The Clever PM

Tips, tricks, and hacks that help you to be a better, more clever, Product Manager.

10 Questions: Paul Jackson

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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.

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Don’t Reward Behavior You Don’t Want!

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One of the more common challenges that growing companies face is balancing the needs and goals of the company with the needs and goals of its employees.  And, unfortunately, all too often decisions are made with a business perspective that don’t take into account the potential effects on the personnel side of the equation.  The simple fact is, people will do what we incent them to do and what we reward them for far more often than they will do what we want them to do, if there is any misalignment between the two.  This applies across the business — from high-level executives to entry-level employees, and even out to our products — how we position, package, and price our products can often drastically affect how people will perceive and use the product.

While people always seem to nod their heads when you tell them this, it’s rather insane to realize just how often we create competition between these two things.  Here are some things to consider when you’re trying to figure out how to get people to do what you want, or why they’re not doing what you expected.

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Five Common Myths About “Iteration”

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Everyone in tech has seen the word, repeated ad nauseum as the “silver bullet” for everything from go-to-market timing to quality to product discovery.  But like many terms bandied about by those both within and on the periphery of Product Management, the term “iteration” often comes with connotations or meanings attached to it that aren’t really quite right — almost to the point where the word itself begins to lose its meaning and becomes a “cargo cult” phrase without any real “there” there.  In this post, I want to explore what I think are five common myths about iteration that if busted will let us renew the meaning of the word and make it something worthwhile in our profession.

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The Dangerous Myth of “Consensus”

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As Product Managers, we’re often involved in making decisions and driving others to decisions that need to be made — sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming toward the future.  And in doing so, there’s often an undercurrent of “reaching consensus” that runs through discussions and permeates meetings comprised of varying people with a wide breadth of interests and agendas.  But the simple fact is this: consensus is, more often than not, a means by which the great is sacrificed at the altar of groupthink.  Great ideas are rarely consensus-driven ideas; they challenge too much of the status quo to be something that everyone can agree on.  Let’s explore some of the ways that consensus-driven decisions suck…

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PM 101 – Working With Service Teams

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted one of my “PM 101” articles, so I figured with 2017 just kicking off now is as good a time as ever!  Past articles have focused on marketing, sales, and design teams, but this time I want to focus on service teams.  These types of teams are your integration specialists, your technical sales people who come in after a deal has closed to help clients onboard, or even your own internal team that uses your product on behalf of your customers.  No matter where exactly they sit in your organization, service teams can be a prime source of information and validation for any Product Manager.

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Leading Through Influence: Identifying Fellow Influencers

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We’re often told that Product Managers “lead through influence” — that we don’t generally have the direct authority to get things done, but rather do so through convincing others of the best option available from the myriad choices they have.  The bad news is, that’s really damn hard.  The good news is, we’re not alone — in any given organization there are many different teams and members who lead through influence rather than authority…and identifying who they are and how we can work together with them is an essential tool that every Product Manager needs to have in their back pocket in order to be successful.  Here are some clues that we can look for to identify those fellow influencers so that we can work with them and not against them.

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“Humans Are Hard…”

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Never have I heard a better description of the challenge that faces Product Managers than a quote that I overheard at this year’s ProductCamp Seattle — “Humans are hard…” spoken by none other than my fellow General Assembly Product Management instructor Tricia Cervenan, as part of a panel discussion.  Those simple words struck a chord with me, as it made me think about all of the different ways in which we as Product Managers attempt to understand, document, and predict human behavior.  Every single day I can come up with some variation on the idea that “humans are hard” impacts us in some way. [Read more…]