Join a Slack group to extend your network

Everyone knows Slack. Even if you’re not using within your work environment, you know it exists, and you’re able to use if yourself outside of work. Slack is very fertile ground for product community, and if you’re serious about progressing your product management career, then joining a PM focused Slack group can give you the edge.

Knowing how much your team costs lets you make better decisions

When it comes to making decisions in your organization, there's one thing that always counts.  And that's money.  People will push product teams to deliver features because it will lead to one more sale, two more sales, a 1% increase in revenue.  Folk know the income number.

The number they're less likely to give is how much it's going to cost in order to get the one more sale, two more sales, or 1% increase in revenue.  That's your job. You need to know what your team costs.

Internal Product Management - Not as glamorous but definitely rewarding

There are a whole host of product managers whose core users are internal to the organization, i.e. they are work colleagues, using internally developed products, with no financial input into the product (so no LTV or MRR) and no opportunity to stop using your product (so no retention rate). It’s a whole different world, with none of your standard glamour of product management, but it is still extremely rewarding

How To Ask For LinkedIn Recommendations

When recruiting for roles I like to be as proactive as I can be, as it saves so much time and puts me in control of the process, and one way for me to filter out the many potential candidates is to take a scroll through their recommendations.

7 Lessons For Getting The Most Out Of Your Product Team

Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, and some of the simple coaching lessons learned from him can stand you in good stead for getting the most out of your product team.

Product Manager Relationships: Marketing

It's all well and good a product manager ensuring that the organization has a top class product, but if the product isn't being marketed to potential customers, then the product just won't get used. Of course, marketing teams understand the market and so can be a valuable source of information for a product manager. How else does this relationship work?

Product Manager Relationships: Customer Success

If the role of the product manager is to understand the customer's needs, then relationships with the customer success team are a route direct to the source of valuable information. Customer success teams are the first line of customer support, and as such they come face to face with customer challenges day in, day out.

Product Manager Relationships: Software Engineers

Good engineer / PM relationships deliver good products. Poor relationships will deliver poor products. It is that simple. Software development isn't perfect, which means the people putting the inputs into the product development process (the product managers) and those who are delivering the outputs (the engineers) need to work closely in order to handle all of the challenges that they will face.

Product Manager Relationships: Designers

Designers have a large role to play in developing product ideas and contributing to the product backlog, which comes from their core value of understanding the end user and what goals are seeking to be achieved. They work with the PM to bring to life the features and ensure that they are introduced within the product vision.

Feature Factories - how to survive working in them

“Feature Factory” is a derogatory term used to describe a business that is more concerned about shipping features than it is about delivering value. In reality, most organizations fall into the trap of churning out features every now and again, but there are ways to deal with this and make things better.

Technical Concepts For The Non-Technical Product Manager

I’ve been in product management for too many years to mention, and I have never completed a Computer Science degree, and I have no technology certifications. In many organizations, they will only hire Computer Science graduates, but I’m here to tell you that many organizations do not need this, and you can happily make a career in product management without one. However, you should know the basic technical concepts at play with software products.

Your route to a product role won't be a straight one

When we start our journeys we always imagine them as being a straight line from A to B, but in reality, there are many twists and turns along the way. The good news is that all these twists and turns contribute to your journey and to the you that you become, so don't stress about it and embrace it.