research suggests that generalists are more creative, better problem solvers and lateral thinkers — aka ideal Product Managers

There’s a natural phenomenon called “The Edge Effect”. In ecology terms, it’s where two extremely different environments meet (i.e. desert meets rain forest). These regions all over the world are known to have some of the highest biodiversity — the same happens with innovation.

When I wrote ‘The Rise of The Ethical-Economy’, I covered the consumer-facing side of the coin — how the world is changing and making consumers more conscious of the products they buy, and the companies they purchase from.

This is something that comes up often for me — I get questions like:

“What’s the difference between a Product Designer and Product Manager?”….All valid questions but they all have one problem. They are all coming from an individual perspective, not a team one

Jeff Patton was one of the first people to challenge the notion of a linear backlog when he created — and then wrote the book — User Story Mapping (more on that later)…

Over the last decade or so we’ve witnessed the rise in the Experience-Economy — a battlefield where companies and products have been competing not on price or features, but rather on who can ‘woo’ their customers best.

Responsibility vs Accountability & The Trust Paradox of Self-Organising Teams. Yves Morieux, a Senior Partner at BCG, brilliantly provoked in his ted talk that “If you think about it, we pay more attention to knowing who to blame in case we fail, than to creating the conditions to succeed”

When you start to scale and have multiple products and/or teams, alignment becomes paramount. The general trap is to try and control things to stop misalignment from happening by adding many layers of bureaucracy. This stifles creativity, does very little to keep your people motivated and usually degrades team velocity.

IBM a few years back stated that 84% of Digital Transformations fail — although there is a lot of “grey” area around what constitutes as “failure” still 84% is a staggering number! What interests me the most is why this is the case? As a fellow coach Tanner Wortham brilliantly provoked “If this agile thing is so great, then why doesn’t it always stick?”

Similar to giving feedback, receiving feedback effectively is often a place where we struggle. If you’re anything like me, receiving feedback can be uncomfortable and often emotional, even with the best intentions for personal growth it can still be hard to stay objective and keep your cool.

What's the difference between Product Management and Product Ownership? Are they the same thing, or different?  It’s ok, no one seems to know. Rather we find the answer lies in where it all began - where they came from.

I would say we’re in a feedback crisis. Most people don’t give feedback, they give unsolicited advice…