Every product job would be so much easier, if it wasn’t for one thing: the people we have to deal with as we try to make stuff happen.

Engineers! Designers! Sales teams! Customer success! Marketing! Execs! All these humans with their opinions and their needs blocking our path to product perfection.

We have the data, the frameworks, and we’ve also got Chat GPT/ Gemini/ Claude to save us all a ton of effort, let us move at the speed of sound and tell us we’re awesome in the process. But still these pesky humans insist on getting in the way.

‘Twas ever thus, and is likely to stay so.

One the many bits of Jeff Bezos wisdom passed down to me during my time at Amazon, was (and I paraphrase wildly) ‘don’t think about all the stuff that’s going to change over the next 10 years, think about the stuff that’s going to stay the same’

And in the product world the one thing that is going to stay the same is the persistent friction and tension with other teams and individuals.

Yes a lot of the discussion / hype/ LinkedIn boosterism right now is all about how AI will change what we build, and how we build it, and generally how we work, but I think we’ll find the AI stuff quite easy and energising. The humans we still have to deal wtih, much less so.

I’ve noticed when I’m coaching (and I accept that this might well be just the nature of those who chose me as their coach) that around 80% of the challenges people face are people problems. Not only that they’re problems that I recognize not just from my product experience, but also from the early parts of career before I even knew what a product manager is.

Sometimes, it’s true, we’re talking about the challenges of dealing with people who are some combination of unreasonable, incompetent and inconsistent, and whose drive and ambition dwarfs their abilities and emotional intelligence. These situations can be horrific, but fortunately they are not the norm.

It’s a feature, not a defect

More often we’re dealing with what I’d think of as acceptable bounds of tension and friction. What I’d rather see as features of a healthy organization rather than defects.

• A sales/ customer team that wants some feature built to land or retain a big customer - even though they know it’s not on your roadmap (that you shared with them last week) , nor does it fit with your strategy.

• A tech lead who has made it clear that they’re utterly underwhelmed by your product strategy/ plans.

• A finance team that expects you to demonstrate a near instant ROI on the stuff you’re building.

• A CPO who comes back from an exec offsite with a metre-long list of ‘great ideas’ that will now take you at least a week to respond to.

• A CEO whose response to every plan you share is ‘great, but you need to do twice as much in half the time’

And as your career progresses and you step into a leadership position, these tensions become a bigger part of your job, and with higher stakes.

Why product jobs come with tension baked-in

The thing to realise is that there are several reasons why a product job includes - and going to to continue include these tensions.

There’s a bigger plan that depends on you
Your roadmap isn’t the whole story. It’s one component in a much larger organisational machine: revenue targets, retention goals, quarterly forecasts, marketing calendars, board expectations. All of these will normally depend in part on on product delivering. So other teams are looking at you as the linchpin in their plan, which creates pressure, impatience and friction by default.

Where there’s prioritization, there’s people and politics
Prioritisation is unavoidable and it’s never just maths. It’s ambition, incentives, territory, ego, and organisational gravity. Every decision you make implicitly says “this matters more than that” and people have feelings about being on the wrong side of that trade-off. No framework on earth removes the politics completely.

You need to get people who don’t report to you to do stuff
The standard management term for this is ‘influence without authority’ (this is the bible on the topic, if you’re interested). In many job functions, this is a higher order skill that you develop after you’ve learned about ‘influence with authority’ (ie managing people). Product flips that around. You’re expected to influence engineers, designers, sales teams and execs from day one without formal authority. Tough gig.

You are spending real money
You see engineers, squads, sprints and roadmaps - your CFO/ finance team just sees money being spent on a regular basis (an estimate of £700,000 a year for a fully resourced squad), and they will rightly be asking ‘what exactly are we getting back in return?’. Explaining that, for example, ‘revenue is a lagging indicator’ may well be factually correct, but that doesn’t make things any more tuneful for some finance ears.

Everyone who’s good will have a view on the product
From the CEO down, the people who care the most, regardless of their formal role will have a view on what’s good and not so good about the product. This will include those in, say, Sales, Customer Success and Support who speak to customers more than you every will. They will have ideas, they will feedback on your roadmap, and let you know what they think of your latest release. You

And the neat, simple solution? Sorry..

I know that I really should wrap this up with some nice acronym, or a lovely framework. Perhaps I’ll do some of that for some specific circumstances in future weeks.

If there’s a broad principle its that you need to be able to match all those frameworks and techniques you’ve mastered with broad influence and good judgement. Easy to say, but difficult to acquire. More on this soon..

The point is that these tensions should help you realise that some of the stresses, strains and tensions you feel when doing your job are there by design - not because you work in some dysfunctional hell hole.

So next time you’re pulling your hair out because sales wants that feature, engineering thinks you’re mad, and finance wants their ROI yesterday, remember: you’re not failing at your job. You’re doing it.

The toughest review of your year should be the one you give yourself.

And right now - in the small window before Christmas - is the perfect moment to take stock, and think about what you might want to change next year.

Do it well - and you can go into the new year with a well thought through plan. Ignore it..and you’ll be left, at best, with the same old flaky New Year’s resolutions.

Here are six questions you should ask yourself.

Yes or No answers only!

1. Does my CV look stronger now than it did a year ago?

2. If I stay in my current role, will my CV look stronger a year from now?

3. Am I using AI to make me more effective in my role?

4. Am I stronger in one or more key product skills than I was 12 months ago?

5. Am I in a better financial position than I was a year ago?

6. Is my work/life balance where I want it to be?

If the answer is Yes to all six: brilliant, don’t take that for granted.

If the answer is No to all six… well, you already know something’s off and you’ll need to change things quite fundamentally.

But the most common situation, for most of us, is a mixed bag: a few Yes’s, a few No’s.
That’s where this little exercise becomes useful.

Because the point isn’t the number of Yes/No answers you collect.

The point is the shape of the picture they paint, and whether you’re actually OK with it.

But first, let’s look at why these six questions matter.

They’re actually in three groups of two.

Group 1: Your CV as a litmus test

Your CV is a brutally efficient test of what you’ve been achieving at work, for two reasons.

1. Achievements have a brutal half life. What you did a decade ago doesn’t matter. What you did five years ago - vaguely interesting. Two years ago? That’s relevant. In the last 12 months - now we’re talking.

2. The most impactful work (and the stuff that anyone looking to hire you will be most tempted by) can almost always be summed up the most succinctly. You did something that grew revenue, saved cost, massively increased engagement. Easy to talk about.

You implemented a new reporting framework that ensured much greater alignment between product, sales and marketing etc etc …well it may have been a real game changer, but it doesn’t really scream ‘hire me’.

And the forward-looking question — “Will my CV look stronger a year from now if I stay put?” — is the question I ask everyone who comes to me asking whether they should stay in their current role or not.

Very often it’s because they know the answer to that is ‘No’ - but there’s some other factor: they like the people they work with, the vibe of the company, or they have a good work-life balance that’s keeping them there.

That’s fine - but just accept it’s a trade off. And that trade of is potentially ‘creature comforts’ vs ‘market value’.

Group 2: AI + Skills — are you developing or drifting?

The next pair of questions asks something even simpler: Are you actually getting better at your job?

Right now, that has to include a dimension of AI: but it’s not about acquiring expertise or its own sake, or in the hope of landing some massive job in the future (both of which are just fine btw but not relevant right here). It’s a bit more pointed: are you using AI now to be measurably better at your job?

And this is the nub of it. AI has lots of potential, and lots of limitations. What you need to be doing now is taking all of that on board and then applying effectively to your day to day work. That cliche of ‘you won’t lose your job to AI..but you will use it to someone who uses AI’ is a bit melodramatic, but right now - it’s an essential part of skilling up and staying relevant in the market.

But, AI is only one part of the story.

There are still huge parts of the craft — discovery, decision-making, cross-functional influence — that AI won’t magically fix. In particular, it’s the human stuff that becomes more important as your career progresses that’s hardest to delegate to Chat GPT: how you manage a relationship with a demanding sales team; a reluctant engineering manager; a relentless CEO. How you perform in an exec meeting.

Every year there needs to be things you’re getting better at.

Stuff that once seemed impossible should now seem routine.

Your commitment to yourself should be to both know where your gaps are..and what you’re going to do about them.

Group 3: Money + Having a life. The stuff that matters.

These final two questions are there to put work into context.

Because bluntly if work is going great, but you’re going financially backwards and /or your work/life balance is making your miserable…then actually, is work really going that well?

Money: Regardless of what you’re earning, or the enormous riches that might be in store for you on a hypothetical exit/ share vest…year in year out , the key question is: are you getting financially stronger?

A quick test of this is: If you lost your job tomorrow, would you be more or less resilient than you were this time last year?

Now, there are times when you will go backwards financially (having children; moving house; investing in the holiday of a lifetime…are all valid reasons). As with all these things - that’s fine..but be aware of it.

Work/life balance: The only real judge of this is you. And you will know if it feels wildly off; off but manageable; or just fine.

As with money, there are times when you will knowingly go backwards - and you can be happy with it. You’re working on something massive and motivating, and it’s taking up a ton of your time.

At the same time, you can just be in a state of overwhelm and near burn out, and for everything that looks great about your job - the sense of relentlessness is telling you it’s just not worth it.

So what do you do with all this?

It’s not about whether you scored four Yes’s or two.

It’s about why each answer is what it is, and whether you’re happy about it. That’s the good thing with a self-assessment - you get to be the judge as well as the judged.

A No isn’t a problem in itself.

But a No that you really want to be a Yes is.

The value comes from tracing each No back to its root cause:

• What’s getting in the way?

• What have you been avoiding?

• What would need to change for the answer to be Yes this time next year?

• And how are you going to make that happen?

And the last one, of course is what matters. A plan. Action with a purpose. Get onto it now, before the first box of Quality Street make it into the office!

Have you been Vibe Coding? Are you up to speed on Evals? Have you harnessed the power of Claude Skills to revolutionise your workflows? Or perhaps signed up for a course on how to be an AI PM in pursuit of a hot new job?

No matter where you are in your career, you need to be doing some or all of the above. Part out of curiousity, but equally as a means of future-proofing your career.

But here’s the kicker: none of this will, on its own, actually make you any better at your job. And in the long term - that’s what matters.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re job hunting. sprinkling a bit of ‘AI’ on your CV might make you more tempting to a hiring manager. But fundamentally better at product work? Not so much.

Yes AI is transforming how we work and what we work on, but the stuff that really matters, the fundamental capabilities that make someone good at product work haven’t changed.

As always, start with Achievements

In my Vital 9 framework, I’ve talked about the importance of Achievements as the engine room of your career. Specifically: Skills Growth, Meaningful Impact and Domain Expertise. As your Achievements grow, so does your Market Value.

None of this has changed. Nor is it going to change. What has changed is AI’s ability to help you accelerate your development, your capacity to achieve...and with it, your earning potential.

At the same time, if you are by nature curious (and you should be), AI also has the ability to be a massive time sink. The shiniest of shiny new things to distract you - and without focus it can actually get in the way of you getting better at your job rather than help you with it.

So how you adopt AI needs to focussed and rooted in your plans to develop your career: particularly in Skills Growth and Meaningful Impact.

Let’s take these one at a time.

Skills Growth

Remember Product Skills Frameworks? (I did a review of some of them here). Before AI came to town, as our profession was becoming more, err, professional, these were all the rage.

They’re all still incredibly valid. All still based on good evidence about what you actually need to be able to do to be successful in your role.

While individual frameworks might vary—and individual coaches/thought leaders/gurus might badge theirs differently (with varying levels of effectiveness)—they all tend to hit the same notes:

• Good strategic sense

• Strong Discovery Skills - being able to take customer and business needs and turn them into deliverables

• Good communication and influencing skills

• Product and technical understanding

• Business/customer understanding

• Strong delivery/execution skills

• Team leadership and/or mentoring/coaching skills

And in each of these areas AI has the potential to make you more effective. So, you need to know where your strengths and weaknesses are in this list, and you need to be asking yourself:

• Which of my strengths can I supercharge with AI?

• Which of my weaknesses/growth areas can I work on with AI?

You don’t, for example, Vibe Code just for the sake of it (as much fun as that is). You do it to sharpen your Discovery process by developing rapid prototypes, or to improve how you work with engineers and designers in order to deliver better work more efficiently.

Meaningful Impact

The same is true when thinking about impact.

The things you’re chasing haven’t changed: more revenue, increased retention, reduced costs.

AI is just a more powerful way to get there. Use it to test more hypotheses, analyse more data, spot patterns you’d have missed, or prototype solutions you couldn’t have built before.

So the question you need to ask is: how can you use AI, either in your personal ways of working or in the software you deploy, to be more impactful?

What to do right now..

So here’s my guidance for the next six months:

If you’re an IC: Pick one core product skill you want to develop (strategy, discovery, stakeholder management—whatever your weak spot is). Then deliberately use AI to help you get better at it faster. Document the outcomes, not just the tools.

If, on the other hand, you find yourself falling down an AI rabbit hole…endless learning new stuff, but not actually using it. Stop. Get back to basics and ask yourself what are you actually trying to achieve.

