I love anything that allows me and the team I am working with to break away from their normal day to day, ideate, design and refine. I also not-so-secretly love a bit of a process. Anything that is repeatable can be made into a framework to make your life easier, in my humble opinion. A design sprint, therefore, ticks lots of nerdy product and organizational boxes for me. A couple of months ago I facilitated Read more…
Most of us have a hard enough time living in the here and now and doing our day jobs, let alone thinking about the future. It’s understandable that most of us don’t make time for personal development. Who wants to spend time after a hard day of work learning and developing when they could be kicking back with a beer and watching The Crown? It’s a lot about how you frame it. If you think about what you want, and Read more…
A few people have asked me recently how to cast a wider net on their product knowledge, or simply how to get started with it. It can be daunting when there are so many sources and people purporting to be ‘experts’ (glances awkwardly at the mirror), so I thought I’d start with the source I use the most often — Medium. At $5 a month for unlimited content, it’s an absolute steal as a tool Read more…
If you missed my first two posts about the four flavors of product management, depicted by the PM Quadrants, feel free to check out the first post here and the second post. If that’s TL;DR for you, a synopsis of both posts is below. If you’ve already read them, skip to here. The PM Quadrants Based on my experience working as a product manager, business analyst, project manager and consultant, I defined four ‘flavors’ of product manager, that are Read more…
In my previous post, I introduced the four different flavours of product manager, depicted by the PM quadrants matrix: https://chrismiles.co/four-flavours-of-product-manager/ As the name suggests, the PM quadrants are four sections, depicted on a 2×2 graph. It shows the four flavours of product manager based on the relative importance of a discovery versus a delivery focus compared to the relative importance of business versus technical skills. That’s the matrix recapped. Now to talk about the skills Read more…
I have learned so much in the last few years about product management that I wish I’d considered (and known) earlier. This is the first in a series of 4 posts where I will introduce and then expand upon, the ‘PM Quadrants’ that I have created to show what flavors of product manager there are, what skills they require, how to tell if you’re really a product manager and how to use the quadrants to Read more…
Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But you can delay death and avoid taxes — the only thing that truly is certain in this life is change. This notion is the central ethos of the product management profession. Product management is built upon the premise that change is the one true constant. In my view there are 3 key principles: Continuous delivery — because change Read more…
Whether Product Management is an art or a science is an unresolved debate I’ve had with several people over the last few years. Everyone has a different perspective based on their experiences. It only seemed right to answer this question using a combination of art (qualitative) and scientific (quantitative) analysis. I’m sure someone will point out that qualitative analysis also has a scientific method to it but that would ruin my analogy so… shhh. I Read more…
From Jackie Bavaro’s simple and easy to digest Venn diagram of product skills to Tarigo’s product skills matrix, there are countless publications out there listing the skills that a product manager must have. I decided to gather some data to understand from people in the product community how important they believe a range of attributes are. In reality, the options I provided in the survey are a mix of attributes and skills, so I will use the terminology Read more…
During my career, I have worked extensively as both a project manager and a product manager; within consulting and in multiple industries. I’ve worked in companies that have both roles, companies that only have project managers and companies that only have product managers. Several prominent blogs that I’ve read assert that project managers and product managers are ‘two sides of the same coin’ and should work harmoniously to deliver product goals. I wanted to dig Read more…