Master the art of communicating a “positive no” — We’ve all seen this: a backlog composed of at least 2 to 3 months of commitments, and a seemingly endless supply of issues and requests coming in from internal and external stakeholders. You then receive one or more “urgent” or “high priority” issues from your CEO, Sales, or Leadership team…

There is no single template — so where do you start? — Suppose that you’ve just joined a company or launched your minimum lovable product to market. You’re beginning to receive fantastic feedback and validation from your clients. Congratulations! You are now being bombarded with feature requests your customers, partners and suppliers. They are all asking you when you can deliver their…

Don’t wait for leadership to happen. Self-lead instead. — Newer product managers are often given a specific set of scope to navigate with a focus on product delivery and execution. Tasks usually centre around empathising with customers to understand pain points, specifying product requirements, and hustling and doing whatever necessary to implement to plan. There comes, however, a point…

I’ve made a framework for choosing frameworks. Inception much? — Many product managers “don’t know” or “don’t have” a process for planning and prioritizing initiatives, according to ProductPlan’s 2020 Product Management report. There are a few reasons for this: Many managers simply want to focus on creating value and solutions to problems faced today, not tomorrow. Many managers focus on…

Sometimes you shouldn’t play as a Tetris world champion would. — The product backlog is a list of the features, fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver to achieve a specific outcome. It is known to be the single authoritative source for things that a team works on. Managing a backlog is often compared to playing the…

Know your audience and prepare a compelling narrative — Have you ever found yourself feeling like you’ve been trying to gain agreement on a significant decision, but you’re getting nowhere? Have you ever sent communications about a significant project or initiative, with limited to no engagement or reply to your emails or messages? Have you ever held a meeting…

A simple system to change your relationship with anxiety forever. — In the first half of this year, I found myself with a multitude of life changes that caused a great deal of anxiety. I was unable to sleep on hot, restless nights, and I often had a mind racing with a wide variety of unhealthy thoughts: I worried about the…

One does not simply design without team alignment and clarity. — When designing new products, many organisations rely on requirements gathering exercises that often place the onus on a product designer/business analyst/product owner to specify a checklist of features that the technical team needs to build against. A common method is to write up detailed specifications, hand it over to engineers…

Play to your strengths, outsource your weaknesses, and partner for insights — Never has there been a better time to build a payments startup. The shift in consumer demands towards digital and contactless payments provides a plethora of opportunities for software solutions to enable all kinds of innovative purchase interactions. While hundreds of fintech and payment startups are launched each day, each…