If you’re a leader: Make sure your team’s development plans focus on capabilities, not technologies. Yes, create space for AI experimentation. But judge success on whether people are becoming better product thinkers, not just better prompt writers.

And for everyone: stay curious, stay practical, and remember that product work is fundamentally about understanding problems and shipping solutions that create value. AI is a powerful accelerant for that work. It’s not a substitute for it.

TL;DR

- Being told to ‘Be More Strategic’ (BMS) is unhelpfully vague, but also an indicator that you need to change how you operate in order to get to the next level.

- The starting point is to get much more specific - and there are four ‘flavours’ of ‘strategic’ that can help you focus (whether you’re getting or giving the feedback)

- You should read a bit to get your understanding of what strategy is up to scratch. But don’t fall down the rabbit hole.

- The secret to avoiding burnout is to gradually shift more and more of your time towards ‘high leverage’ activity.

BMS: an itch you can’t scratch

By far the least useful feedback that you can give to a product manager is that they: ‘need to be more strategic’ (let’s just call it ‘BMS’ for the sake of brevity’).

It’s unhelpful, because it points to a truth and an important need to change, but unless you qualify it (and people rarely do) - it’s incredibly difficult to act on.

It’s rather like giving someone an itch, but not letting them scratch it.

Those who get the ‘BMS’ feedback are often strong performers when it comes to the day to day execution of product management, they know their domain, they get great reviews - but they’re finding themselves stuck on the same rung of the development ladder.

To paraphrase the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s brilliant book about stepping up as a leader ‘What got them here..isn’t going to get them there’

Think of them as great runners, who now have to become triathletes. There’s no more hours in the day, but somehow they have to master swimming and cycling as well, while making sure their running performance doesn’t drop off a cliff.

Meanwhile those who give the feedback often mean well - but don’t quite know how to articulate something more than a general ‘vibe’...

Let me try and help.

What “Be More Strategic” really means

The first thing is that ‘BMS’ is rarely just about the mechanics of developing a product strategy.

The feedback is normally about the level you operate at. And In practice, it usually maps to some combination of these four different flavours of ‘strategic’

1. Strategic altitude: operating at the wrong level

You’re thinking in weeks instead of months, months instead of quarters. You’re optimising one feature when you should be looking at the whole product experience. You’re delivering - but it feels like a list of stuff, not a cohesive program that’s focused on a clear outcome. Your manager wants you to step up to a higher level of abstraction. Annoyingly though, they want you to do this without dropping the ball on the day to day work.

2. Strategic influence: not shaping the agenda

You’re executing well on what’s handed to you, but not effectively questioning if it’s the right thing. You’re in the room but not steering the conversation. You might disagree, and you can definitely hold your own, but you can be perceived as a blocker and so over ruled. Too often your expertise is being called on to work out whether someone else’s ideas can be delivered in time. What they want is for you to influence what gets done not just how and when.

3. Strategic judgment: decisions too narrow

Your calls are good tactically, but they don’t factor in the wider picture: broader commercial impact, fit with the long-term direction of the company, cost of ownership.

You can talk convincingly about output, but less about outcome. You consistently leaning too far either towards pace at the expense of ‘doing the right thing’ - or vice versa. What they want is evidence you’re playing chess, not checkers. You shouldn’t need someone to look round corners for you.

4. Strategic leverage: impact not scaling

You’re delivering results, but only in proportion to your effort. You’re the bottleneck. What they want is impact that compounds. You feel you need to be everywhere in order for everything to be just right, when in fact you need to be working out ways that things can happen without you.

So - what to do about it?

1. Give/ Get some clarity

Whichever side of the table you’re sitting on, the most important thing you can do is to get beyond the simple ‘BMS’ to something more concrete and actionable.

Perhaps the four flavours above help, or perhaps there’s something else you. The point is you need to get past this high level feedback and start to make it much more focussed and trackable.

If you’re on the receiving end - you can talk about the four flavours - or you can just ask some questions along these lines..

- “When you say strategic, what specifically do you want me to do differently?”

- “Can you give me a recent example?”

- “Who does this well?”

- “What would good look like in three/ six months?”

If you’re on the giving end - you should get ahead of these questions by giving specific examples. Better still cut the phrase ‘BMS’ and instead focus on the specifics (’We need to see you factor in broader company goals as your building out your roadmap’)

One of the most important things a manager can do at this stage is to focus on a change in behavioiur for a specific initiative or events (eg: for a planning session that’s coming up in a few weeks, or a new project that you’re just kicking off).

2. Get to know the basics of ‘strategy’

There’s way way too much written about product strategy. Some of it good, some of it less so. But, I think you can get 90% of what you need from just two pieces of work.

Pretty much everyone book I’ve read that talks about product strategy, or strategy generally - refers to Richard Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

It’s one of the few books I’d say everyone should read. So read it - or find one of the dozens of summaries/ reviews on YouTube. Just get to know the basic points he makes. It does an excellent job of removing the fluff and flannel from discussing strategy.

And on top of that - I recommend this essay by Jackie. Which is just good solid advice.

Honestly - that’s it.

Maybe something else will work for you. But reading or watching 10 x more won’t make you 10 x better, it’ll just give you 10 x less time to actually do some work.

The point is

Do know what a strategy is - and isn’t

Don’t get tangled up in the dozens of different frameworks and methodologies for product strategy

Do read/ listen to a limited amount of stuff and think about how you can apply it.

Do think about the behaviours you need to change day-to-day, in order to be perceived as ‘more strategic’

Shift to higher leverage work.

OK - now we’re getting to the gritty bit.

People who get the ‘BMS’ feedback are often insanely busy - feeling like they’re at peak plate-spinning capacity - that’s part of what makes them good at their current role.

Being told they need to ‘Be More Strategic’ will send them hurtling towards burn-out as they suddenly now try and fit in ‘strategic’ work alongside their day job.

The misconception here is that ‘strategic work’ happens separately to your day job. The truth is you’re being asked/ challenged to change your day job

And the key to this is to focus on **doing higher-leverage work**.

This concept of the ‘leverage’ of your work comes from Andy Grove’s _High Output Management_. Which he defines as ‘the output generated by a manager’s actions, relative to the time and effort spent.’

Here’s some examples of high and low leverage work.

High-leverage activities

- One conversation that unblocks three teams for a month

- One hard stakeholder chat that stops a load of churn/ friction between your teams

- Coaching someone so they can make similar decisions independently

- Doing high quality preparation for an important exec-level meeting

- Defining clear principles that guide hundreds of decisions

- Getting your team/ squads permission not to do something that you know will prove to be a wasted effort

- Creating a framework that saves hundreds of hours of debate

Low-/negative-leverage activities

- Sitting in meetings just to be informed

- Reviewing work others could review

- Personally doing things you’re great at, but others should learn

- Firefighting problems instead of preventing them

- Being the go-between for stakeholders who should talk directly

Before you start clearing your diary - you don’t get to suddenly stop doing the low leverage work - what you need to do is gradually reduce the %age of time it’s taking up each week.

If you need help - here’s a few prompts

1. Which 3–4 things must I stay close to because that’s where my leverage is highest — and what can I let go?”

2. Who do I need to meet with regularly in order to help my teams/ squads be more effective?

3. Which meetings can I avoid/ go to less frequently/ delegate to someone else?

4. How can I organise my work so that I do the high leverage stuff when I have the most energy?

5. What am I doing because I really enjoy doing, but could really delegate to someone else?

6. How can I clear 1 hour a week to take stock of how I’m spending my time and make sure I stay on track?

And the kicker - this is a team effort

Every manager who gives the ‘BMS’ feedback - or variant of it - has an obligation to help see it through.

While some of this will be guidance in specific behaviours, the crux of it is likely to come down to exactly this challenge of helping someone work out how best they should allocate their time.

For the individual, shifting the nature of your work isn’t something you can just do in isolation. It might mean changing the nature of how you work with your engineering, design and product peers. And initially at least, they might not appreciate your change in priorities.

So if you’ve given the feedback, make sure you follow up frequently and constructively.

If you’ve been given it…don’t fly solo. Work with your manager as you start to shift the way you work, and where you put your effort.

These days I'm mostly in the business of helping people change either how they work or where they work. Occassionally both.

Sometimes they're trying to kickstart a career that seems to have lost its momentum.

Sometimes they're working out how to succeed in a new company, or at a new level.

It’s all about change.

They might not be able to say exactly what they want - but they know that what they've got isn't it.

We all kind know what we have to do.

• Decide what we want

• Work out what we need to do it

• Track our progress and adapt accordingly.

But that's a bit like knowing that all you need to do to lose weight is move more and eat less. We might know it, but it doesn't mean we actually do it.

To help, here's 10 tactics or hacks that I've found can help. Hopefully one or two will be helpful for you..

1. Define your red lines

If you can articulate what you want - then you're off to a flying start. But often we’re much clearer about what we don’t want, or what we want to change from.

To get things moving, the best starting point is often to be very clear about your red lines: the things that are utterly essential in any change in how or where you work. Your P0s. Your must haves or must avoids.

When I left Sky, I really didn't know what I was going to do next, but I had two red lines.

• I needed to earn a certain amount of money (which happened to be much less than I was earning at Sky).

• I wanted a job outside media.

As my search went on (and on!) the detail of exactly what I wanted, where I'd be useful, and - vitally - who would consider me all started to take shape.

But those two red lines simultaneously stopped me going off at impractical tangents, and forced me to explore a whole load of areas before I eventually ended up at the RAC.

Often our red lines are financial. You need to earn a certain amount.

Or it might be a thing about time: for the next 2 - 3 years you need to be able to drop the kids off at school.

It might also be a positive (the obvious one now: I need to be much more hands on with AI)

The point is - you need a short list (1 - 3 things) and you need to stick to it.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes..once you've worked out what's impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is up for grabs.

2. Write the CV you'd like to have

Now we're clear about what we don't want - it's time to accentuate the positive with a bit of visioning, or working backwards.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey encourages us to write the obituary we'd like to get as part of his 'Begin With The End in Mind' habit.

That’s a great exercise, if you're having a fundamental rethink about your life, but it's perhaps a little dramatic if you're just thinking of moving job or changing how you work.

Instead, write the CV you'd like to have in 18 months' time. Three years at an absolute push.

What achievements would be on there? What experiences? What do you want to be able to say about yourself?

Now - write the CV you think you'll have if you stay as you are.

The difference between the two is what you need to focus on.

It should feel credible, but not comfortable.

I'd quite like to be CPO of Open AI. But I can accept that won't be happening in the next 18 months. Or three years. OK - or decade. Or two. So that’s not going on. But I do have a clear sense about how I want to develop and help others. That’s what I’m focussing on.

3. Start with one thing

There may be a dozen things you need to sort out in your current role or as you start chasing your next one.

Your skills, your stakeholder relationships, your external profile, your network, your understanding of the business, your CV and LinkedIn profile. All might need work.

Don't try to fix everything at once. Pick the one thing that's causing you the most frustration right now and focus exclusively on that.

Better to make meaningful progress on one front rather than minimal progress on all of them.

If you're pushing for promotion - get your promotion blinkers on and think about that.

If you’re pushing for a new job - get your CV in shape.

If you want to develop your network - just do that.

Whatever it is - do just that for a month - which brings us to..

4. Set monthly goals. Review them weekly

This is the simplest of simple hacks, but I've seen it work time and time again - especially when managing people who find it impossible to crawl out of their day to day stress-fest.

Annual goals are great, but often meaningless a few months into the year.

Thinking quarterly is better, but still a bit baggy when you're trying to create momentum.

Meanwhile just lurching from week to week is chaotic, and a recipe for busy work that amounts to a lot less than the sum of its parts.

Monthly goals are the sweet spot. Long enough to achieve something meaningful, and accommodate for the unpredictable stuff that clutters all our lives, but short enough to stop you procrastinating indefinitely.

Reviewing weekly keeps you honest about whether you're actually making progress or need to change tack / invest more time.

The secret sauce: It's entirely possible for you to miss your goal each month - but still end up in the right place.

5. Carve out your 'change' time

I often say that planning a change in where you work or how you work is like having a part-time job.

The counter to that is it's only a part time job.

So, yes, you need to commit some time to it, but you have to box that time in in order to get on with the rest of your life.

Unless you're actually unemployed and now giving your full attention to looking for a new role - I'd suggest thinking about 2 - 7 hours a week for whatever you're planning.

Let's say you want to get up to speed on A/B testing; or understanding Evals for AI. Or you're expanding your network. Put some time in your calendar to do this. Or if you're just starting to think about a new move and you're in research mode. Give yourself a month of doing 3 x 40 min sessions a week focused on that.

If you can get a decent break for lunch at work - committing 3 lunch times a week to whatever it is you're working on, can make a massive difference.

This is especially potent if you’re not loving work that much. And yes, I speak from experience.

6. Expand your horizons

I saw a post from Daniel Pink recently where he said 'if you read the same things as everyone else, you'll think the same as everyone else.' I guess lots of people read that now think it..which proves the point.

The world of product is incredibly broad - but it's very easy to make it feel narrow, by only thinking about your company, your sector and your particular set of problems.

If you reading the same books as every one else, and following the same people on LinkedIn as everyone else - you’re effectively putting in a ton of effort just to keep up.

