The Art of Product Management
Ken Norton believes that there’s an art and a science to product management. “The ‘art’ gets dismissed as soft skills. When PMs fail, it’s usually because of ‘The Art.’ The most important thing you can do early in your career is grow these skills. Don’t let them be dismissed as ‘soft skills,’ don’t get lured by the promise of tactics and techniques: they’re essential, but the craft depends more on the art over the long term.” Here’s a closer look at the six skills that Ken considers part of “The Art”: communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, and consciousness.
|
|
|
Someone forward you this newsletter?
|
|
|
Empathy: the Product Manager's secret weapon. Empathy is the secret weapon of Product Managers. You use it in customer conversations to build connections, understand context and unearth unmet needs. But so many PMs cannot lead with empathy when working with internal stakeholders. Often underrated and underappreciated, the absence of empathy can spur discord, confusion and division. If your Product team is constantly arguing with Sales or Marketing or Customer Success & Support, the first step in rebuilding trust is to show true empathy. Kevin O'Donnell explains how you can use empathy to improve your communication with the folks in your organization.
(via @kevinodIRL)
Collaboration: How the best product managers foster creative teams. Building products is about creating something with other people. It’s not only having to work in a team environment in service of a larger goal. You can work on all kinds of things in a team environment that are challenging, rewarding, and important, but learning how to create something together is extra, and unique. Not everyone gets to do that, and not everyone does it well. Chris Petersen explains how you can master collaboration - the art of creating together.
(via cdpetersen)
A Product Manager's Toolkit for Creativity. As a product manager, it’s frustrating when your role is reduced to merely executing the ideas of others rather than being able to contribute your own creative ideas and solutions. While there are many resources available for product managers on how to be analytical and make objective decisions, there is often a lack of guidance on how to be creative and bring new ideas to the table. To help make up for the dearth of guidance, Joseph Alvertis put together this product manager’s toolkit for creativity.
(via @alvertisjo)
Continues below...
|
|
|
If you were planning on joining us for INDUSTRY Europe (March 20-22 in Dublin, Ireland), the New York Product Conference (May 4th), or INDUSTRY Global this Fall (October 2-4 in Cleveland, OH) -- now is the time to grab your pass if you want to save. You'll learn from the best of the best (like Matt LeMay, JJ Rorie, Marty Cagan, and many others), and instantly build a network of product peers. It will be time well spent on developing you.
|
|
Product Collective has launched our most ambitious product for Product Managers for years. It's called Product Collective Pro, and it's an annual program designed to get Product Managers and teams to the next level, faster. And you can now subscribe on a monthly basis, or save by choosing an annual plan.
What do you get with Product Collective Pro?
- Access to small-group, expert-led sessions (2x/month) – with early sessions led by April Underwood, Ash Maurya, Bob Moesta, April Dunford, and others!
- Quarterly, live, intensive half-day virtual workshops
- Curated educational resources
- 100+ hours of on-demand videos on Product Strategy, Discovery, and more.
- Access to two full-day Virtual Conferences each year.
- A collaborative community platform designed for members to learn from and support each other – with interactive virtual meetups held each month.
|
|
|
|
If there was ever an example of garbage in, garbage out, it’s generative AI tools such as DALL·E, GPT-3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. The better the prompts and data you put in, the better results you get back. If you were concerned about the quality of the prompts, you’re putting into those AI tools, have no fear Promptbase has your back. This new marketplace provides a way for you to buy and sell prompts you can use to generate AI-powered creative.
In the ongoing search for additional revenue sources as advertisers cut down their spending, Twitter started charging $100 a month for access to its API. This came after reports that the company has convinced just 180,000 users to pay for its Blue subscription. The main implication here is you may need to revisit your business model if you rely heavily on interactions with Twitter. It’s also an continuing case study in the balance between intentional action and speed.
While collaboration technology has improved leaps and bounds in the last few years, running an engaging virtual workshop or training session is still a challenge. Primarily because it’s difficult to keep people in session fully engaged. A new product, Butter, consolidates an agenda planner, interactions and integrated collaboration tools so you can run engaging virtual sessions without juggling several tools.
One explanation for the furious pace of AI product introductions - corporate technology leaders are leaning on artificial intelligence and other software automation tools to help their companies grow without hiring additional workers soon. Though some of these efforts predate current economic uncertainties, many are being sped up or expanded as pressure mounts on organizations to do more with less—including fewer workers—until market conditions improve, according to several enterprise technology executives.
|
|
|
What I learned from Product Management by teaching it
Today, I find myself in Oakland, California to give a talk at ProductWorld to share what I learned about product management by teaching it. Yes, you read that right.
For the past several years, I’ve been an Adjunct Faculty member at Case Western Reserve University teaching within the Weatherhead School of Management. Back in 2017, I started the very first undergraduate product management class that they’ve ever offered. It’s been a lot of fun, and nearly every guest speaker I bring in often makes a comment about how jealous they are of the students, as these classes didn’t exist 10-20 years ago when many product leaders found themselves back in school.
The funny thing, though, is that I ended up learning so much about product management by teaching the class.
One example:
I learned how sometimes, our customers don’t “hire” our products for the reasons we think they do. For instance, I thought that my class’s job was to feed the insatiable hunger that the students had for product management. Before my class, there was no place within the university for them to feed that hunger… but now, they had my class! I prepared that first class to give them a preview of all of the exciting new frameworks we’d learn throughout the semester.
And then… crickets.
They didn’t care. In fact, they were pretty ambivalent to product management, in general. I learned that the reason most of the students enrolled was to simply fulfill a course requirement. The job that they were hiring my class for wasn’t to feed any sort of insatiable hunger. It was to check a box so they could graduate.
Initially, that was a bummer – but it turned out to be just fine. It just meant I had to reposition how I taught the class throughout the semester.
It will be fun to share some of the other learnings here at ProductWorld. Which conference should I share them at next? 🤔
|
|
|
Leveraging Critical Thinking to Drive Product Innovation and Success. Product managers have a challenging job: bringing new products to market in a way that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Achieving this requires critical thinking skills — These skills help product managers make informed decisions on everything from marketing campaigns to engineering processes. Adir T. discusses what critical thinking is and why it’s important for product managers. He also shares some tips for practicing critical thinking in your daily tasks as a PM.
(via @Adirtr)
Building a culture of curiosity for product teams. Healthy, high-performing product teams have a culture of curiosity. These teams know how powerful curiosity is—and how easy it is to lose (especially as your company grows). Curiosity is a muscle, and if you don’t use it, it atrophies. Evan Michner explores how product leaders can foster healthy curiosity that keeps teams aligned and the product on track.
(via @fullstory)
Emotional Intelligence in Product Management. As product managers, we often focus on the data and facts regarding product development and decision-making, followed by technical aspects of product development, such as features and functionality. However, it’s also essential to consider the emotional aspect of our products and how they can impact our customers’ experiences. Mangesh Bhamre explores how to understand and influence user emotions to help make your product a success.
(via @mangesh_bhamre)
|
|
|
Product Collective's Talent initiative already introduced 36 candidates to companies hiring! As a refresher, if you're looking for a new job, you can apply here and companies will be reaching out to you about their open roles.
There are 10+ companies hiring from Talent now. Check out a few highlights from this week:
- Mos (Series B, backed by Tiger Global)
- Rippling (Series D, backed by Sequoia)
- Stelo Labs (Seed Stage, Backed by Andreessen Horowitz)
If your team is hiring, reply to this email to learn more about it. Or sign up here to have immediate access to almost 200 candidates from our community.
|
|
|
|
