Product Management

The Core Questions of Product Management

Product management is a complex discipline, with a lot of moving parts and no shortage of things to think about. Luckily, breaking out of this is actually fairly easy. There is a set of core questions at the heart of product management, and if you simply return to those regularly you can't go wrong, and you'll be able to cut through the noise.

Product managers should straddle utopia and reality

Product management is a hard job. Some of the reasons for this are mundane: long hours, lots of responsibility, isolation. But one big reason for why the job is difficult is not related to the execution factors (i.e. what you might call work/life balance), but rather the fundamental nature of the job itself: the need to live in two worlds simultaneously.

How should a Product Manager spend their time?

For Product Managers, the core dilemma – one I see many fresh PMs struggle with – is how to allocate your time. You only have 40 (ha!) hours in a working week, so what should you do with them?

How fintech companies should think about financial crime risk

Sometimes when we talk about risk within fintech companies, we lose track of the core concept. Since risk is such a central aspect of what we do, this can harm our ability to make good decisions. ‘Risk’ does not stand alone as a concept – it requires additional information to be meaningful.

How to prioritise Fincrime features

Prioritisation frameworks run into some difficulties when thinking about features targeting Fincrime. Defining Reach and Impact is challenging in the area of fincrime product areas, since there are components that don't convert easily to a common denominator. Here's my suggestion for how to deal with that.

Scales for Product Managers

Like most knowledge work jobs, product management isn’t a profession that has success metrics nearly as clear as sports. This makes it more challenging to find a smart practice regimen, but far from impossible. Before we can figure that out, though, we need to zoom out a little: what does success look like for a product manager?

When should a company hire a product manager?

How does a company know that it’s the right time to hire a product manager? This is not such an easy question to answer, as it turns out. There’s no precise formula (although there are still some helpful rules of thumb), because different companies have different focuses.

Lessons from games: dynamic difficulty

Games are products too. In fact, I’d argue that some video games rank among the best products in the world – look no further than Breath of the Wild for a recent example. There’s a lot that Product Managers can learn from games and how they have been developed.One example is the idea of dynamic difficulty.

The 'Car Product Development Stages' analogy sucks

If you’ve worked as a product manager in the last few years, I bet you’ve seen the diagram above. But the second row – the super happy wonderful example we should try to emulate – annoys me a lot.