Aug 28Member-onlyBi-Directional Product ManagementWhat if product managers did something else? — For a while now, I’ve had this suspicion that something is wrong with product management more broadly — especially as it relates to the roles responsibilities. I believe there might be alternative way to do this job that is fun, and more effective for the customer and organisation. …Agile20 min readAgile20 min read
Jul 27Member-onlyHomo Decidus: The card game that reduces bias and logical fallacies so your team can make better decisions.For a while now I’ve become increasingly interested in the field known as decision intelligence, a somewhat flexible term from engineering which sits at the cross sections of social science, decision theory and the managerial sciences. Beyond its applications into AI, which is being put through its paces at Google…Bias12 min readBias12 min read
Jul 7Member-onlyWhat if meetings cost money?The benefits of meeting scarcity and why you should create it — Last year, after a lengthy discussion about ‘meeting culture’ at dinner with some friends, an idea emerged that I think has promise. It’s simple to explain, and I believe worth exploring for those who have long felt meetings are mostly an enormous waste of time. …7 min read7 min read
Published in Product Coalition·Feb 26Member-onlyThe Great SilenceWhy have Product Managers stopped speaking to customers? — Very sadly, most product managers I meet today no longer talk directly to customers regularly. If you ask; “How many customers did you speak to this week?” …most invariably say zero. I know this because I asked. I ran a survey with industry insiders and at least 50% of all…Product Management33 min readProduct Management33 min read
Jun 30, 2021What I say when people ask me for more moneyEvery now and then I’ll have a discussion with someone on the team who is looking for more money, a promotion, or just wants to talk about how they progress their player token on the financial scorecard of professional life. People want to progress. Sometimes it’s being called something different…9 min read9 min read
Jun 19, 2021What phases do product ideas go through at Whispir?How do we know we’re building the right product? While the engineering roles at Whispir primarily focus their energy on building the product right, the product, design & intelligence roles focus on ensuring we’re building the right thing for the right market. That’s the idea at least. The way we do this is to simply follow the math. When…Agile6 min readAgile6 min read
Apr 19, 2021Member-onlyWhy We Don’t Interview Product Managers AnymoreJob interviews are mostly nonsense. According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of “The Best places to work”, 80% of people lie during their interviews — so if that's the case, the information you’re hearing is likely fiction, or at best, inspired by real-world events. On top of that…Product14 min readProduct14 min read
Mar 25, 2021How We Know For Sure When Something is Ready to Build?No matter what we do at Whispir, we want to make sure we’re building the right things — but truthfully, you never know if something will work until it makes the first contact with customers. …Agile7 min readAgile7 min read
Mar 12, 2021How Our Cross-Functional Teams Decide What to Build at WhispirI wrote a variation of this for the various product teams at Whispir recently and then as fate would have it, a friend I know reached out to me on LinkedIn asking the same thing — so I thought I’d share the same instructions with the world I gave everyone…Agile8 min readAgile8 min read
Published in Product Coalition·Jan 11, 2021Member-onlyRAGE. A simple way for product managers to answer the question “Why does everything take so long?”Why does everything take so long to build? Have you heard this before as a product manager? Maybe everyone on your team is working hard to ship good, high quality software only to be faced with comments from different parts of the business about why things take forever to build…Product Management20 min readProduct Management20 min read
