post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Customer

How behavioral economics can improve product strategy

Product Roadmap

Why most product roadmaps fail: Phil Hornby (Product Leadership Coach) – ProductTank Porto

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Join us at #mtpcon London in 2025 – mark your calendars

Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Nis Frome focuses on content and product for Alpha, an on-demand user insights platform for Fortune 500 product teams. He is the producer of This is Product Management and his articles have been published in Forbes, UX Mag, and The Next Web.

Nis Frome

It’s become a common trope that product management is less about the management of products and more directly about the management of stakeholder relations. To that end, meetings would seem like an ideal use of time, enabling product managers to communicate with key members of the team. But as most readers know, that’s rarely the case, and most meetings become dreaded wastes of time. By applying a few proven techniques, meetings can indeed be great for aligning stakeholders and facilitating a customer-centric product management process.
In my experience, the three most common reasons that meetings are ineffective are because the agenda is flawed, they deteriorate into arguments, and/or they end without clarity as to next steps. Fortunately, the product teams I work with have creative solutions for each.
<h2>To enhance the agenda, meet before the meeting </h2>
It’s not enough to include an agenda in an email or calendar event details. To ensure a seamless meeting, Joe Lalley, Digital and Social Strategy Director at PwC, <a href="http://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/rallying-stakeholders-is-product-management">described on This is Product Management</a> how he avoids blindsiding colleagues.
“What hasn’t been so successful is scheduling a meeting and asking people to react naturally to a set of research or proposals,” Lalley explains. Instead, he holds ‘meetings before the meeting’ with colleagues who are critical to the project, and gets feedback from them on an initial agenda. If he’s planning to present data to make an argument, he’ll create a quick video to introduce not just the findings, but also the methodology followed to acquire those findings.
“[It’s] a great way to scale the message&#8230;in a very short amount of time,” Lalley says. By socialising the agenda ahead of time, he’s found that meetings flow smoothly, rallying stakeholders around important initiatives they feel they’ve contributed to.
<h2>To prevent debates, transform opinions into testable assumptions</h2>
Discussion, and even some debate, can be a healthy way to flesh out ideas and perspectives. But it’s important to recognise that decisions shouldn’t be made by whoever makes their case the loudest. Product teams have the expertise to turn opinions into testable assumptions and finally into actual customer feedback and data.
Sunil Parekh, VP of product at Truveris, a specialist SaaS provider in the US pharma space, explains how <a href="http://alphahq.com/blog/how-truveris-validates-new-features-and-drives-user-engagement-for-onerx/">he defuses internal debate</a> quickly. When stakeholders were arguing about how to design a key feature in their award-winning OneRX app, Parekh transformed each opinion into a prototype. He funnelled target users to each prototype to observe their behaviour and stated reactions.
“From the results provided, it was clear that [one variant] enabled the majority of users to complete [the objectives] successfully,” Parekh says. “When we have data like this, internal debate stops. We have an objective measure of which version will be more effective.”
<h2>To decide on next steps, agree to disagree</h2>
Many product managers mistakenly believe that consensus is the objective of every meeting. The problem with that belief though is that consensus is often too unrealistic. Different stakeholders have competing priorities and aren’t necessarily incentivised to agree with each other.
To help facilitate healthy disagreement, Intel pioneered and Amazon <a href="https://www.amazon.jobs/principles">adopted</a> the practice of “disagree and commit”, where the goal of a decision-making meeting is not to reach consensus, but rather to achieve commitment.
When <a href="http://alphahq.com/blog/product-leaders-transform-organizations/">commitment is valued over consensus</a>, stakeholders are more comfortable sharing their concerns, rather than keeping them to themselves — or even worse, sharing them with each other privately after the meeting adjourns.
One very specific way to practise “disagree and commit” is to interpret all silence as disagreement. In other words, if you suggest something to a group, and the group is silent, you might say: “I am taking that silence to mean that everybody in the room vehemently disagrees with me. Please share your disagreements.”
Product teams don’t need to begrudgingly participate in meetings with the expectation that they’ll be a waste of time. Of course, having too many meetings can get in the way of a productive work week. But with the above tips in mind, product managers can make meetings as great as once promised.

core/freeform

Product Management Process

How to F.A.I.L. better in product by Marc Abraham

Fighting product-market drift by Dave Wascha

Building a digital product organisation, brick by brick by Nils Michaelis

Learnings from London: Going from Meh to Awesome by Shiva Rajaraman

The art of product management with Ken Norton

Using principles to make better decisions faster by Martin Eriksson

Rethinking delivery with product operations in the age of product

What’s stopping teams from running experiments by Cameron Savage

Top 7 signs you’re in a bad product system by Scott Williamson

How to bring product thinking to any team by Merissa Silk

How product managers can make meetings great again

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Johannesburg

ProductTank Tauranga

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Timisoara

ProductTank Stockholm

ProductTank München

ProductTank Düsseldorf

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank London

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Málaga

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Braunschweig

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Vienna

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Brno

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Rotterdam

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Manchester

How product managers can make meetings great again

Nis Frome

Read more

Comments