Yes, if everyone zigs - you kind of need to show you can zig too. But having a bit of zag about you can be a massive help.

Think more broadly. Read outside your sector. Follow people from different disciplines. Fill in your broader business knowledge, or of adjacent fields like psychology and economics. Read some fiction. Lots of fiction! Get out to a gallery. Watch a You Tube lecture about something you've always been interested in.

This isn't just for the sake of your personal growth. Although there's a bit of that. It's to give you more reference points when you tackle problems.

A big part of this is just speaking with people / friends who work outside your sector and listening to what's going on in their world, which brings us to..

7. Talk about it - with humans

Don't keep it all in your head and on your screens.

Speak with people. Catch up with old colleagues and friends from school and Uni.

Spend time with someone at work you think you can learn from - even if they do a completely different job.

Articulating what you want and what you’re thinking - hearing the words come out your mouth and feeling comfortable about them is both a useful exercise in itself, and a vital part of getting your story right.

Only one rule: don’t be a bore - remember to listen in return.

8. Talk about it - with AI

There was a brilliant story in the NY Times recently about Allan Brooks, a corporate recruiter from Canada, who got caught in a 300-hour, three-week conversation with ChatGPT (the transcript ran to 3,000 pages) during which he was led to believe he'd made an earth-shattering breakthrough in Mathematics—despite having no real Maths experience. Only to find out it was utter nonsense (which he discovered, ironically, by asking Gemini).

Don't be like Allan. But do use your LLM of choice to kick around ideas and get guidance on ways of working.

ChatGPT's memory capability, in particular, makes it great for keeping tabs on an ongoing project - such as a job hunt.

Tell it what you're trying to achieve and what you've done over the last week, what you need to do over the next week. Make part of your weekly review a bit of back and forth - about what you think has worked and what not.

This isn’t a substitute for spending actual time with actual humans. But it’s a handy complement. Tread carefully.

9. Accept it'll take time

There's a reason I started banging on last week about planning 2026.

Whatever you're trying to achieve it’ll take longer than you’d like.

Heres a quick ready reckoner: think how months you'd like something to take and then assume it will take that many quarters, and then add one more quarter just to be safe.

Particularly when you're more senior and looking for a job, things can take time.

Similarly, if you're looking to change how you work, you can do some stuff differently tomorrow - but what matters is how you change over months, quarters and yes, years.

Our mental problem here is that we will benchmark ourselves against people who have already got what we want. And when we see them, we want it instantly.

What we can’t see is that they probably either had to work for it much harder than you imagine; or they have some set of circumstances that means you simply can't compare yourself to them.

So, give yourself time. If you get the right job, or turn yourself into a product strategy ninja, or achieve whatever it is you're trying to do, the fact it took six months longer than you'd hoped will be an irrelevancy.

10. Get a little awkward

If you’re a shameless extrovert - you won’t even know what I’m talking about here. But if you’re like the rest of us, this is vital.

'Growth starts once you leave your comfort zone' is a classic self-help mantra. Cheesy as it is—there's definitely something in it.

If you're looking to change your career, get more money, tackle something you’ve always found challenging, you're going to have to put yourself into situations that you have mostly avoided until now.

Asking for feedback on your weaknesses. Approaching someone senior you don't know well. Admitting you want something you're not quite qualified for yet. Doing the thing that you’re worst at.

The conversations that change careers are usually the ones you're slightly nervous about having. Lean into the awkwardness - it's usually a sign you're heading in the right direction.

Useful?

I do hope so… no excuses now…time to get on with it!

Let’s do a quick bit of time travel and jump forward one year.

It’s September 2026. You’re back from summer. Same job. Same level. Same manager. Same kind of work. Compensation nudged by inflation. Work–life balance unchanged.

How does that feel?

If the answer is “awesome!” then brilliant. Keep reading if you like, but this may not be for you.

If it stirs a bit of dread, despair, or regret, then it’s time to get planning, and in the next five minutes I’ll give you four principles and three questions to create your three-month plan.

It’s never too early to start

Whether you’re pushing for promotion, moving team, or changing company, everything takes longer than you’d like it to. Especially if you’re more senior.

If you don’t want to be in exactly the same spot this time next year, the safest time to start is now. Actually, it was yesterday - but now will do just fine.

Start now and the worst case is that things happen faster than expected. Leave it late and… well, we’ll be here again next year.

But where am I even going?

All successful planning has a consistent pattern: get clear on the objective; list what it will take; then do the work.

If you know you want a promotion next year, you can map the path. Easy. If you’re hell bent on getting a job at Amazon - then

But, what if you’re not so clear about what you want?

You’re not feeling great where you are, but deciding on your “next step” feels like wrestling with water.

You might have a five-year vision, but translating that into a concrete next move can feel overwhelming. The temptation is to do nothing and hope it sorts itself out.

If anything - this is even more of a reason to start now. Especially if you’ve been in one place for a while, you need some discovery: what the market’s doing, where you fit, what realistic next moves look like, and what gaps to close.

The 4 principles

It’s not enough to have a plan. It needs to be the right plan and you need to give yourself the best chance of being successful. So..

1. Commit weekly hours

This isn’t a list you write once and forget. Block recurring time and treat it like a part-time job.

2. Optimise and Position

You need a plan that balances “optimising” - ie: getting more from what you already have,(run sharper 1:1s; ring-fence two evenings a week) with “positioning” ie: getting into better shape for where you want to be (build AI fluency; work on a highly visible project; expand your network).

3. If in doubt, experiment

Don’t just charge off and be busy for the sake of it. Test the water. See what works. Adapt accordingly. Don’t pre-commit to a dozen meetups. Try two. If they help, do more. If not, try something else.

4. Talk to humans

Learning via LinkedIn, books, podcasts and ChatGPT has its place. But the breakthrough usually comes from real connections and conversations. Calls are good. Coffee is even better.

The 3 questions

Create a plan for the next three months by answering these three - they’re based around the three pillars of my Vital 9 framework: Achievements. Catalysts and Rewards. Keep it specific and weekly.

1) What can I achieve in the next three months that strengthens my CV?

The best CVs are rooted in real Achievements - and these fall into three categories.

Meaningful impact deliver a measurable result (almost always make money, save money, or move a key metric).

Example: volunteer to own a metric that’s drifting; propose a 4-week experiment with a clear success threshold.

Domain expertise: signal depth in an in-demand area (AI is the obvious one).

Example: ship a small internal AI use-case; present learnings; add before/after evidence.

Skills growth: add visible range to your product toolkit (discovery, analytics, stakeholder management). Focus on areas where you’ve had feedback in the past.

Example: co-facilitate three customer interviews; instrument one new funnel properly; run a stakeholder-mapping workshop.

If you do nothing else, line up two concrete achievements you can finish (and measure) in the next quarter.

2) Who - or what - can help me?

This is the Catalysts piece of Vital 9: the people and conditions that help you do great work.

- Inside your company: who can mentor you? What do you need (specifically) from your manager?

- In your network: who will give you a straight read on your market position? Who hires in the roles you want?

- New people: which two events or intros would expose you to different opportunities?

- Your environment: where can you claw back time or energy? (e.g., finish by 5 p.m. twice a week; protect one deep-work block.)

Yes, books, podcasts and AI tools can help. Just don’t get lost in them. Remember, real momentum comes from conversations and connections.

And yes, this is where a coach can be useful: neutral, experienced, and focused on keeping you moving.

And now the final question..

3) What can I do in the next three months that will most improve my long-term finances?

This is the Rewards pillar. Career moves aren’t only about money, but money matters. You will make better career decisions if your financial house is in order, and you’re clear about how much you need to prioritise increased earnings as part of your next move.

Think in two layers:

Market Value: what would raise your value 6–12 months from now: scope, impact, credibility, scarce skills?

Financial Progress: what can you clean up outside salary: spend, save, invest so you can make better trade-offs?

Example: You might decide you need to prioritise earnings for the next 2 - 3 years, trading some work-life balance for scope or upside. Or you might discover that a few smart personal-finance fixes buy you the freedom to choose better.

You should think of one one-time action; and one habit to change.

Bringing it all together

Three months effort isn’t going to transform your career. But it can get you out of a rut, and give your 2026 a kick start.

Small, consistent actions compound: having that career conversation with your manager; thinking about your work through the prism of what will make you more marketable; shipping a measurable result; updating your LinkedIn; blocking two hours a week to develop a skill or reconnecting with old colleagues. All help.

Try bringing it together as your plan

Mini-worksheet (optional)

- Weekly time block: ___ minutes on _[day]_ + ___ minutes on _[day]

Two achievements by end of December.

1.

2.

Three catalysts to activate (names / events / changes):

1. ___

2 ___

3 ___

Two finances move (one-time) + habit (recurring):

One-time: ___ (e.g., consolidate pensions, speak with an advisor)

Habit: ___ (e.g., monthly spending review on last Sunday)

I can help..

If you want help developing your plan - or bringing it to life. I can help. It’s what I do. Just reply to this…and let’s talk!

I love the idea of OKRs, but when I've experienced them in practice within an organisation all too often they crumble. And 99% of the time it's for one reason: other people.

It's 'other people' who kick against the whole idea of OKR's because 'we don't do that here' or 'we tried it and it didn't work'. 'Other people' argue about whether this one is actually an 'objective' or a 'key result' and who say 'isn't that too ambitous?' or 'it's not ambitious enough'. And what about all these KPIs that we're reporting on every month?

And all this before the joy of actually tracking their status, let alone acting on it .

But here's the good news. When you're writing OKRs for your career, there are no 'other people'.

You are the primary stakeholder, CEO, CFO, CPO and CMO of your career, so you can basically write what you want, how you want it.

The only criteria is that you do it in a way that is meaningful and useful for you.

Ah - but how to do that?

In the background, I've been working on a GPT that will do it for you (more on that some other time). To do that, I've had to create a system prompt.

Reading it back, I realised that with a few tweaks, that would actually make a pretty good human prompt. Given that 'The Hot new programming language is now English' - and we are pretty good English interpretation machines..that's hardly surprising.

So right here, right now (to quote HRH Lord Fatboy of Slim) here is a human read-able, and hopefully actionable prompt for you to create some career OKRs.

The Career OKR Prompt

CONTEXT: You are a product professional who loves their job but feels frustrated by their career progression. You want to set career OKRs to ensure you're giving as much systematic attention to your career development as you do to your day-to-day work.

PREREQUISITES: Before setting OKRs, you must have taken stock of where you stand and identified your highest-priority career challenges. If you haven't done this analysis, stop here and do it first. (I can recommend the Vital 9 framework for this, but any systematic assessment will work.)

IMPORTANT: Don't just identify surface problems. Do a 5 whys analysis to get to root causes. For example:

- "I'm not getting promoted"

- Why? "I don't have the right experience"

- Why? "I'm not working on initiatives that demonstrate next-level capability"

- Why? "I haven't put myself forward for stretch projects"

- Why? "I don't know what projects are available"

- Why? "I don't have relationships with people who would offer these opportunities"

Root cause: Lack of internal network and visibility, not lack of capability.

CALIBRATING YOUR AMBITION: You are the only stakeholder that matters for these OKRs. Consider your motivational style:

- High-bar setters: You find ambitious, almost-unattainable goals motivating. You'll feel successful hitting 70% of a stretch target. Set bold objectives.

- Achievement seekers: You prefer the satisfaction of fully completing goals. You're motivated by ticking things off. Set challenging but achievable targets.

There's no right or wrong approach—only what works for your psychology.

EXPERIMENTATION OVER ASSUMPTION: If you're uncertain about the best path forward, build experiments into your OKRs rather than making big commitments. Test your assumptions with small actions first.

Instead of: "Build my professional network" Try: "Contact one new person in my target domain each week for three weeks, then assess what approach generates the most meaningful connections" (read 'Tiny Experiments' by Anne-Laure Le Cunff if you'd like to know more about this approach)

BALANCING OPTIMISING VS POSITIONING: Your career OKRs should include both "optimising" activities (improving your current situation) and "positioning" activities (lining you up for your next move and beyond).

- Optimising: Getting promoted in your current role, improving relationships with your team, mastering skills relevant to your current job, increasing your impact where you are now

- Positioning: Building external network, developing skills for target roles, creating visibility in new domains, establishing relationships at companies you might want to join

If you're setting 3 OKRs (and you can set between 1 - 3), the balance depends on your satisfaction with your current career direction:

- Happy with current trajectory: 2 optimising, 1 positioning

- Want to change direction: 1 optimising, 2 positioning

Even if you love your current role, you need some positioning activity. Even if you're desperate to leave, completely neglecting your current situation can damage your track record.

OKR STRUCTURE: Create 1-3 Objectives . (Don't feel a need to create three if one will do just fine for you). Each should have 1-3 Key Results. Make them specific, time-bound, and measurable where possible.

Remember: these are for you, not your boss.

SAMPLE CAREER OKRS:

These are examples..and not all for the same person! (P = Positioning / O = Optimising)

Objective 1 (P): Build the market visibility I need for senior product roles

- KR1: Try doing 3 reactions; 2 comments; and 1 professional post on LinkedIn twice a week for 1 month from tomorrrow.

