Give your team the credit they deserve and bask in its reflective glory. Your team's success is your success. Never take credit for their work; recognise and reward your team. Be humble. Be thankful. Be enthusiastic. Be open and honest when things go wrong and; when they go right. Take…

Conway's Law is as much a warning tale as it is the perfect reminder to organise yourself in the right way. — Conway's Law is not a new concept, and plenty has been written about it. But as a product manager (or any leader!), you must wrap your head around it. Understand the impact it will have on the success of your product. …

Values and culture are an essential part of leadership. The values you hold most dear and the culture you wish to nurture are not about what you say, nor are they simple slogans to be hung on the wall in the office, but how you behave when all else is stripped away. — Desiderata, Values Simply said. My folks had the poem Desiderata hanging on the back of their loo door for as long as I can remember. They have now passed it down to my brother and his family, where you can see it below in their Loo! 🚽👇

Your most precious commodity is your time Do you see yourself as being time rich or time poor? Use of the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, is essential in product management– especially when there is a long list of things and people vying for your attention. Pareto principle - Wikipedia The Pareto Principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital…en.wikipedia.org

Why building products is a bit like training to run a marathon. — I used to run quite a bit and loved it. The preparation for a race, the build-up, was often comparable to the excitement of launching a new product. As with most things I’m interested in, I immersed myself quite a bit in running literature. The excellent Biography Paula Radcliffe ‘My…

Few skills are as crucial to a product manager as the ability to negotiate, so why don’t more folk take the craft of mastering negotiating as seriously as they do the role of being a product manager? — A skilled negotiator influences people and results. They make change happen. Move projects forward—lead teams to victory. Get paid more. And make more profit for their company. Negotiation is one of the most undervalued skills you can learn. …

To take the time to…To create, to think. — Too much to do, not enough time? Do you find yourself in a constant cycle of meetings for meetings? Not finding the time to do your work? or worse think? Give yourself permission to ‘Stop’. Schedule time for yourself. Schedule time for yourself. The world will not stop turning. The same problems will exist when you come back. As…

You cannot improve what you cannot measure This phrase has a long history and was first attributed to 19th-century public health pioneer Dr Joseph Lister. Lister’s idea was that shining light on specific public health issues was the most effective way to address them. In another sense, sunlight is also…

Many self-help books say, ‘to be successful; you must read every day….’ — I agree, but there is a vast difference between being a lifelong reader/learner and a lifelong student of ‘learning to understand’. Take me, for example; I read books, a lot of books. But do I ‘understand’ these books enough to describe them to my 7-year-old son? I can probably explain…