I recently finished reading both of these books by @juliestarrcoach - "The Mentoring Manual" and "The Coaching Manual". As the co-founder of @mymentorpath and a coach to product people, I find it important to keep learning! And these books don't disappoint.

Takeaways 👇 Coaching and Mentoring are similar but different.

🤔 Mentoring: "A mentor provides support by offering information, advice and assistance in a way that empowers the mentee"

"How can you get value out of a fractional CPO, surely you just get 1/20th of their time - what's the point?"

We need to decouple value from time - one well-placed intervention can work wonders, but I don't think it's fair to classify fractional CPOs as minimal part-timers. But how does time work for fractional CPOs? I'm sure there are loads of variations on this, but many that I speak to offer a (roughly) fixed number of hours per week, e.g. 16 hours a week (2 working days).

I picked up "Forget the Funnel" by @ggiiaa and @ClaireSuellen - a brand new book that aims to snap marketers out of old-fashioned thinking and get them focusing on customer-led growth. After all, customers don't care where they are in your funnel!

Takeaways 👇 1. Marketers are wasting their time throwing spaghetti at the wall

When you're working around the clock trying experiment after experiment, hoping that something, anything will work. It often doesn't, so they just move on to the next thing. Rinse & repeat. Then burn out.

I was asked recently about what to do if you're stuck in a feature factory and want to get a job in a non-feature factory. Why would they take you, after all? You're just some loser from a feature factory!

Not so fast... 👇 The first thing to do is work out if you're in a feature factory (and also to realise that a feature factory isn't necessarily a binary thing). And also... how much does it matter? No leader is going to be worried about perfect product processes if the company is doing great.

On my flight to Greece recently, I read "Productize" by @EishaArmstrong. It's a short book and packed with insights about the often tricky journey for professional services transitioning to products. Having worked in such companies, I found myself nodding along!

Takeaways 👇 🪜 There are four steps on the Services "Innovation Ladder"

One-to-one:
Customised Services (e.g a bespoke project)
Productized Services (e.g a standardised project)

One-to-many:
Products (e.g buy a syndicated report)
Products as a Service (e.g. subscribe to SaaS)

I recently gave a talk at @GfK's tech conference, entitled "product management isn't like the books (and that's ok!)", where I argue that you're not doing anything wrong, that everything is context-dependent, and it's the principles that really count. Here are the principles 👇 1. The only measure of success for product teams is building a good Whole Product

I don't care how good the code is, how clever the data science is, or how nice the design is. You don't succeed by getting one thing right. It's a system and we should all care about all of it.

Would you buy an OKR from this man? Listen to my latest #podcast episode &decide for yourself! It was great to speak to @jboogie about Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking, thinking in outcomes & the power of OKRs.

Listen on your podcast app or the link below.

Takeaways👇 1. Lean, Agile & Design Thinking can get along

These came from different places, but the philosophies that underlie all of these ideas are the same: understanding our customers, working in shorter cycles, making decisions based on evidence, and continuously improving.

9 lessons for Product Managers, as expressed via the medium of Love Actually

Strap in folks!

🧵 1. Alan Rickman cheats on Emma Thompson with a woman from the office

PM lesson: Sometimes you will look at well-marketed competitor features & want to build them too. Stay the course & stick to your strategy. Remember what you have.

I just finished "Never Split The Difference" by @fbinegotiator. Given that Product Managers live almost all their working lives leading indirectly & trying to influence others, I strongly recommend you add this to your reading list!

Here are some key takeaways: 👇 Chris Voss was an FBI negotiator turned business negotiation consultant. Many of the stories in the book involve hostages and the kind of super-high-stress situations that hopefully we privileged office workers never need to worry about, but we can apply many of his lessons:

Last but definitely not least in #TwelveDaysOfProductChristmas, we have my chat with @cwodtke, author of numerous books, including The Team That Managed Itself & Radical Focus. I chatted with Christina about empowered teams, learning organisations & OKRs. Check it out right now! The first OKR book I read was actually Measure What Matters, and I was surprised to find out that Radical Focus (first edition) came out before that book. I decided it would be a good idea to try to stoke some controversy and get Christina to say John Doerr sucks, but no dice 🎲

As we near the end of our #TwelveDaysOfProductChristmas, we go back to my interview with @allenholub and ask ourselves.. is Scrum "agile"? Do we need to use all the stuff that's in it? Are structured frameworks bad? For all this & more, check out the interview on your podcast app Like many of you, I've been following Allen for a while on Twitter, and I'm aware that he's a polarising figure for some in the agile community. His spicy, somewhat fundamentalist takes jar with some but I've got a lot of time for the discussions they provoke.

