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Mind the Product

mission statement

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

Podcast

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

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

How Google makes AI work at Enterprise scale – Miku Jha (Director, AI/ML and Generative AI, Google Cloud)

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

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

Building your own user experience and software stack: This week’s product news

Sam spends his days drinking Aeropress'd coffee and scribbling interface designs, roadmaps and product ideas on scraps of paper. You can follow him on twitter at <a href="http://twitter.com/smcllns">@smcllns</a>.

Sam Collins

Like most people in the tech world, I read TechCrunch. Like most product managers in the tech world, I cringed when I read <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/spare-me-from-product-guys/" target="_blank">Spare Me From The Product Guys</a> &#8211; one of the most atrocious pieces I have read in a while.
For example:
<blockquote>… to drive a product means understanding the full scope of the vision of your company.</blockquote>
—sorry dude, but what does that even mean?
I don&#8217;t have a problem with inaccurate, meaningless writing online &#8211; I mean we&#8217;ve all learned to cope with it &#8211; but I do have a problem when <a href="https://twitter.com/harris" target="_blank">some dude</a> tries to self-promote his own startup on TechCrunch by selling some complete rubbish about a role that we (the actual product community) have been so carefully trying to educate people and companies about. While I think he&#8217;s trying to say product is hard and you can&#8217;t call yourself a product guy without the scars to prove it, mainly he just manages to call all product professionals idiots.
All I can say is anyone wishing to move into Product Management, do not follow this advice. Hat&#8217;s off to <a href="http://twitter.com/nerdgirl" target="_blank">Stephanie Robesky</a>, who amongst a storm of angry comments, so eloquented put it:
<blockquote>Blah blah to reading all these books and thinking you are going to be a great product person. Learn some methodologies like XP/Lean/Kanban, figure out how to prioritize a roadmap when you have 1,000 things on it and 6 platforms, write user stories, fight and love with engineering, deal with backlogs and try to make launch happen with a beautiful and usable product. When you can do those things, you might be a product person. But if you call yourself a great product person because you figured out where to put a pretty button on your app and you read a Paul Graham essay, then you haven&#8217;t a clue…</blockquote>

core/freeform

What is Product Management?

Interpreting the product Venn Diagram with Matt LeMay and Martin Eriksson

Why Product Management Should not be Responsible for Project Management

20 years of product management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

The Evolution of a Product Manager – Josh McWilliam

Product Management Tools in Everyday Life – Oisin Zimmermann (ProductTank Oslo)

The Importance of Listening to Your Customers by David Cancel

Finding “Product-Me” Fit

Product, management, and communication by Andreas Thorsheim

Product Management Fundamentals

How to avoid screwing up technology (and how product managers can help)

Spare Me From THAT Product Guy

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Spare Me From THAT Product Guy

Sam Collins

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