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Mind the Product

Podcast

It’s not you, it’s them – frustrating things orgs do – Keji Adedeji (Product Leader and Coach)

Artificial intelligence (AI)

The AI feature checklist: 21 questions addressing familiarity, fallbacks, and feedback

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

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Product Management Career

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Leading product ops at Delivery Hero with Koen Dubelaar

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

“You’re not as competent as you think” 5 lessons from Ken Chin on navigating a product career (CPO, Spark Networks)

Everything wrong with the product management job market. And how to fix it

Co-founder of <a href="http://www.prodpad.com">ProdPad</a> and Mind the Product who run ProductTank, ProductCamp London and Mind the Product conferences in London and San Francisco. Blogs about Product Management at MindTheProduct.com &amp; ProdPad.com. Simon began his career in Space Engineering, where he developed a Fortran realtime program to automate satellite operations. He then traveled around the world before a stint in the Australian Army.

Simon Cast

We often see Product Management in light of tools and techniques, such as roadmaps and lo-fi usability testing. However, Product Management encompasses more than that. Indeed focusing only on the tools means you are not taking advantage of what Product Management can bring to an organisation.
More than the tools, Leadership is of crucial importance to Product Management. <a href="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/leadership5.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-440" title="Leadership" src="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/leadership5-300x216.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="216" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/leadership5-300x216.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/leadership5.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>
At its heart Product Management is about the execution of the vision. This execution requires thousands of decisions to be made covering the product. As the product grows and becomes more complex there is a point at which the human scaling problem kicks in. Humans don’t scale, but with leadership, the Product Manager can align and inspire everyone on the execution so that decisions on details can be taken by anyone in the organisation, increasing flexibility and speed of execution.
With so many people making decisions about the product, the cohesion of the product is threatened. With leadership the Product Manager can provide the guidance and course corrections to maintain cohesion in the product without micro-managing or destroying the flexibility and speed of execution that comes from empowering everyone to make decisions on the product.
Product managers not only have to lead within the organisation but also outside of the organisation.
To create that fundamental long term value that is the hallmark of successful products, people need to be able gain the maximum utility or value from at the product. In order to do this people will have to change their behaviour, habits and thought patterns in someway. We use the terms such as barriers to adoption, learning curve and adoption chasm to describe the challenge of changing people.
While product features &amp; technology can help there is a limitation to what that can do, as there is always the human element to the barrier to adoption. Through leadership Product Managers can address the human element of barrier to adoption. Leadership allows the Product Manager to express the reasons why users should change, why they will get value from making that change and then help them make those changes. Without leadership from the Product Manager change is incredibly difficult and scary for users to undertake themselves.
Fundamentally, for Product Managers, leadership is how they create value for the company and for people using their product. Without it business will not be able to overcome the scale problem of humans nor people easily overcome the challenge of changing behaviours, habits and thought patterns.
Bibliography:
<ul>
<li> Deresiewicz, W. (2011) <a href="http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/">“Solitude and Leadership”</a>, The American Scholar</li>
</ul>
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core/freeform

Product Management Characteristics

Taming your product gremlins: an antidote guide for product people by Keji Adedeji

The next 10 years in product management

Bring the JOY back to work by Ben Newell

From engineering to product management at Google

What makes for effective product management by Nikolaus Horn and Sebastian Ratcliffe

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes by Egan Cheung

In My Humble Opinion by Thor Mitchell

Mindset – Is Being a Product Manager the Worst Job? With Laurel Gray and Rosemary King

Leadership and Product Management

Simon Cast

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