- KR2: Attend at least 2 industry events per month for the next three months - speak with at least three new people at each one.

- KR3: Arrange coffee with one product leader at a company I'd love to work at within the next 30 days.

Objective 2 (O): Develop the strategic influence needed for promotion to Head of Product

- KR1: Lead one cross-functional initiative involving at least 3 departments by Q3

- KR2: Present quarterly product/ business review to CPO, including strategic recommendations

- KR3: Complete 360 feedback process with manager, peers, and reports to identify leadership gaps

Objective 3 (P): Test whether transitioning to B2B SaaS is the right move for my career

- KR1: Have 3 informational chats with B2B product leaders by end of March

- KR2: Attend 3 B2B focussed product events in the next three months

- KR3: Apply for 2 B2B roles to test market reception (even if not actively looking to move)

Objective 4 (P): Establish financial foundation for future career flexibility

- KR1: Increase emergency fund to 6 months expenses by September

- KR2: Meet with financial adviser and create 5-year wealth-building plan

- KR3: Research and set up tax-advantaged investment accounts for equity compensation

OUTPUT: Write your career OKRs using the above framework. Be specific about timelines and success metrics. Focus on actions you can control rather than outcomes that depend entirely on others.

EXECUTION GUIDELINES

- Make them visible and unavoidable: eg: put them up on your wall/ have them as a pinned note in your Notes app.

- Review progress monthly (calendar block this now)

- Have an 'accountability partner' - friend (even better if they don't work in product), colleague, coach.

- Adjust Key Results if you learn something that changes your approach.

- If an experiment reveals a better path, pivot rather than stubbornly sticking to the original plan

And now, the little plug bit at the end..

I’m pretty much done on the beta testing and signing up early birds for the Vital 9. Thank you for everyone who took part, it’s given me clarity on what to focus on (something very different to what I started on). I’ll share more at the end of the summer!.

I do have a limited amount of capacity for 1:1 coaching for the next few months. If you’re interested just reply to this email with the phrase: ‘Right here, right now’.

I've had a great career, but if I'm honest, my actual career planning has been quite amateur.

I've always worked hard at my job. I’ve never been less than 100% committed (you don't survive 5 years at Amazon by just turning up and working out how to use the coffee machine.)

But when it comes to actually sorting out my career, I realise now I left a lot to chance.

- I stuck around at the Guardian for too long

- I didn't learn half of what I could during my time at Amazon

- I knew during my time at Sky that I wanted to move on from media - but I did little to plan or prepare for that.

On the measures that really matter - my happiness, relationships and finances - it's worked out fine. But like many, I stumbled from opportunity to opportunity.

This is great for me as I get towards the end of my career. But, I wouldn't recommend it as a strategy in 2025.

The world has changed

In today's (and tomorrow's) product market, that amateur approach doesn't work.

The talent pool is deeper and more competitive than ever.

The expectations of what a great product person needs to achieve have progressively ratcheted up over the last decade.

Every product role has 100+ applications within hours of posting, our experience is assessed in a nano second by some algorithm. AI is transforming how we work and what we work on.

And as you get older (ie: from mid 30s), more senior, and your financial needs tend to be greater - it only gets tougher.

I've rarely met a product manager who isn't passionate about what they do; and keen to both learn and improve.

But I've also met a lot who like me, take their job seriously, but are decidedly amateur about their career planning.

It's time to turn pro.

Lessons from 'The War of Art'

This pro-am division hit me this week as I was reading Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art." Which is a brilliant polemic against 'Resistance' which he describes as ' the most toxic force on the planet' .

Reistance is what stops writers writing their novel and enterpreneurs from starting their businesses. It keeps people in jobs when they've long since stopped growing; and makes sure that the Peloton that was going to get you fit ends up as the world's most expensive clothes stand.

Resistance affects everyone. But professionals deal with it.

There's no voodoo involved. No cute habits. Just doggedly getting on with the job. These are some of the attributes he gives professionals.

We show up every day.

We show up no matter what.

We are committed over the long haul.

The stakes for us are high and real.

We master the technique of our jobs.

We have a sense of humour about our jobs.

We receive praise or blame in the real world.

Reading that, I realised I'd been a professional product manager for decades, but an amateur when it came to planning my career.

What Amateur Career Management Looks Like

Amateur career management is reactive.

It's knowing that your LinkedIn profile is a bit crappy but you'll sort it out some time.

It's letting yourself develop Achievement Deficit Disorder, but not asking why and doing something about it.

It's getting so caught up in your job that you lose sight of where you want your career to go, and what you're doing about it.

It's getting a rejection and thinking you're better not trying.

It's about losing a sense of what's really valued in the market - and making sure you are offering it.

It's about having a decent salary, but no long term financial plan.

It's not bad. It's not lazy. It's natural given the thousand things we all have to do.

It's just - to use the understatement I heard a hundred times a day at Amazon: sub-optimal

At times, I have done all of the above.

At Sky, I had a great time on many levels. Loved the people, the products we were working on, and was handsomely rewarded. We also shipped a lot. But I totally lost sight of the product world that was changing rapidly on the outside, and didn't see how I was slipping behind.

When it came to looking for a next role, I found I was nowhere near as 'hot' as I thought I was.

A total amateur error that resulted in months of often painful job hunting.

What Professional Career Management Looks Like

Professional career management starts with showing up consistently. It means working on your career whether you feel like it or not, whether things are going well or badly.

It means having a plan - not a rigid 10-year roadmap that will look irrelevant within six months, but a clear sense of what you're trying to achieve over the next 12-18 months and why. It means regularly assessing where you stand, identifying gaps, and taking deliberate action to address them.

It means building and maintaining relationships before you need them. Not cynical networking, but going out your way to connect and keep in touch with people whose expertise (and often friendship) you value.

It means keeping your skills current and your market knowledge fresh.

It means documenting your achievements and being able to articulate your impact clearly.

Most importantly, it means not over-identifying with any single job or company.

Your career is bigger than your current role, and professional career management requires keeping that perspective even when you love what you're doing.

Three Pro Tips

If you recognise yourself in the amateur description, don't worry. It's natural. I've been there.

The shift to professional career management isn't about becoming more corporate or strategic in a cold way. It's about respecting your career enough to manage it properly. Here’s three things you can do to kick things off.

1. Set yourself some career OKRs (more on that next week) set aside time monthly to assess progress, quarterly to review your plan, annually to think about bigger strategic shifts (if you need help with this reply to this email saying ‘OKRs please’).
   

2. Find 5 companies that you want to work for . Find out everything you can about them, and then have a focussed effort to get on their radar (here’s a playbook for how to do it from Ben Erez)

3. Every week, capture your achievements at work. Everything. Pendo’s Dave Killeen suggests using Chat GPT to store everything and then let it resurface back to you (tell it to create an Achievements project and explain what you’ll be using it for). But even just dumping everything into your Notes is fine. Give yourself a monthly appraisal (make it part of your personal ‘strategy offsite’ at the local coffee place while also looking at your OKRs!). Are you feeding your CV, developing your skills - or just standing still?

Get comfortable with the fact that professional career management sometimes means making decisions that don't feel good in the short term but serve your longer-term objectives.

And finally a plug: if you think this is relevant/ useful..you're welcome to kick off your new professionalism with a free assessment against my Vital 9 framework.

Everyone I've tested it on so far has found the process useful..an for now the assessment and a 30 minute debrief is free. Just reply to this email with 'yes please' in the message.

Next week: using OKRs for your Career.

Over the past few weeks, I've been sharing the Vital 9 framework—the nine ingredients for a successful product career broken down into Catalysts; Achievements and Rewards.. The response has been really positive, and in the background I've had plenty of people trying out the Vital 9 assessment.

But this week, I want to step back and tell you how the actual product development is going.

I've always had confidence in the framework itself, but the real challenge has been turning it into something genuinely useful for people to use.

The Vision

From my earliest sketches, I've always envisioned three pieces to the ‘prouct’

1. Assessment and evaluation - helping you take stock of your career and work out what you need to focus on

2. Personal OKRs creation - turning that assessment into a concrete plan for what you should actually do

3. Regular check-ins - keeping you on track and helping you adapt as things change

Crucially, I wanted a low-touch, DIY (ie: cheap!) version that you could use without ever needing to speak to me.

Coaching and guidance would always be available on top, but never necessary.

Where I’ve got to

For the last few weeks, whilst sharing the framework publicly, I've been incredibly grateful to have some beta testers working through the first assessments. Their feedback has given me real confidence in the methodology—people are getting genuine insights about their careers and clearer priorities.

More than one person has compared it to a ‘Myers Briggs for your Product Career’ - which was something I always had in mind.

The next step is creating tooling to automate and accelerate this process, particularly helping people set their own OKRs and action plans.

This is where I've turned to ChatGPT. I've created a custom Vital 9 GPT that takes someone's assessment results and guides them through creating personalised OKRs and an action plan.

Early tests are promising, but I need more people to put it through its paces.

This Is Where I Need Your Help

I'm looking for a few more people to go through the complete process—first the assessment, then working with the GPT to create their plan.

I'm having to throttle this a bit to ensure everyone gets proper attention, so I won't link directly to the form. Instead, if you're interested in helping out, just reply to this (or add a comment below) with "yes please" and I'll send you the details.

What I'm looking for:

- Product people at any level who want to get clearer about their career direction

- Honest feedback about both the assessment and the GPT experience

- About 45-60 minutes of your time over the next couple of weeks

What you'll get:

- A comprehensive assessment of where you stand across the Vital 9 - with the option of a 30 minute session with me to talk through the results.

- A nice fat discount for when I launch a paid version .

- A personalised set of OKRs and action plan for your career

- Early access to tools that will (hopefully) become a game-changer for product career planning

- My eternal gratitude and a proper thank you

Why This Matters

I genuinely believe this framework can help people make much better career decisions. But frameworks are only as good as their implementation, and implementation is only as good as the feedback from real people using it in real situations.

Your input now will directly shape how this evolves—and hopefully help create something that makes a genuine difference to product careers.

So if you've been following along with the Vital 9 content and thinking "I'd like to try this for myself," now's your chance to help build it whilst getting the benefit.

Just hit reply/ comment and say "yes please."

Thanks for reading, and for all the brilliant engagement with the framework so far. Next week, I'll be back with more insights from the Vital 9.

Over the past two weeks, I've explored Catalysts and Achievements. This week, we're diving into the final leg of the Vital 9: Rewards: what you get back in return. Yes, it's time to talk money!

This isn't just about your salary, though, or even your current total compensation. What you earn at a given point in time is important, but real rewards are about what you accumulate over a longer period of time, both in terms of your personal financial status, and your earning potential.

When I'm coaching people they often think about a target salary that they're looking to achieve. Often it's a milestone that they want to hit. Or they've been tempted by a new role - with a nice pay increase.

I’ve found it’s always best to think broader and longer term.

- What if you don’t hit that milestone salary? Can you adjust your spending so that you get a lot of the benefits anyway now?

- If you get this pay increase make any meaningful impact on your longer term financial plan?

- If you take this new role - what will be the impact on your market value? (do you think you'd be worth more or less than if you stayed in your current job for another year)

The two Rewards ingredients

Given this, need to think a bit broader and longer term than just your salary - the two ingredients I’ve defined for Rewards are..

💰 Financial Progress How your career supports your personal financial goals through salary, bonuses, equity, and total income. And, how you manage that income to create stability, security, or freedom.

📈 Market Value Your future earning potential. How likely your career trajectory is to lead to better-paid, higher-impact opportunities, based on the signal your track record sends about what you're worth next.

The second you start thinking about these two things, you realise there are two dependencies.

1. You need to have some longer term financial ambition and a clear plan about how you'll achieve it. A plan that covers what you earn, what you spend, and what you save and/or invest.

2. You need to both be aware of your current market value; and think about what you need to do in order to improve it.

There's a lot to unpack in these two ingredients, so Let's dive into some FAQs to get into the detail of this..

Q: How to 'Rewards' relate to Catalysts and Achievements?

In a dream scenario, there's a linear progression. You work in a great environment; you achieve a lot; and then you get well rewarded.

Unfortunately, work often doesn't deliver on dream scenarios. You can also easily find yourself in a situation where you're achieving a lot but not getting the rewards for it (especially if the business you're working in is going through a tough time/ or just not a great payer). In which case you will really need to ask whether you are prepared to accept this, of if you’re going to move with a prime focus of improving your Reward level.

It's also - as improbable as it may seem - sdpossible to be doing well on Rewards without Achievements, but I'd always question about how sustainable this can be.

Q: How do I start thinking more strategically about Financial Progress?

A: I could give you a whole dissertation on good financial practice (get rid of debt, build up an emergency cash fund, and invest sensibly and consistenly), but I'll cut it to the chase and say this. If you don't know where to start: speak to an independent financial adviser (ie: someone who's there to advise you, not just sell you stuff). And the earlier you do this the better. I've done this for the last 20 years - and really recommend having someone to work with to help you think longer term about your finances.

Q: How do you define Market Value?

A: Market Value is what you're worth in the job market right now. There's no simple formula, but there's a clear set of factors: where you've worked, the current level of demand for your specific experience, your level, your trajectory (how rapidly you've been advancing), and your current compensation.

