Team Leadership

There are many approaches to product management, and every organization tends to breed its flavour of leading product. For many years, I have been thinking deeply about my core values and which ones withstood the test of time as I worked on different teams and businesses. During our recent trip to Japan, I was dumbfounded by the amount of respect every single person seems to have towards their craft. Whether it’s a shopkeeper, artisanal craftsperson or a barista, everyone seemed to take their role in society extremely seriously. Not only that, but there was also a sense of progression, of continuous improvement at what they did. I came back from that trip with a deep respect for a culture that could breed such professionalism. ...

It was 2015 when I first encountered the idea of a remote-first team culture. Before that, I had been working with clients at Hipo remotely for many years. However, I mostly worked from the same office with our internal team. We had a very flexible culture, and we were used to working online from different locations. So, we thought it would be easy to have some remote team members. Spoiler alert: It was not. ...

The term “high-impact” gets thrown around a lot lately, and it got me thinking about what that exactly means and why it’s important. And if it’s essential, how do we achieve it as product leaders? When we talk about impact in the product world, we usually mean a few different things: Impact on end-user experience Impact on business goals of the organization Impact on internal processes All of these are worthy goals to have for any product team. Of course, any PM would want to have a positive impact on both the customer experience and revenue, as well as making their peer’s jobs easier with better processes and internal tooling. ...