My backlog of things to write about

Seedling

This is just a long lists of things that I want to write about, in rough order of priority. If I’ve started writing about it, it will be a link.

Practical Product Artefacts

I run a twice monthly lean coffee for my work place’s Product Community of Practice and there’s always a few recurring themes that eventually crop up again, I want to take these and write a whole raft of short reads on “So you want to create X but you have Y problem, here’s what to do”.

Things like:

  • “You want to do discovery but there’s no time”
  • “You need to prioritise but everyone says everything is urgent”
  • “You need to measure outcomes but only have output metrics”

Product Strategy: In the trenches without air cover

As part of some product maturity work, one area I’m working on is around product strategy. A pain point I’ve found here is an organisation wanting Product Managers to be strategic, but there’s a missing link between the organisational strategy and the product strategy.

I think there’s a few things to talk about here:

  • “How to influence upward when strategy is unclear”
  • “Strategic thinking skills for individual contributors”
  • “Bottom-up product strategy”
  • “The only steer from above is specific things to build”

The art of subtly making organisation more product minded

Another pain point I’ve identified in working on developing product maturity in an organisation is whilst you may have some support for your body of work to mature product practice, support and understanding of that effort won’t be homogenous in the organisation.

  • “Why stakeholders fear ‘losing control’ to product managers”
  • “Breaking down “us vs them”: shifting mindsets through collaboration”
  • “Why do product managers exist?”
  • “How are Product Managers different from Project or Delivery Managers?”

My ultimate goal is for this content to form some sort of guide: “Transforming product culture: a guide for PM’s in the trenches”

Design Thinking & Facilitation

I’m in the very early stages of working on a short course for my workplace on “Successful Workshops”, I’ll be doing some of that thinking here.

Some of the things on my mind in this space:

  • “How in god’s green earth do I aligning lots of stakeholders?”
  • “Running design sprints & discovery in risk adverse organisations”
  • “Getting people to focus on really strong problem diagnosis rather than jumping to solutions”