As with any value, though, it's really about what someone is prepared to pay. If you take it to an extreme: Meta is currently paying (literally) millions for AI researchers from Open AI and Anthropic because they tick all of the boxes above.

A personal (and much more humble) example of how market value can rise and fall: when I left Amazon Video, I found I was very valuable to Sky. At that point in time, having someone join from Amazon was deemed to be massively valuable and they paid me handsomely to join.

On leaving Sky, five years later, I was keen to move out of media, and my trajectory had been pretty flat. In addition the stuff I'd been working on wasn't really in demand. So I found out quickly that market value had taken a bit of a battering.

Q: How do Financial Progress and Market Value relate to each other?

A: As with all the Vital 9 ingredients' they're loosely coupled. You can have them both, or neither or just one. But there is a pretty standard pattern as you go through your career.

Early on, it's likely you'll find it hard to be making any meaningful financial progress (and frankly you're way too busy having fun to bother about it), but you will want to focus aggressively on improving your market value.

This means working at organisations that others want to hire from; continuing to step; and - as we discussed last week - that you keep your achievement levels up.

As your career progresses and you hopefully have more income in, you would hope that you start making more financial progress, but your market value may actually be static or even going backwards. (This, by the way, is exactly what happened to me during my stint at Sky - the drop in my market value was more than compensated for by the Financial Progress I'd made during my time there).

Q: How do I assess my Market Value?

A: The only true test is to put yourself in the market every couple of years, even when you're happy. Value can shift depending on what's happening broadly in the markets and the demand (or lack of!) for your particular experience.

This isn't about constantly job-hopping - it's about staying calibrated to your worth and maintaining relationships.

One thing to realise is that your market value can often be very independent of how you're doing in your job. A low-to-average performer at somewhere hot, you might well be much more valuable than a star at somewhere not so hot. It shoudn't be the case, but it often is.

But even before you do this - there's a good set of lead indicators of your value: specifically how often you're getting approached for

Q: What if I sense my Market Value is actually less than I'm currently earning?

A: Short term answer: make sure you're doing everything you can to use your current earnings to make as much financial progress as possible.

Longer term answer: ask yourself

1) Is there something I can do in my current company to improve this? Or..

2) Do you need to take a sideways move to a new role/ organisation in order to get back momentum? Or..
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3) (especially if you're 50+) you might have to accept you've now hit peak earnings - in which case, I go back to my first point...about making the most of the earnings you've got.

Next Week: Putting It All Together

We've now covered all nine ingredients of a successful product career. Next week I’ll talk in a bit more detail about the assessment tool I’ve been building - and some of the result patterns.

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Want to assess your own Rewards and build a strategic plan? I'm building tools to help you evaluate your Vital 9 and develop an action plan. [Join the beta programme here] for early access and a discount.

Last week I explored Catalysts—the environmental factors that make success more likely. This week, we're diving into the second zone of the Vital 9 and the most critial for your career growth: Achievements..

Before I talk about them - a bit of my own career history to put Achievements in context.

How I developed Achievement Deficit Disorder

I worked at the Guardian for 14 years (1996 - 2010).

For about the first 10 of those years, I was on an achievement hot streak. I learned a ton, and we were knocking it out of the park in terms of both audience and revenue numbers - with a healthy array of awards to show for our efforts. I was a genuine industry expert in what was at the time a pretty hot domain of (to give it its old name) 'Digital Publishing'. Job offers came thick and fast.

To make things better - I worked in a great environment, and was paid well. Overall, my Vital 9 picture was about as Green as it's ever been.

But for the final four years things changed. I was kicked upstairs/ promoted to Group HQ and given a job title with the word 'Strategy' in. I still worked with great people, was well supported by my boss, had lots of autonomy, and pulled a great salary. So all was nice and Green on Catalysts and Rewards, but my actual level of achievement was low. Or if I'm honest, pretty much zero.

When it came time to leave, I really struggled to find a role. The market had moved. The domain I was in wasn't that hot any more. The last few years of my CV might have been able to boast of a nice sounding job title, but there was little in the way of achievement to go with it. (I remember a particularly painful interview with the CEO of a media company who kept asking ‘yes, but what do you actually do..?’)

Now here's the context: during those four years, we'd had three children (yes..twins!), my mother had died and we'd moved out of London. While not traumatised, I was definitely knackered. The fact I had a steady, well-paid job somewhere that I didn't have to go in and prove myself every day, was probably the thing that mattered to me most.

I unwittingly made a trade-off. In the days when I was really struggling to sort out my next role, I regretted it. I kicked myself for developing Achievement Deficit Disorder.

Looking back now, and seeing how things have ended up, those regrets have long since passed. But I also realise that that trade-off had got me into a hole that took some digging out of. (Spoiler: thanks to a chain of co-incidences I ended up at LOVEFiLM, focused on Product Management and never looked back - a move which I think these days, I'd find almost impossible to make)

if Achievements == "Red": Act

Enough of my story. What's the point?

* If you're not Achieving, you're stalling. There are times when that might be right, but it will take an effort to get going again.

* Achievements have a half life: you can't trade on the stuff you did five years ago, let alone a decade ago.

* If you have accidentally developed Achievement Deficit Disorder - you need to ask yourself why and act.

The Three Achievement Ingredients

That's enough vague talk about 'Achievement' - what do I mean specifically? I break it down into three Ingredients.

🎯 Meaningful Impact: the measurable difference your work has made. It's about moving the needle on outcomes in ways that can be clearly communicated and understood by those both inside and outside of your organisation. This is really the currency of career progression: the things you can shout about in your CV, use in your case for promotion, and talk about in job interviews.

📈 Skills Growth There are lots of different skills frameworks out there for product people (I did a write of a few here). Almost all cover similar bases that go from Product Vision and Strategy through to Delivery with additional ratings for how you work with others. Exactly which one you use (and I'll go through mine in a future week) isn't as relevant as the fact that you use one, preferably with your manager, and that you're clear on what you need to work on. None of us are perfect - but we can all get better and ensure that we build on our strengths while making sure our weaknesses don't hold us back.

🏆 Domain Expertise represents the experience you've built across specific sectors/markets, company types, and product areas. Right now the hot domain is AI, but your domain can also be B2B SaaS, or 'Start Ups' or 'Big Tech' or 'Marketplaces' or 'Academic Publishing'. There's a perfectly valid argument that this isn't that important, and what really matters are two ingredients above, but whether we like it or not, it's how the market tends to badge us (often in combinations eg: 'Fintech Start-up PM/ B2B SaaS Scale Up), and it shapes which roles we're seen as suitable for.

The simple Achievement test

Step back for a second and ask yourself how you're doing.

Think back over the last year, and ask..what meaningful impact have you had? What skills have you developed? What domain have you developed experience in? Do things look stronger now than they did 12 months ago?

Now look 12 months ahead. Based on what you know now - what do you think the situation will be ? Or to put it another way - imagine you're writing your CV today, and your CV in 12 months time will the one you write in 12 months time be more compelling?

If you don't feel you're looking stronger now than you did a year ago, or if you're not feeling good about the year ahead...it looks like Achievement Deficit Disorder is settling in. At the very least it's worth asking if you're happy with that, and if not, you need a plan to change things, before it's too late.

But that's enough for this week!

Next Week: Rewards

Achievements create the foundation for everything that follows, but Rewards are what make the journey sustainable. Next week, I'll explore Financial Progress and Market Value—how to think strategically about compensation and building wealth through your product career.

Quick plug: if you’d like to see how you’re doing for Catalyst, Achievements and Rewards…you can get a free Assessment if you sign up for my Vital 9 beta program.

If you’d like to get a free Vital 9 Assessment, this week, just sign up to be a beta tester here

Last week I introduced the Vital 9 framework for product career success. This week, I'm diving deep into the first pillar: Catalysts.

Catalysts are the environmental factors that spark you into doing great work.

When they're strong, you feel motivated and energised to give your best every day.

When they're missing, everything becomes harder and less fulfilling. Success is possible, it's just more of a slog.

The challenge with Catalysts is that they have a big impact on your day-to-day experience and long-term career growth, yet they're incredibly difficult to assess before joining an organisation and equally difficult to change once you're there.

A quick recap: I talk below about different ingredients (or a group like ‘Catalysts’) being Red/ Amber or Green. My definitions for these are

🟢 Green: A real strength and a reason to stay in your current role
🟠 Amber: Not great - but nor is it a problem
🔴 Red: A problem. A potential reason to move job/ change role.

Why these four Catalysts?

They're grounded in Self-Determination Theory, which identifies the core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

I've adapted these for the reality of product work and modern organisations, based partly on my own experience, and partly on decades of management and coaching.

👥 Talent Boosters came from reflecting on my own career and realising how much certain people had accelerated my growth. These aren't just colleagues you enjoy working with (though that's lovely) - they're people who actively develop your capabilities, put opportunities your way, and create environments where you can thrive. It might be your manager, but it might also be peers or other leaders you

🧭 Lived Values Every organisation - including tobacco companies and arms manufacturers - now has a mission statement that sounds noble. But that’s not enough. What matters is how they actually operate, the role you play in that (often down to some relatively fine grain product decisions) and most importantly - how you feel about that. There’s no absolute right or wrong. But there is a point where we can suddenly find that the way our organisation operates just isn’t ok with us, and as a result we become detached and demotivated.

⚖️ Work-Life Balance This is about more than just the hours we work, or the days we’re expected in the office. When this is ‘Red’, it feels that any achievement at work is has to be at the expense of happiness at home, and vice versa. When it’s ‘Green’ - work might be challenging, but we’re also able to be present outside work, both physically and mentally. Our need here will shift over time. Early in our career, this might not matter; later on, with young children or elderly relatives, it might be the single most important thing to us. At any stage though - we should be as aware of this as we are of any other ingredient in our career.

🎛️ Professional Agency was my answer to the limitations of terms like "autonomy" (too open-ended) and "empowered" (too loaded with specific product management approaches). Agency is something that is both given and taken. It captures whether you have meaningful control over your work - and whether you then take advantage of that. In a future week, I’ll go pretty deep on this, as it’s

The relationship between Catalysts and Achievements

Catalysts aren't just about feeling good at work. They're there to make Achievements more likely. And it’s Achievements that propel you forward. They’re the engine room of your career.

The relationship isn't a strict cause-and-effect. Just because you have a someone there helping you, and you have strong agency, doesn’t necessarily mean you get to knock it out the park (we’ll see that the ingredients of the Vital 9 are all loosely coupled rather than a set of automated triggers)

If you step back a bit and think overall about Catalyst and Achievements as either Red or Green - we have four possible combinations. (8 if you add in variations of Rewards, but we’ll get that to another week)

😊 Green Catalysts/ Green Achievements: The Good place
Not much to say - as this is obviously when things are going well.

😬 Red Catalysts/ Green Achievements: The Grind
You may not be waking up every day psyched about work, but you will have something to show for it. This is often a short term trade off for long term gains (this was how I felt for a lot of my time at Amazon!).

😴 Green Catalysts/ Red Achievements: The Velvet Coffin
A potentially dangerous comfort zone. Even if you’re being well rewarded for it. Periods of work like this can be great, in fact there are times when they may be necessary, but they can look like dead zones on your CV. We’ll revisit this next week.

😢 Red Catalysts/ Red Achievements: Move. Now.
Yes, really - you should move. Sorry, it’s that simple.

Spotting Catalysts During Interviews

Since Catalysts are so hard to change once you're in role, assessment during the interview process is crucial. Here's what to look for:

Pay attention to who you meet. Companies with something to hide often start by making sure you only have limited visibility during the hiring process. More exposure to people at different levels and functions is generally a good sign.

Do your research: Look Glassdoor, but also look into your network and see if anyone knows anyone who can give you some guidance. A 20 minute conversation with someone who has previously worked there is more powerful than multiple hours of online research.

Ask specific questions rather than broad cultural ones. Instead of "Are teams empowered?", ask a potential peer to walk you through how they develop their roadmap and how success is evaluated. Probe actual working practices rather than aspirational statements. If you’re meeting a few people through the interview process - make sure you have specific questions relevant to each of them.

Be explicit and up front about any Work/Life Balance needs you might have. If you need to be free by 5.30 on a Tuesday night to coach a school football team - say that up front. If the reaction is shock and horror, better you find out in advance.

Some Catalyst FAQs

Q: Should I always have all four Catalysts in the green?

A: Ideally, yes. But realistically, probably not. If you can have at least one green, and no reds then you’re in a pretty good place. If it’s all red or at least if there’s no greens - then it really depends what’s going on with your Achievement and Reward levels.

Q: Isn't prioritising Work-Life Balance the opposite of career advancement?

A: This is one of the biggest myths in product careers. At certain life stages, optimising for better Work-Life Balance can be as strategically powerful as focusing on a particular skill set. It depends on what you're trying to achieve overall. Just accept that it might come as a trade-off against something else.

Q: My company talks about having a great culture. Isn't that enough?

A: "Culture" is such a broad term that it's almost meaningless. What feels like a great culture to one person might be completely wrong for another. The four Catalysts help you break down what specific environmental factors actually matter to you, rather than relying on generic cultural statements.

