7 Product Leaders to Follow on LinkedIn

Most of us think of LinkedIn as our always-updated Rolodex. Our professional contacts and connections are stored in there, with promotions, job changes, and new degrees popping up in our feed, job postings, and the occasionally shared link that we find interesting. Like a Rolodex, there’s no priority given to the contacts we care about and those of...

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How to Escape the Product Manager Hustle Culture

Crazy-busy. Hustle culture. These loaded terms have risen to become a badge of workplace honor. They describe a state of professional fervor that’s not for the faint of heart. The crazy-busy product manager (PM) runs from meeting to meeting without breaking a sweat. Returns emails on a laptop with one hand while tapping out messages on the phone with...

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Top 7 Reasons You Need to Conduct a Squad Calibration With Your Product Team

Ocean’s 11. “The A-Team.” All those Fast & Furious movies… US popular culture is littered with examples of assembling all-star teams to overcome the odds and combine their unique skill sets to save the day or pull off a heist. Although your organization may not employ car thieves, cat burglars, or demolition experts, your teams are still a collection...

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Aligning Your Roadmap Themes to the Customer Journey

Much has been written over the last few years on the idea of the featureless roadmap, which challenges product teams to present their plans grounded more in strategic vision – or by themes – rather than a laundry list of specific features. ProductPlan alone has several articles on the subject that demonstrate the many virtues of this outcome-focused...

Aug 2020

My Experience Transitioning From Engineering to Product Leadership

When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t set my sights on becoming a product manager. Flash forward fifteen years later, and I’m the Director of Product Management at HG Insights. Working in startups and big technology companies, I’ve encountered one question more than most: “How do I make the switch from engineering to product management?”...

Aug 2020

Your MVP is Not the Minimum Product

If you’re a product manager or part of a startup, you’ve likely heard about the Minimum Viable Product concept for getting products to market faster. In my opinion, the definition of an MVP is often misunderstood, and I’ve seen entrepreneurs and product teams misinterpret it with unfortunate results. Those that take the concept of “minimum” face value...

Aug 2020

Your Dev Squads Shouldn’t Be Hitting 100% of Their Sprint Goals

Goals are a good thing. Without setting goals, we have don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish and have no real way to measure success. They’re directive, motivating, and establish the guide rails around any activity. In the world of Agile, every sprint has goals. These sprint goals make it clear to the entire team what the objective of each sprint...

Aug 2020

4 Useful Real-Life Customer Interview Email Templates

Communication is a vital skill for product managers. We spend lots of time thinking about the best way to deliver our product roadmaps, give presentations, run effective meetings, and create stakeholder alignment. But in reality, the communication tool we use far more often is email. Even if internal communication has shifted to collaboration platforms...

Jul 2020

What Does a Lead Engineer at ProductPlan Do in a Day?

I’m writing for the first time on the ProductPlan blog! Long time reader, first time writer. I’m currently a remote Lead Software Engineer at ProductPlan, where I head up a team of four engineers focused on bringing you List View, among other things. Our team is distributed throughout the United States and Central America, making my workday out of...

Jul 2020

5 Strategies for Burning Down Silos and Building Bridges

As organizations grow and expand, keeping stakeholders and employees on the same page to drive alignment with your product strategy can be a big challenge. That’s because growth often brings culture shifts, new offices in different locations, and new hires with the different product vision. All of these changes tend to cause a few disruptions. Without...

Jul 2020