In my last post I talked about my ambition to work on our team’s product practice. I started by focusing on what problems we might solve within the organisation. As a next step, I needed something tangible that described a mature product team. Like a sort of toolkit that would help us agree on the…More
Setting up a product practice – part 1
What does product practice mean to you? I have worked in organisations where product teams and product management were fairly well defined. We often had debates and discussions about the product role, but it was within an overall framework of expectations and understanding of what the product role did. A few months ago, I started…More
Building Knowledge Management products
You may want to start by reading part 1 of the series: What is Knowledge Management and why should you care? Our users are our colleagues. Whether they are working in games, human resources or IT, they require an entire ecosystem of products to help them access the knowledge they need. What are the products?…More
What is Knowledge Management and why should you care?
Knowledge Management, whether you have a department for it or not, is a crucial part of how companies function. In an organisation with thousands of people working across the world, knowledge is not only created constantly, but it is also shared and consumed with near immediacy. Our designers are coming up with new ideas, our…More
Starting as a manager of product managers
Inspired by a former colleague’s blogpost about things to do as a new product manager joining a team (which has now become a Trello board) and because I have just started a new role, I thought to add to Steve’s piece by reflecting on what to do when you start as a manager of product…More
What about a squiggly product career?
‘What are you building here?’ was an interview question that dumbfounded me 5 years ago. That day, I mumbled an incoherent answer. In hindsight, I have a better response: a squiggly career*. With every new product job I have changed industries, working across non-profit, legal, government and now gaming. I have chosen to focus on…More
Guest post: Deepfakes – What are they?
by Chris Watching and reacting to the Buscemi-Lawrence video At first glance it looks like Steve Buscemi has expanded his wardrobe, donning a sparkling, red dress at an awards Q&A event. Once he speaks, or rather she speaks you realise that the voice coming from his mouth is not his own. It’s the voice of…More
Reframing the local authority as a local facilitator of change
At a recent service design event in London, I was in a discussion about service design and local authorities, where I heard about the great work that Waltham Forest Council is doing in that area. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since, specifically about what was so different about the approach the service design…More
Why do PMs keep asking existential questions ?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about feeling like a product fraud, which got me thinking about what this PM archetype is that we imagine the role of a typical Product Manager to be. And then, considering how many blogposts I have read about that particular question, I wondered why we spend so much of…More
Feeling like a product fraud
Throughout my career as a Product Manager, I’ve had several existential crises, thinking that the job I was doing did not reflect what I imagined a Product Manager should be doing. Several years into being a PM, I came to realise that no-one really does this ‘typical PM role’ I imagined, because it doesn’t exist…More
