One of the common struggles that Product Managers are faced with is figuring out how to be “agile” while still managing to a vision or strategy that’s been established by the Executives or Board. The important thing to remember is that strategy and agility are not in conflict with one another — if a strategy is properly formed, it’s a long-term view of where you’re going, and not specific enough to tie your hands when approaching the execution side of things. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t tensions to be found in such a situation. Here are some thoughts on managing agility while executing against long-term plans…
Manage to Data, Not Guesswork
There are a great many different corporate cultures to be found in the world, but one consistency among far too many of them is decision-making processes that rely more on gut-level instinct and whomever yells the loudest rather than on hard data. For some companies, this has served the CEO well — a small, nimble startup can’t always waste time doing detailed validation or data-gathering in a “stop moving forward and you’ll die” environment. In other companies, it’s become the de facto standard due to strong personalities who may prefer authoritarian leadership styles over more democratic and empowering styles. Regardless of the reason, though — companies like this eventually wind up struggling because they make the wrong choice one time too many, based on the leaderships “market instinct”. And it’s our job as Product Managers to shepherd these companies into a more modern-day, data- and hypothesis-driven approach. Here are three major reasons why data-driven management is far more effective than management by gut or personality.
10 Questions: Paul Jackson
It’s time for the next installment of my ongoing series of “Ten Questions” for thought-leaders and colleagues from the Product Management world! This month I’ve reached out to Paul Jackson, a longtime Product Manager from the UK who showed up on my radar a few years ago when he started to feature some of my posts in his articles and in his newsletter. Since then, we’ve exchanged thoughts on a wide variety of topics, and he was high on my list when I started up this ongoing series.
As Paul describes himself:
Paul is the publisher of Pivot Product Hits, a monthly newsletter on product strategy and a regular writer on all things product.
As a Product Manager and user-centred design practitioner, Paul has been building digital products and services for over 15 years. Currently Managing Director of Castle in the UK, he was Head of Product Management for The Times and The Sunday Times and Director of Product at Newsmart, an edtech SaaS that leverages premium news content from the Wall Street Journal.
Find out more at his personal website, Pivot, on Medium, Twitter or via his newsletter.
10 Questions: Rich Mironov
For the second installment of my “10 Questions With…” I reached out to one of my mentors in the PM/Consulting space, Rich Mironov. I met Rich many years ago at ProductCamp Seattle, where he was giving a presentation about the struggles and challenges of the role that really spoke deeply to me and where I was in my career. Over the years, when he’s passed through town I’ve tried to maintain a connection, bouncing ideas off of him and mining his depths of experience for pearls of wisdom to help me grow as a Product Manager. I’m happy to present his 10 questions here, and for those of you who don’t know him, here’s a quick bio:
Rich is a 30-year product management veteran based in San Francisco. He’s an unrepentant blogger at www.mironov.com, author of The Art of Product Management, and coach/consultant to product management teams and startup executives. On occasion, he parachutes into software companies as interim VP Products. He thinks a lot about the strategic and organizational challenges of running product management teams.
10 Questions: Lewis C. Lin
This is the first in a (hopefully) continuing series of interviews with leaders in the Product Management community, hosted right here by the Clever PM. The idea is to have five static questions about Product Management in general, and five questions that are specific to the current participant’s areas of focus. For the very first installment, I called on my good friend Lewis Lin, one of the most knowledgeable resources around in the arena of interviewing for Product Management roles, and the Amazon.com bestselling author of Decode & Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews and his new book titled Secrets of the Product Manager Interview.
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