Q: What if I'm in a Catalyst-poor environment right now?

A: Some of this depends on exactly which Catalysts we’re talking about. If there’s no-one boosting your Talent for example you should definitely lean into and/or develop your network or look to getting a coach. If it’s work life balance that’s the issue - that might require specific tactics just to make things tolerable. We’ll cover these in future weeks. But as I’ve said already, changing environmental factors is often outside your control. The bigger Question is - are you achieving? and are you getting rewarded well?

Q: Is ‘Professional Agency’ the same or different as an ‘Empowered Product Team’
A. I’ve deliberately kept this one vague. The reason is I think you can both experience and display Agency in a variety of different ways of working. One to revisit in future weeks..

Next Week: Achievements

Catalysts create the conditions for great work, but Achievements are what actually propel your career forward. Next week, I'll dive into the three types of Achievements every product person needs: Meaningful Impact, Skills Growth, and Domain Expertise—and why getting this right is absolutely crucial for everything else that follows.

Want to assess your own Catalysts and build a plan to improve them? As part of my beta testing, you can do a full Vital 9 assessment and get your results (as well as a nice fat discount when I launch a paid product later in the Summer). Find out more here.

Last week I talked at a high level about the framework I’ve been working on to help people decide what they should do next: The Vital 9.

The purpose of this is get people thinking about what they really want and need from their career - and then decide what they need to focus on in their next move.

This week I’m laying out the 9 themselves: the ingredients that will give you a career that works for you.

I’ve based these on a mix of my own experience, academic research about motivation (especially Self-Determination Theory, if you’re curious), and countless coaching conversations I’ve had over the years.

In the background, I’m building a set of tools that let you do an evaluation against the ingredients; and develop and track an action plan. (You can join the beta program for this and get an early bird discount here).

OK…so let’s walk do a walk through the 9 ingredients..

⚡ Catalysts: The Things That Spark Great Work

Catalysts are what make the difference between just doing your job and absolutely loving it. They're the environmental factors that energise you and help you perform at your best. Without them, you can still be successful, but everything becomes harder and less fulfilling. The challenge with Catalysts is that they're difficult to assess before you join an organisation and even harder to change once you're there.

1. Talent Boosters represent the people who actively develop your capabilities—your manager, mentors, and colleagues who challenge and inspire you. These are the relationships that accelerate your growth through meaningful feedback, development opportunities, and creating environments where you can thrive.

2. Lived Values capture how well your organisation's actual practices align with your personal principles. It's not about the carefully crafted mission statement and corporate purpose. It’s about the organisation you experience: how it actually makes money and treats staff, customers and other stakeholders. Above all though it’s about the role you play in that, and how you feel about it.

3. Work-Life Balance is about whether your job allows you to maintain your health, relationships, and interests outside work sustainably. At times we can be prepared to sacrifice this, at other times it comes ahead of everything else. Overall we want to feel that success at work doesn’t need to be at the expense of happiness at home.

4. Professional Agency reflects how much control you have over your work. It’s something that’s both given and taken. Can you make decisions that match your level? Can you shape what you work on and how you do it? Or are you constantly seeking approval and executing someone else's ideas?

🛠️ Achievements: The Engine Room of Your Career

Achievements are what propel your career forward. They're the accomplishments you'll put on your CV, discuss in interviews, and use to demonstrate you're ready for the next level. Without meaningful achievements, careers stall—regardless of how good the working environment might be.

They are very much the connective tissue between Catalysts - which help you achieve; and Rewards…which are (or at least should be) what you get as a result of your achievements.

5. Meaningful Impact is about delivering measurable results and outcomes that you can confidently explain to others. Your impact should be visible, well-understood, and something you can use to strengthen your case for promotion or new opportunities.

6. Skills Growth focuses on your sustained competence as a product professional. It’s not how good you are now, but how much better you're getting. It's about building core product capabilities like discovery, strategy, delivery, and stakeholder influence, and having clear examples of how you've improved.

7. Domain Expertise represents the experience you've built across different sectors, company types, and product areas. Whether we like it or not, it's how the market tends to 'badge' us, shaping both the roles we're seen as suitable for and the ones we're ready to grow into. Right now of course the hot domain is ‘AI product management’

💰 Rewards: What You Get in Return

Product roles are generally well-paid, but there's a difference between having a decent salary and building genuine financial security and the options that that gives. Rewards require strategic thinking beyond today's pay packet—considering both your current financial progress and your future earning potential.

8. Financial Progress examines how your career has supported your personal financial goals through salary, bonuses, equity, and total income. More importantly, it's about how well you've managed that income to create stability, security, or freedom in your life.

9. Market Value looks at your future earning potential—how likely your career trajectory is to lead to better-paid, higher-impact opportunities. It reflects the status you've reached and the signal your career sends about what you're worth next.

Making It Work for You

The power of the Vital 9 lies not in trying to optimise all nine ingredients simultaneously—that's impossible. Instead, it's about understanding where you stand today, what matters most to you right now, and what you need to focus on in your next move.

If you want to do a very quick bit of self assessment - try just grading each of the ingredients Red/ Amber/ Green for your current role and/or your career to date. Think about what that’s telling you…and what it means you should focus on.

I’ll focus on Catalysts next week..in the meantime - feel free to sign up for the Early Bird List. If you feel you’d benefit from some 1:1 coaching - just book a call.

TL;DR

• The Bugle is back. Now as a mid-week treat

• I'm launching Vital 9 - a programme to help product people with their careers. Coming later this Summer.

• You can sign up here to join the Early Bird list and get 40% off at launch.

• It's the first of a number of products I have planned in this area

• Also in the pipeline: Skills Assessment and 'Habits of Highly Effective Product Teams'

  
  

I've learned two things about writing a newsletter:

1. I find it impossible to do when I'm actually doing a job/working full time.

2. Sometimes you need to step back and think before you just dive in and write

So, while I spent 6 months as Interim CPO at QA (a brilliant time - thank you 🙂), I had to shut-up shop here. Then when I left QA, rather than just start blurting out whatever was top of mind, I stepped back a bit and thought about where I wanted to focus.

There are two things I’m passionate about: helping people with their careers, and helping organisations be successful through good product practice.

Careers first! I've done a fair bit of coaching over the last year and loved it. But I've always wanted to provide something a bit more structured that people can do in their own time; and that costs a lot less than getting a coach.

So I've been working on a number of products - the first of which is The Vital 9. A self-paced programme that will mix text, audio, video and some interactive tools/assessments to help people own their product career. Or as the title of this suggests - to help you work out what to do next.

A few obvious FAQs…

So what are the Vital 9?

The Vital 9 are 9 ingredients that I believe every product person needs to have in their career, but almost certainly can't have at the same time.

They come in three groups:

⚡ Catalysts: The things that give you energy and help you do great work.

🛠️ Achievements: The engine room of your career - the impact you have, the things that will demonstrate you’re ready for your next move.

💰 Rewards: What you get back in return - not just your salary, but your overall financial progress and your value in the market

I’ll be covering each of these three groups here (and on LinkedIn) over the next few weeks.

And what does this programme actually do?

1. Helps you assess how you're doing against each of the ingredients - both in your career to date, and in your current role

2. Helps you work out what you need to prioritise over the next 1-2 years

3. Helps you build a plan to achieve that

4. Helps you take ownership of your career as you deliver against that plan

Or, as I've summed it up in the strap line:

Decide What Matters. Build a Plan. Own your Product Career.

Right now, you can sign up for the Early Bird List and you'll get 40% off when it launches.

I'll also write up each of the three groups here in the coming weeks (obviously teasing you with some good bits, while holding some stuff back for paying customers!).

What problem does this solve?

This is to help you answer that deceptively simple question: ‘what should I do next?’. If you have a really clear answer for that, based on sound rationale - great. If not - this should help.

It’s deceptively simple because 90% of career decisions involve some kind of compromise and prioritisation. And even if you are be cool, calm and structured when making decisions at work, it can be a lot harder when you’re making them about work and about your future.

Are you going to say that my career is like a product - so I need to manage it in that way?

Well - there’s a bit of that. And yes, I use techniques like a Strategy Canvas, OKRs and Outcome-based-roadmaps to help you build your plan.

Also as with any product strategy/ plan - there’s a need to define your priorities based on what you’re trying to achieve in the long term.

But, I won’t stretch the analogy. The truth is those are just good planning techniques, we all know them, and you can apply them as effectively to your career as you can to any product (or business) problem.

Are you still coaching?

Yes, although I don’t have much free capacity at the moment. Still - if you’d like to work with me 1:1 - just book a time to discuss here.

Who's it for?

I've tailored it very deliberately to the broad group of 'product people' - so yes, Product Managers and Designers, but really anyone who works in a product team will find it useful. I suspect it’s not entirely useful for those right at the start of their careers - but once you’re past that, I think this can be valuable, whatever level you’re operating at.

I actually think it has broader potential, as a lot of the ingredients are quite generic. But I have to start somewhere.

How much will it cost?

The honest answer is: 'I don't know yet'.

This is partly because I'm still building and writing. But also because I need to make sure that I don't make a pricing decision (say subscription or lifetime access) that leads me to making a bad tech decision.

What I can say is that the initial price will be about the same as a single coaching session. I want this to be affordable.

Anyway, if you sign up to the Early Bird list, there's no obligation to buy and you'll get 40% off whatever the price ends up being.

What's coming next?

Beyond the Vital 9, I'm working on:

• A skills assessment tool for product managers - for individuals, teams and to use in a corporate setting for 360 assessment.

• 'Habits of Highly Effective Product Teams' - a workshop aimed at teams and businesses who want to learn about how great product organisations work, and think about how they can apply it.
  

  If you want to know more about either of these, just get in touch.

Are all your newsletters going to be this sales-y from now on?

Probably not. Well maybe. Anyway - best wait till next Wednesday to find out. There may well be video!

As I’m officially An Old Man, I’m very prone to repeating myself. But not everything I say is nonsense (yet!). The combination of having worked with some very smart people; having had my fair share of hits and misses at work, and having spent more time than I really should reading about work related stuff, means I’m often repeating things that I’ve picked up along the way and found to be consistently useful.

Some are very product focussed. Some are general principles that can get applied to product work. There’s probably a few too many from Amazon..but on reflection, that’s where I hear more genuine wisdom about how to operate than anywhere else I’ve worked.

So - in absolutely no particular order…

1. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
aka: No plan survives first contact with the enemy
aka: The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

So I’m a bit sceptical about having Mike Tyson as a role model - but this quote attributed to him is so perfect..and so applicable to so many situations that I find myself saying it again and again. The fact it has earlier versions (from Helmuth von Moltke and Robert Burns) shows its universality.

The standard scenario is ‘we were going to follow this happy path…then guess what? something we didn’t want to happen happened, and we ended up taking a different route…to a much less happy place’

That product / feature launch that your customers just weren’t bothered about. That delivery plan that hit the buffers because of some unanticipated dependency. That genius competitive move that your competitor seemed to have already anticipated. Fill them all under: under ‘punch in the mouth’.

Work is full of punches in the mouth. It’s why pre-mortems are such a good idea. But it’s also why we need to be very careful when we’re sitting in a room getting very excited about our genius ideas ignoring the fact that their success is going to be dependent on a whole load of stuff that we often have very little control over; or that our customers aren’t dumb…and won’t just ask ‘how high’ when we ask them to jump.

Planning is good. But being able to adapt when you’re plan blows up is where the really great work starts.

2. Better to build half a product than a half assed product

The best mantra about prioritisation that there is. From Jason Fried, 37 signals. It’s ok to build a lot less functionality than you’d like, but it’s not ok to build it in the wrong way.

3. ‘Leadership is taken, rather than given’

Said to me by a very wise former boss, and advice I’ve often passed on. He was explaining that change and disruption provides opportunities for people who step up to progress.

Too often people are sitting back and waiting for leadership roles to be granted to them: the promotion that will fall in their lap. But more often what happens is leadership roles are given to those who step up of their own accord, not being held back by their job description and often helping and unblocking others as a result..

Example: The (incredible, utterly inspiring) conductor Charles Hazlewood tells the story of how he became a conductor. Once when he was a musician in a youth orchestra, they were waiting for the conductor to appear. He was late. They were sitting round doing nothing. So Hazlewood just went up to the front…grabbed the baton and said - let’s get on with it. Shortly the conductor came in. ‘Where were you? Is there a problem? ’ Hazlewood asked. ‘I was hiding at the back to see who’d pick up the baton…I thought it might be you’. And his career in conducting started! I suspect the story is a slight polish on what actually happened - but who cares!

4. Distribution beats features

This was the mantra when I joined Prime Video. The business was way too small, and the real blocker was just not having our app on enough TVs, games consoles, and other devices. At the same time there were lots of things our app couldn’t do that the obvious competition could. So yes, we knew we needed a Watch List..and a whole load of other stuff - but first of all we needed to just get our app on as many devices as possible. Hence our iOS app launched without any search on it. (half a product..but not a half-assed product).

The point is - there’s always a ton of things you need to build. But some needs are greater than other. You need to be clear about what’s really going to drive the business and focus on those. The rest can - and usually will - follow.

