I build digital products and services in the UK public sector and write about the work that makes it possible. I also make tools that force focus, and wrote...
Nothing has changed, everything has changed In the early 1990s, the Gracie brothers - intense and now legendary martial artists from Brazil - moved to the US, and brought with them a new variant of jiu-jitsu. It completely shook up the fighting world. In 1993 - the year before I was born - the first Ultimate Fighting Championship event took place, pitting different disciplines against one another.…
A bridge between worlds Product teams have a tricky job. You’ve got to vividly imagine a future world (how your thing will work, who it’s for, what problems it solves, how it fits into your user’s day to day) while simultaneously keeping the reality of the now in sharp focus (the constraints of legacy systems, governance boards, release cycles, data migrations, workarounds and shadow IT,…
Who wants to be an administrator? On the face of it, administration doesn't sound particularly exciting or fulfilling. To be honest, it sounds like the sort of thing you might start your career doing: filing things, scanning documents, processing invoices… Designers, engineers, managers, and leaders may be thinking, "Admin? Well, that's someone else's job. Not for me." Deep down, many of us might…
Your roadmap is a working hypothesis Product is probabilistic . That means you can't know for sure when Feature X will ship or if Initiative Y will work. You have a thesis about what matters and an informed guess about timing. Your roadmap's job can't be precision. Your roadmap's job is communication : it needs to explain how you get from here to there, and why. Because your team need direction.…
Where should you spend your finite time and energy as a product manager? It's a big and scary question. As ever, sometimes it's easier to think about all the ways you can make things worse - then avoid them like the plague. In my experience, the absolute killer of momentum, productivity - and sometimes entire projects is ambiguity. Choosing what to focus on A lack of clarity can creep in and…
These days, we monitor technical infrastructure obsessively. Service uptime, deployment frequency, how healthy your pipelines are looking. There’s a collective understanding that while this sort of infrastructure isn't glamorous, it is fundamental to building products that actually work. There’s another vital bit of infrastructure that too often gets overlooked: communication. When your CI/CD…
Every product manager inherits a roadmap eventually. A scrappy spreadsheet of initiatives that made sense to someone, once upon a time. Features that seemed important in a meeting six months ago. Work that's been rolling forward on momentum alone. Your job is to figure out why any of it matters. I remember the first time I stared at one of these inherited roadmaps, trying to make sense of the…
I have had this question written down for several years on various post-it notes, which I keep either on my desk, in my current notebook, or on my whiteboard at home: "How will the thing we're working on replace or work with what people currently use?" Answering that question has proven incredibly useful time and time again on project after project. If I can't come up with a credible, coherent and…
Can you predict the future? Most lines of work involve some kind of prediction. A film producer might reason "There's an appetite for a new Superman film, and it'll generate more than $500b", which convinces studio executives to undergo the huge effort of bringing it to life. A maize farmer could think "Our crop will flourish if we can just deal with our aphid problem", and focus their efforts on…