Helping founders and product people grow their business and craft.
Subscribe to ‘The PBL Newsletter’ for regular posts on Product, Business and Leadership.
Read previous posts of ‘The PBL Newsletter’
What Product-Led Companies Look Like
Let’s start with what being Product-Led is not… It’s not: Product Management-led, Product Managers are the boss, Where product makes all the calls, Something that only engineering and product do…
The Release (Planning) Checklist 🚀
Early in my career as a Product Manager I soon found myself also being the release manager — having to organise and manage the release and tasks associated with it. This didn’t feel like the best use of my time.
How to Kickoff Product Discovery like a Pro
A step-by-step guide (with templates) to level up your Product Discovery. A common question I get when I coach Product Managers is, "I know what I want to do discovery on, but how do I get started?" Although there are many ways to start discovery, I have two tools that are my absolute go-to for kicking off and structuring Product Discovery.
7 Different Product Roadmap Formats
There are many different types of roadmaps and different formats that roadmaps can take.
Here are a few different shapes a Product Roadmap can take. I hope this gives you some inspiration and perhaps even makes you rethink your current roadmap format.
A Product Manager’s First 90 Days
Approach your first 90 days like a Product. I like to break the first 90 days down into essentially 3x 30 days sprints. Sprint 1 (0–30 days) = Discovery. Sprint 2 (30–60 days) = Quick wins. Sprint 3 (60–90 days) = Establishing trust.
Four Frameworks to Help You Define Product Metrics
You can find numerous articles out there that will rattle off a list of “essential e-commerce metrics” or “metrics for startup PMs” however the universal problem with these types of articles are that you end up tracking metrics without fully understanding why or how they interplay and impact your product.
Five Time Management Hacks to Get on Top of Your Day
Tips and tools I’ve learned to make time for the things that matter
A Product Strategy is NOT a Vision and Roadmap
You have a Strategy and a Roadmap. They’re two different things. Often I hear that roadmaps are part of your strategy layer. I’ve for many years struggled with this notion. Rather to me, they are a translation layer that sits between your strategy and your day to…
Product Manager vs Product Marketing Manager vs Growth PM — What’s the Difference?
A question I get often is "what is the difference between a Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager and a Growth PM". However, understanding the nuances can be beneficial for those who might be more suited…
4 Roles & Responsibilities Workshops to Bring Clarity to Your Team
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…
Five Under-Appreciated Aspects of Product Leadership
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.
Paradoxes of Product Management
Originally a late-night brain dump on Twitter, I thought it’d flesh some of it out a bit here.
‘How-To’ Guide for Crafting Your First Product Vision
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?
Prioritization is about Confidence, not Value
“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.
Why Generalists Make Better Product Managers
Research suggests that generalists are more creative, better problem solvers and lateral thinkers — aka ideal Product Managers
“The Edge Effect”: Lessons on Innovation from Nature
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.
Why Companies Are Choosing Purpose Over Profits
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.
‘Product vs Design vs Tech’: A Partnership, not a Battlefield
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
8 Different Ways to Organize Your Backlog to Make it More Impactful
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)…
The Rise of the Ethical-Economy
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.