5. Our UX isn’t great…but it isn’t bad enough to stop us being number 1

Another Amazon lesson - when we launched Prime Video in Europe we were a clear number 2 to Netflix everywhere. Except Germany, where a number of factors (including having the rights to The Big Bang Theory) thelped us be number 1.

The point is - the product (ie the bit we work on as product people) isn’t the only thing that matters to customers. Or to put it another way: ‘the product’ that customers see, is often a lot more than ‘the product’ that we actually work on.

Often having something that is good enough can be good enough if a lot of other boxes are ticked for customers.

6. Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

This is one of the Amazon Leadership principles. It’s brilliant both for it’s epigrammatic brevity, and for being a very powerful cultural mantra.

The principle is simple - teams and individual will disagree. But you need to air that disagreement. Make a decision between you - or get one made. And then move on.

My experience before Amazon was that conflict at work either meant furious blow outs; or time-consuming, passive-aggressive, politicised, conflict-avoidance. You might disagree or not. You definitely didn’t commit.

It takes a while to realise that tension is a feature of good organisations, not a defect. And great companies know how to get the best out of that tension, not to quash it or pretend it isn’t there.

7. When people feel they’ve lost control of something, they compensate by ‘over controlling’ the things they still have some authority over

I wish I could find a more eloquent way of repeating this. Something like this was said to me by an exec at Sky, and it such a truism about how life can be in big (and often not so big) businesses..

This is the opposite of ‘Disagree and commit’. It’s more like Disagree..and if it doesn’t go your way, leverage what power you have to demonstrate that the decision that’s gone against you was totally misconceived.

Example 1: a local team suddenly gets told the product roadmap is going to be driven by the group team. The local team’s reaction is to make ‘localisation’ a really major issue, general blocker etc - in order to demonstrate to the group team that they have no idea just how difficult/ complex/ unique their market is.

Example 2: a platform team is working on a feature that needs to be rolled out across a load of client teams. This means the client team has to work on it instead of something they wanted to do. They suddenly organise a whole load of user testing of the proposed feature to show that the platform idea really doesn’t understand *their* audience.

The second this exec (who was actually explaining some of his own team’s behaviour to me) said this, I realised that I’d done exactly this many times in my career. Once you know this behaviour - you see it everywhere. Including in yourself. It’s totally natural. Better understood, anticipated, and accommodated rather than hoping you can avoid it.

8. “If you’re stuck, just imagine you’ve been sacked, some awesome person now has your job. Ask what they’d do…and then just do it.”

I think I might have come up with this myself, and I’ve written a bit about it, but to be honest, I’ve seen lots of other people say something similar, so I can’t really claim it. We often know exactly what needs to be done, but for whatever reason we just can’t see ourselves doing it. This simple act of detaching ourselves from the situation can be incredibly powerful.

9. Don’t sell your ideas - explain your decisions

When presenting work it’s natural to switch into a subconscious sales mode. Which basically means presenting our genius work with as much conviction. You are utterly convinced about what you’re presenting and if you can just get that sense of conviction across - everyone will be equally convinced and glory and applause will follow!

I’d say that can work about one time in 10. The normal reaction is ‘have you thought about this?’ ; ‘have you spoken to x'?'; ‘what else did you think about’.

The point is you need to show your working. Explain the decisions you’ve made along the way, the alternatives you’ve considered. You need to make your solution feel like the best solution to your problem given the circumstances, and the evidence you have available. Not just a stroke of genius you had this morning in the shower.

10 . Think of the question you least want to be asked, and make sure you have the answer to it.

In some variation of Sod’s Law: ‘If there’s a question you don’t want to be asked, it will be asked’. Be prepared. Have your answer. Better still cover it up front…

11. Listen to the question you’re asked and answer it

Sometimes we’re in a meeting and there’s something we really want to get across. We then get asked a question, and the first thing our brain does is see this as a great opportunity to say the thing you really wanted to say, rather than answer the question we’re asked.

Or, even more common: we get asked a question that we don’t quite know the answer to - so we shoe horn in something else that we know lots about.

For politicians and execs doing media training, this is actually an art form…but for us normal human beings - it’s something we need to be careful about.

There’s an old Amazon mantra (sorry, yes, another one) that the correct answer to a question is either ‘yes, no, a number, or ‘I’ll get back to you’. There’s no need to be quite that robotic, but when you’re asked something - really listen, and really answer.

And if you don’t have the answer…well, that’s because you haven’t followed the previous bit of advice…but best to admit it and get back to them.

12 Judo not Sumo

From a negotiation course I did at the Guardian. Not that I’ve ever really done much Judo or Sumo - but with Judo the real skill is going with your opponent’s momentum, while with Sumo you’re going to try to push them over the line with shere might.

Judo moves are smarter, and less effortful. But this isn’t just about negotiation, but often when thinking about products/ features - sometimes we want our customers to do a particular thing with our product. It’s 1000x simpler to get them to adapt something they’re already doing (Judo), rather than getting them to do something completely different (Sumo).

13. Always take your full holiday allowance

Best. Career. Advice. Ever. Way way back there was a trade mag for journalists tha had a feature at the back where some big name editor would offer their wisdom to the world.

The last question was always ‘What’s your one bit of advice to young journalists?’ Most people would say something worthy like ‘always pursue the truth’/ ‘never reveal a source.’ etc etc…but the then editor of Esquire (I wish I could remember his name) said this.

There’s so many reasons its true…just do it!


Well - hopefully you made it to the end of that! Feel free to share a few of your own.

Have a great weekend!

Two wonderful nuggets from my reading over the Summer.

First from Simon Napier Bell’s Black Vinyl, White Powder - his 2001 history of British pop and rock told through the prism of sex and drugs - this description of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barratt

“..he appeared on-stage with his hair slicked down by a jarful of Brylcreem mixed with a bottle of crushed Mandrax tablets. Under the hot lights, the Brylcreem melted and the mixture slide down over his face, feeding his lips with an endless drip of downers which he happily licked through the show.”

I won’t comment - other than to say they book is a great read, and reminds you that there’s more to music than staring at a Ticketmaster queue screen for 24 hours.

On a slightly more work-related note, however, there was this from strategy consultant and academic, Roger Martin’s A New Way to Think

At desks and in meeting rooms, every day of their working lives, knowledge workers hammer away in decision factories. Their raw materials are data, either from their own information systems of from outside providers. They produce lots of memos and presentations full of analyses and recommendations. They engage in production processes - called meetings - that convert this work to finished goods in the form of decisions. Or they generate rework: another meeting to reach the decision that wasn’t made in the first meeting

I love that description of the workplace as a ‘decision factory’ (‘feature factory’ is so 2023!)- for a whole host of reasons, but mainly…

1. ..because as product managers and product teams we are nothing more, or less, than the sum of the decisions we make and the decisions we help to get made by others.

2. ..because it makes you realise that as a PM you are just a cog in a bigger decision making machine (ie: we’re not that different to other functions…let’s get over ourselves!).

3. ..because if you frame our work as a ‘factory’ - it forces you to think about factors such as efficiency and constraints and wasted work. Decision making is a highly repeatable process; even if you can’t automate it, you can definitely optimise it.

I’ve written before about better decision making; and I’m not claiming any great originality by focussing on it.

There’s Jeff Bezos’s famous (well, in this context) description of Type 1 and 2 decisions; the D.E.C.I.D.E framework - which started in healthcare (here) and I quite liked this S.P.A.D.E (Setting, People, Alternatives, Decide, and Explain) framework. In one of Lenny’s podcasts earlier in the summer, Kevin Yien suggested keeping a decision log.

Each entry should include the date, the decision made, the rationale behind it, and any expected outcomes. For example, if you decide to implement a new feature, note why you made that choice and what you anticipate will happen. Set a calendar reminder every three to six months to revisit and evaluate the outcomes of your past decisions. Reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Which I’m sure is a really sensible and valuable thing to do…but, you know …life is short…

We are the decisions we make

Going back to my point 1: We are just the sum of the decisions we make or get made. And that simple fact often gets lost in the screed of podcasts, newsletters, books, linked in posts and other good stuff about product management that can hit you on a daily basis and often make our job seem a whole lot more complicated than it actually is.

Scope. Strategy. Roadmapping. These are all just decisions - riffs on prioritisation. You have to look at the options; and use the best information available along with some clear success criteria to pick a path forward.

If you want to get better as a product manager - at whatever level - just ask yourself what are the main decisions you have to make; and then how can you make them more effectively.

Nine times out of 10, the answer will revolve around including the right people (which isn’t the same as everyone who wants to be included); being clear about what you’re trying to achieve; and then developing the confidence to make the actual decision based on the information available and move on.

Then rinse and repeat.

Decisions Made x Time - Biases = Judgement

The more decisions we make - or that we get made - the better we get at it. And given we are the sum of our decisions: the better we get at our job.

Partly because we hone our process, partly because we get to see the consequences of the decisions we’ve made in the past - and we learn what works, and also because we start to pattern match between different scenarios.

I know I scoffed at the idea of keeping a journal - but the principle is a good one. Every decision is something we can learn from.

We learn about how to mitigate the biases that exist in both us as individuals, and in various processes (the bible on this is Max Bazerman’s utterly excellent but not exactly snappily titled: Judgement in Managerial Decision Making (look for a copy on eBay!).

Being part of the machine

A lot of the biases that Bazerman points to are straight out of the behavioural psychology text book (our inability to understand probability; how the way data is framed can affect us) but there is also another bias: Product Knows Best.

And this brings me to my points 2 and 3, and the whole theme of Roger Martin’s quote (which, by the way, I have yanked totally out of context - and is part of anessay about something completely different to this): we sit in this much bigger decision factory. We are part of a machine; and we crank out decisions just like everyone else. The real way to succeed, as a product manager or team, is to understand the machine as a whole - and how you can help it be more effective.

One of the slight delusions with product management is that we think we are the machine; and everything we do is somewhere on the complexity scale between brain-surgery and nuclear fission.

The way for everyone else to succeed, therefore, is for them to understand us. (whoever coined the term ‘productsplaining’ summed it up perfectly).

But, you would never think that..would you?

Anyway - tea break is over. It’s time to get back to the factory floor…and start turning data into decisions!

A bit about me..

So, I had a great Summer and totally failed to do the things I set out to do. My amazing course on setting a strategy for your product career is half written; but a long way from live; and I got half way through moving from Substack to ConvertKit and bottled it (in the end all I achieved was changing the font on Substack - pretty impressive in only 8 weeks!).

I did however start an interim CPO role at a great workplace training business: QA - which is keeping me (very) busy for most of the week. But fear not..I’m going to keep going with the Bugle on a Friday!

The best bit of career advice I ever read, and that I’ve regularly repeated, is: ‘always take your full holiday allowance’.

So - having discussed with the Product Bugle leadership team (tough meeting!), I’m going to take a break from sending out weekly emails between now and the end of August.

As well as an actual holiday, and spending time with the family (and my guitar), there’s going to be a few things going on in the background.

• I’m moving off Substack - onto a fancy email/ CRM platform.

• I’m finishing writing and recording a course (or two) that I’ve totally failed to get on with.

• I’ve got a small mountain of books to read/ listen to

• I’m also lining up work for the Autumn/ Winter..

And on that last point, if you’re grappling with any product related challenge: from your career, to your team, or your product strategy. Feel free to get in touch (just reply to this email)…I’ve always got time for a chat and a coffee!

In the meantime - wishing you all a fantastic summer, and see you in a few weeks time!

The urge for rank is ineradicable. It's the secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game - and gain as much of it over you and you and you as we can. It's how we make meaning. It's how we make identity. It's the worst of us, it's the best of us and it's the inescapable truth of us..
Will Storr: The Status Game: On Human life and How To Play It

Let’s talk about Status. Because let’s face it, we all think about it enough. Even if we don’t admit it.

I was lucky enough to see Will Storr, Author of The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It, speak a few weeks ago (at the excellen† Off-Grid Sessions).

Since then the whole issue of status in the product world (and work generally) has been rattling round my brain. Two things in particular

• How it’s such a driver of so many of the things we do at work - even though we never want to admit to it

• The difference between the status we have inside a company and what we have outside us.

It’s amazing how much status can obsess us; and the pursuit of it can cloud our judgement. The only way to stay sane and get the success you deserve for you and your team is focus on impact and let status follow.

Micro status: the gamification of work

We don’t really admit to chasing status. But as Will Storr points out - we pretty much can’t help ourselves. It’s something that’s deep inside us. We might as well accept how much it drives us.

When you start to look at work through a status-shaped prism you realise Our day-to-day experience is an intricate (and often not very subtle) game of acquiring and using micro-status symbols.

These are the small things that cost a company little, but are all similar to the badges that boy scouts collect: they can range from what projects we get to work on, which meetings we go to, or lead; to where we get to park, who we have lunch with, or if we get mentioned in All hands.

Smart companies create micro status symbols to drive a desired behaviour. At Amazon, anyone who has a patent application submitted gets a big clear plastic jigsaw piece for their desk. If the patent is approved they get a blue piece. Even the most cynical of engineers couldn’t resist the status boost of a nice stack of jigsaw pieces.

This is classic gamification. Indeed you can think of work as one great big computer game where we go around gathering all these micro status symbols in the same way Mario collects coins.

