Over the weekend, Boris Cherny - the head of Claude Code at Anthropic - released a maturity model for AI adoption . He’s a smart guy, and it’s hugely valuable. There’s 5 steps: Step 0: Gated , just dipping your toes in Step 1: Assisted , augmenting the work you’re doing without significantly adapting your processes or delegating any work to agents Step 2: Parallel , delegating a huge amount of…
AI tools are changing everything about how Products are developed, companies are run, and how we work together . Except for what it’s not changing at all - the underlying philosophy of Product thinking. I’ve been having a ton of great conversations with people on the front lines over the past few weeks. Things are changing way too quickly for there to be any answers, but we’re starting to ask the…
The way that companies work is fundamentally changing. Classic Product Management is based on a very simple idea: Waterfall is bad, because we don’t find out if something has value for a long period of time. Agile is good because it allows us to experiment and learn quickly, because building things is time-consuming and expensive. AI-based tools have fundamentally changed this. We can now build…
Most of the time, problems come from the OKRs being either: * Too Big * Focused on a specific Activity, emphasizing effort rather than results and impact * Or they’re Disconnected from overall strategy
The Kano Model It’s been 10 years since I learned about the Kano model (from Jared Spool’s talk at Mind the Product). And while it’s always been something that I turned back to as an inspiration, it’s also been difficult to put into use practically… until last week, when it became the perfect way to align a product team in how they communicate their roadmap priorities. Why I haven’t used it…
Congratulations, you’ve made it. You’ve finally landed the job - the one that puts you in a position of power. You now get to make the decisions. First of all, you need to decide what kind of leader you’re going to be. You already know that you’re not going to make the same mistakes that the people you used to report to made. No, your team(s) are going to be effective. Things are going to get…
TL;DR: I just want the template At the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the Captain does a voiceover: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Most of the time,…
When other people can believe that your team is either doing a great job or a terrible one - and you don’t know which! - it’s a real problem. Here’s how to avoid that…
For years, an idea kept niggling away at the back of my brain: if I know so much about how to do the Product management job, why is it still so hard? And why do all of my peers seem to have the same challenges? When I made the transition from full-time operational roles to fractional, coaching and advisory roles, I was able to see things from a different headspace. I was able to synthesise my own…
Conferences and Training are the classic ways to spend your team’s Learning & Development budget - but what if there was something better?
There’s nothing Product people like more than geeking out about how one of the hot tech companies approaches Product development - and what that means for the future of their company and their own role. (Except maybe a 2x2 matrix. I mean, who doesn’t love another way of analyzing things?) In the past couple weeks, we’ve had entries in this space from Airbnb, Tumblr and Twitter. They’re all…
I’m very lucky. I co-host a podcast where I get to talk to amazing people in the Product field; I speak at conferences and get to spend time with some amazing presenters; and I’m a participant in multiple communities of people at the top of their jobs, all striving to get even better. That means I get to hear a lot of great stories of how they’ve succeeded. What’s even more valuable, though, are…
Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to chat with a ton of people - via The Product Experience podcast, in communities, at conferences & talks, and through everyday work - and I have learned a ton from all of them Two of the things I’ve learned have coalesced into the launch of CPO Circles: 1. Being a product leader is a hard, lonely job You’re dealing with problems, situations &…
“People,” Janna Bastow likes to say, “are hard.” Agreed. In fact the only thing harder than managing people is managing lots of people. One of the hardest parts of product management is understanding who wants what, why, and when. This goes for people both internal and external to your company - and getting straight answers from any of them can be tricky. The biggest issue that’s come up for me is…
You’re probably familiar with the concept of the Digital Divide - the unequal distribution or access to resources (broadband, equipment, education, etc) which creates an advantage for those with the means to take advantage of it. It’s a thorny issue, one that’s difficult to solve that cuts across geography, class, and other social factors. There’s another Digital Divide - one that we impose upon…
One of the barriers to entry for people starting on new roles is the terminology. Every company I’ve ever worked at has their own set of TLAs (Three-letter acronyms), and there’s usually a wiki or dictionary that someone started as a jargon-buster. For product development teams, there’s an additional hurdle - we have lots of words that we use in common, except that everyone seems to have a…
We’ve all been there: your stakeholder leans in, nods their head just a fraction, and says the magic words. “Yeah, but we already know what’s needed. Can’t you just give it to me?” (A quick aside: JUST is the most dangerous word in tech. We’ll touch on that another day.) Or maybe it’s someone you’re at a party with. They look slightly quizzically at you and ask, “Yeah, but what does a Product…
It’s that time of the economic cycle again: companies are tightening their belts and laying people off - sometimes too many of them! - as their earnings miss forecasts. If you still have a job, this means that your team is going to be expected to absorb some of the work that the departed did - to accomplish a miracle turnaround with fewer people and more pressure. It’s a huge challenge. It’s one…
Get my stakeholder interview template, below OK, Product person, here’s the scenario : You’re starting a new job. You’ve got a new project to kick off. Or your main stakeholder has changed. How do you start things off on the right foot? Those first two weeks are critical. It’s a time when relatively little is expected from you in terms of output, but everything is on the line in terms of making an…
TL;DR: Dragon Mapping is a framework for having hard conversations with stakeholders and teams. Especially useful where there’s disagreement on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, prioritisation, and what success looks like. You should be able to get people using this in 10 minutes or less. A Dragon Mapping template is now available on Miro and Mural . A testimonial: I recently used Dragon…