For today's #TwelveDaysOfProductChristmas, we return to @parkercrystal_ to answer that age-old question "How do I get into product management?" - I chatted to Crystal about her journey into product management and how she's trying to help others get in. Check it out now! I first bumped into Crystal on Twitter when she tweeted something along the lines of "I got my first PM job by taking a UX course and finessing the rest" - I thought it showed an incredible amount of moxie and I had to find out more. I was delighted to have her on as a guest.

Here's a hot & spicy @oneknightinprod episode with @saeedwkhan where we talk about the 5 Dysfunctions of Product Management teams. Saeed has some tough love for PMs & product leaders, but it is love!

Check it out on your podcast app or the link in the thread.

Takeaways 👇 1. It's important to be honest about the state of product management

It's not about being negative or blaming "bad product managers" for everything. But, there are repeated dysfunctions across a large number of companies and we can't fix them if we ignore them.

Many product companies struggle with malfunctioning product management teams & dream of a world with no PMs where their rock star programmers can just build, build, build but these organisations don't need NO product managers, they need BETTER product managers.

Why? 👇 Some causes of malfunctioning product management:

🔥 People that aren't PMs doing things that aren't product management
🔥 Poorly trained/coached PMs trying their best
🔥 Good PMs not getting a chance to do their job
🔥 Poor product leadership

Some can suffer from multiple/all

The new @oneknightinprod episode is out! I had a great chat with @AdrienneNakohl about what happens when your company's growth stalls, some common reasons behind it & how to get back on track. Check it out on your favourite podcast app or the link below!

Key takeaways 👇 1. Growth Stalls can happen to anyone and often happen after really strong growth

Companies can be growing, growing, growing and then all of a sudden just stall. There are factors that influence this, but if they're not addressed then growth stalls can last for years or decades

If you're in a disappointing, frustrating job and decide to move on then I salute you! No one should have to stay somewhere they're not wanted, needed or valued. BUT... Beware of panic buying. It's easy to find a new place that isn't right for you either. How do you avoid this?👇 Firstly, we need to accept that all companies are complicated systems and all companies have problems. If the grass is greener it's probably been spray-painted and has hidden thistles. No perfect company exists, it's about finding the balance that works for you

This is a small, insufficient expression of gratitude to two of my most recent advisors, @loomista and @RichMironov, who have been gracious with their time and sharing their experience and learnings from their distinguished careers 👇 Petra is the author of the wonderful "Strong Product People" which is a manual for product leaders to build & develop effective product teams. The PM Wheel is a fantastic way to try to bring objectivity to your PM assessment process and identify gaps and learning opportunities.

"I've told the sales/dev/leadership team X but everyone keeps saying they don't know what's going on or why!"

It's common for other teams to feel frustrated & blame PMs for not sharing information. At the same time, the product team are constantly sending out updates.

Why? 👇 PMs communicate with different functional groups a lot. They're the ones that know the most about what the product can & can't do for users, what's coming up and why. But, they can't spend ALL their time communicating otherwise they wouldn't get the rest of their job done.

New podcast episode! I had a chat with @MirelaMus about why she set up @Product__People, why onboarding for PMssucks & how we might survive our entry into an org & set ourselves up for success.

Check it on your favourite podcast app or the link below.

Key points: 👇 1. It's important to support promising new product managers

Mirela is committed to bringing talent into product management with the Product People operating model which gives APMs real-world product experience whilst maintaining quality for clients

I re-read The Lean Startup by @ericries. It's a classic book and has the age-old "White Album" problem. As with the Beatles, sometimes you define something so much that everyone copies you & your stuff permeates everything & people forget where it came from. So here goes 👇 Obviously "The Lean Startup" itself was a natural extension of earlier principles and doesn't claim to be anything but that, but it's a very good place to start and most of it still holds up years later (always funny these days to see Lotus 1-2-3 used as an example though!)

For the Dr Seuss fans (@elonmusk?) ...
--

The Verified Tweeties had bellies with Ticks
But the Unverified Tweeties had given it a miss

Those ticks weren't so big. They were really so small
You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.

🧵👇 But, because they had ticks, all the Verified Tweeties
Would brag, "Hey! We get all the best features"
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they'd snort
“We'll have nothing to do with the Unverified sort!"