When have accumulated enough of them we get to step up to the next level and trade them for a step up in our macro status: a move to a better team, a promotion; a pay rise.

Our careers are driven by both achieving and being able to demonstrate ‘macro-status’ symbols: Title, Level, Where you work and your Salary.

Macro status: The Top Trump version of you

When we put ourselves ‘out-there’ - and start job hunting (or seeking any other type of external approval) we’re all too often reduced to these factors: the Top Trump card version of ourselves.

Ex-Google CPO at FTSE 100 Corporate; VP Product at Series C Health Tech; Senior PM at a ‘traditional’ insurance company; PM at Series A B2B SaaS Reg Tech. These are all Top Trump status descriptions.

Whether we like it or not, we are all sifted and sorted according to these descriptions that simultaneously say absolutely nothing and absolutely everything about us.

But.. Internal status ≠ External status

If you want to get stuff done, and get ahead it’s essential to have your own stack of micro status, and to recognise it in others. But, so many of bits of micro status that matter when inside a company, have absolutely no value when you’re outside it.

They don’t make it onto your Top Trump Card.

Let’s say the CPO runs a monthly product review with the CEO and CFO. Each month she decides who is going to join from her team. This kind of thing is a major minor status indicator.

Product Manager A gets invited. Product Manager B isn’t.

From an internal perspective - PM A is riding high on a micro status endorphin rush; while PM B is now suffering from total FOMO.

But from an external perspective it’s irrelevant. If both were to apply for a job tomorrow this would make absolutely no difference.

OK, it’s a small example. But the broader point remains: much of what happens within a company - both good and bad - is irrelevant once you’re outside it.

Getting too caught up in its ebbs and flows and stressing about where you sit is seldom productive. Similarly getting complacent because you’re a big shot internally is dangerous. On the outside, 90% of it just doesn’t matter.

Better to keep your eyes on the bigger prize - and that means focussing on Impact.

Improving the Top Trump version of yourself: focus on impact.

So there is this ‘Top Trump’ version of yourself. This is basically the boiled down version of you that a recruiter will deduce from scanning your CV or LinkedIn profile for 30 seconds (and if you’re lucky having. quick conversation with you to find out your salary).

This is your vital statistics: where you’ve worked (this is worth a whole piece in itself); your title; what you’ve actually achieved (your Impact); how big a team you’ve managed; how much you earn; and whether you’re on the way up (your Trajectory) or flatlining.

Yes, we’re back to our friends Impact and Trajectory And Status is the connective tissue that sits between the two.

Impact - specifically the delivery of stuff that can be easily communicated outside your business (eg: I delivered £xm in value) - gets you status both directly (because it has value in its own right) and indirectly (because it drives bigger changes in level, pay etc). And trajectory is all about the rate of change of status.

So if you want real status, Top Trump card status, your best starting point is always going to focus on the key input: the impact you and your team are having. In particular, make sure it’s something that resonates both inside and outside your business.

It should be obvious..

I know this sounds blindingly obvious, but so many conversations I have people are caught up in micro status wrangles rather than thinking about the things that really matter.

They are thinking about how a particular job move might look or feel based on internal perception; or whether they’re up or down because they’ve got one or two more or less people in their team.

Instead you need to focus on one question: are you in a place where you can personally deliver something impactful that can be communicated easily outside ?

If the answer is yes - you’re just fine. You will be in the strongest possible place to succeed both internally and externally. If not, then all the micro status trappings in the world aren’t going to help you.

So you’ve been asked to come up with a Strategy for your product. Or show your roadmap. Or talk about your vision. Or perhaps you feel there’s a need for one or more of the above.

There’s no shortage of guides on how to create a product strategy/ roadmap/ vision; but most a) treat them as discrete activities; b) recommend a uniform process that you can allegedly apply in any organisation; and c) they ignore the context of whatever might be going on elsewhere in your organisation at that particular time.

Strategy, vision, roadmaps (and the accompanying financials) are all key outputs - but they’re not an end in themselves. Rather they’re optional tools for the outcome you want which will normally be some combination of defining, deciding and getting support for the future direction of your product.

And how you do that depends so much on your situation, the nature of the organisation (eg: an early stage start up is very different to a big corporate going through digital transformation); and the context of whatever is happening.

So, before you take some framework off the shelf and start getting all ‘strategic’, I’d urge you to take a beat: and maybe follow the old road safety advice: Stop, Look, Listen, Think. And ask yourself some fundamental questions.

• What are you actually being asked for? Is it a strategy? a roadmap? a vision? some financials? Or - more likely - some combination of all the above?

• What are you trying to get out of it? Funding? Support?

• Who is your audience? And what’s going to be on their mind?

• Who do you need to work with/ get on side?

• When do you need to get things ready for?

• How are you going to communicate?

Take 5: very different scenarios

If you’ve operated as a product leader at any level of seniority - here’s a few scenarios that will be very familiar to you.

1. There’s a board strategy offsite and they want to know the 3 - 5 year product vision.

2. You’re presenting your plan for the next year to the sales/ marketing team.

3. You’re new in a job; you’ve been here a month and you need to present your plan for the next few quarters to some group of senior leaders.

4. It’s budget time and you need to present your plan for the next 1 - 3 years to the CEO and CFO.

5. You’re presenting your plan for the next year to the product, design and engineering teams.

Each of these occasions has a different desired outcome; and even though you might be telling a very similar story in each situation, exactly how you tell it will have to change in each instance.

In each case what you’re actually going to have to provide is some blend of Vision, Strategy, Roadmap and Financials. Although exactly how you blend them and dial up and down the details in each case is going to be very different.

In each case you’ve got an audience that’s sitting there thinking ‘what does this mean for me and/or the things I’m trying to achieve?’. But in each case what they’re looking for is different.

And the unspoken bit: you know that they other question that’s being asked: ‘Do we have the right person leading this?’

The ideal world: Directional DNA vs reality

In the ideal world, you will have some discrete strategy process - where you capture and get support for your overall approach. You have a clear sense of long term direction; you know what you’re planning to focus on; you can talk broadly about a sequence of delivery; and you have a sense of the financials / resource.

This then creates a core Directional DNA that you can then call on - and each of the instances above is simply a different framing of the same core narrative.

You know this is how it should be. I know this is how it should be. Yet somehow it hardly ever happens like this

In reality, you never quite get time to break away from the day job to step back and really; and you will instead be focussed on simply getting your stuff together for one or more of the above activities (and they often all tend to land at the same time).

These events/ requests above which are meant to reflect your strategy/ planning process, in fact they often drive it.

So what is often presented as a neat linear process - like taking a penalty…becomes more like some kind of rolling maul, while also playing chess, on a roller coaster.

Principles > Process

The point of all of this - and the real skill of product leadership - is not to robotically follow a process, but to adapt to your circumstances and the particular needs of a situation, while having a very clear set of principles for how you operate.

You might have your own principles - but painful experience has led me to these..

1. Assume nothing: always get clarity on what’s expected from you. Especially if you’re new to a company and the idea of ‘a product strategy’ might be very different to what you’re used to.

2. Build and tell the whole story: Vision. Strategy. Roadmap. Financials: all are rarely effective when either conceived or presented in isolation.

3. Think bigger. Make it simpler. Only watchmakers succeed by making things smaller and more complicated.

4. Do the hard work outside the room: You’re 90 days into a new role and about to present to the exec, and you’ve decided to kill off the CEO’s pet project. Probably best to discuss that with her in advance.. !

5. Context is everything: be aware of whatever is going on outside your world that will be on your audience’s mind. If you have 10 mins in front of the board - make sure you know what will have happened in the hour before you go in.

6. Answer the question you’ve been asked not the one you hope you were asked: True on every level.

And finally..

Setting direction for a product, a team or an organisation is hard. If you or your team need help. Just reply to this, or track me down on LinkedIn.

We’re at that half-way point in the year, and there’s a good chance that you’re getting or giving some kind of mid-year feedback.

Or perhaps you’re thinking about your next job - either internally or externally, and you’re taking a look in the mirror and asking yourself where your strengths are, and where there are things you really need to focus on.

Or perhaps you’re thinking about how either all or some of your team need to step up in the second half of this year.

In all of these cases, you really need to lean on some sort of product capability model. Not the most exciting terminology I know, but it’s something I’ve found essential as both a manager and a coach.

Now - if you’ve never seen a model like this, or you’ve seen a few and not known how it might be relevant to you. Fear not! All is about to be explained.

What is this capability model of which you speak?

All PMs love a a nice pretty diagram. Most are either a dressed up list, or description of a process. And this is no different, it’s just a list of the stuff that you need to be good at in order to be good at being a good PM. Hell, let’s make that a ‘great PM’.

I’m going to give four examples below. Three from great product thinkers, and one of my own.

They all do the same thing in slightly different ways, namely they break thee PM role into a set of clear chunks/ clusters/ areas they enable four different things.

1. As an individual: It helps you define and name your talent and the areas where you need to improve

2. In a manager/ team member relationship: it enables structured feedback and development discussions, removing emotion and ambiguity.

3. As a team leader: It can give you a consistent overall map of team strengths and gaps.

I’ve found point 2 to be particularly useful. Without something like this it’s remarkable how unstructured and unhelpful feedback and development guidance can be. There’s the persistently useless ‘be more strategic’, but more than that without a framework to work from it can often feel very scatter gun and very ambiguous.

And so onto our four models..

Shreyas’s 3 Essential Senses

OK, I’ll admit it was listening to Shreyas talk earlier this week that I went back to this whole issue of these frameworks. And he’s also very big on ‘find the one that works for you’ ..so I’ll start with him.

Shreyas’s 3 Essential Senses of a PM is a simple route into the key aspects of product management, with a lot to unpack within each of the ‘senses’.

If you follow the link above, and in fact generally follow Shreyas on YouTube or Twitter - you will hear him unpack this. '

Ravi Mehta’s Product Competencies

Next Ravi Mehta’s Product Competencies

It looks like there’s a lot here - and that’s because it’s deliberately exhaustive. It’s simply not credible for you or any PM to be getting an A* in each of the 12 boxes. As Ravi says.

Most PMs, even peak PMs, excel at only a handful of these competencies. The difference between the average PM and the peak PM is an understanding of gaps and the ability to unite a team that fills those gaps.

Which is really the key to all these frameworks. No one is awesome at everything. If you’re lucky you will have one or two things that you are truly great at. The skill is in making sure that in all the other areas that matter in your role, you’re strong enough to

Petra’s Product Wheel

Then there’s Petra Wille’s Product Wheel..and I really think you should read her full description of it to do it justice. She provides a full pdf with all the detail in.

My own contribution to the genre

And finally, my own humble contribution to the genre…which I will call Simon’s awesome PM stack (for clarity: that’s a stack for creating awesome PMs….not saying that my stack is awesome).

I can (and maybe will in a future week) go into this in much more detail, but I’ve found this useful for working with my team and people I’m coaching, primarily because it reflects the way I see Product Management work clustered up.

Along the top it’s all around the three specific functions of a PM..

Discovery: Understanding your customers, their problems, and how you need to solve them

Setting Direction: From setting a vision to working out what you’re going to focus on and presenting this as a clear plan

Delivery: Which is where - if done well - the magic happens, and you make the kind of fine grain decisions (normally about prioritisation and exact scope) that make the difference something that ticks the boxes of your plan, or something that really delivers results.

This then gets underpinned by what I think of as three ‘muscle groups’ which are sets of adjacent skills that you need to be able to flex accordingly.

Analysis and Decision Making: Because whatever we do as product managers we need to constantly be weighing up evidence and either making decisions based on the back of it..or helping others make those decisions.

Communication, Collaboration and Influence: Which I group together because this is your toolkit for working effectively within any organisation.

Product Sense and Expertise: Which combines both your general product capability and intuition along with your specific expertise of either a given domain or your specific product.

Which is right for you?

The simple answer to that is - whichever instantly resonates with you, ie: whichever one you look at and can start to map yourself against.

I like (ie: I’m jealous of) the simplicity of Shreyas’; but also like mine because it leans in on two things I’m passionate about: Discovery and Decision making. I think Ravi’s is the most comprehensive, but perhaps a bit overwhelmingly so; and Petra’s tbh isn’t quite to my taste..but that’s just me, it might be just the thing for you.

The differences between them though are really the differences in the different ways of thinking of the creators. The underlying assessment is pretty much the same.

Rather like exercising, saving for a pension, the difference between each of the options is marginal; but the difference between doing something and doing nothing is immense.

Where to start…

The absolute simplest way to do this is to just pick which model works for you, and then mark yourself out of 5 for each item.

Be prepared to bump yourself up to 6 if you think you’re utterly awesome, and go to -1 if you really need to transform yourself.

The next thing to do is to ask your manager to do the same for you - see where you agree, and disagree.

If you are a manager - do this with everyone in your team.

Did I mention I’m a coach?

Perhaps, by some miracle, that passed you by ;-) If you’re a leader who wants to roll out a capability model like this, or if you’re an individual who wants someone to partner with as you look to develop - just reply to this newsletter , head to https://simonwaldman.uk, or find me on Linked in, and let’s see if I can help.