Strategic digital product management: organizing

Few topics are discussed more often in companies than the organization. How to organize people into teams? How to organize functions into departments? Where to allocate responsibilities? The problems of the existing organization. How much better things would be if we did it differently? And so on. This is particularly the case with product management … Read more

Strategic digital product management: Vital Few

The final dimension in this series on digital product management concerns roles and responsibility. Surprisingly, in many traditional organizations, product managers have significant responsibility but surprisingly little authority. Instead, they need to align all the relevant stakeholders and reach decisions based on consensus. Traditionally, this challenge is addressed by building a product management function where … Read more

Strategic digital product management: stakeholders

After having discussed principles, activities and scopes, we’re now moving on to the different viewpoints product management needs to consider. The coming posts will explore these. Specifically, we’re going to focus on stakeholders, technology and exploration. Stakeholders, as the name implies, are parties that have a stake in whatever is going on. In our context, … Read more

Strategic digital product management: execution

Thomas Edison, the alleged inventor of the light bulb (he wasn’t), famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The same is true for product management. We can explore and strategize all we want, but if we don’t act on the findings and the strategy, all these efforts are in vain. … Read more

Strategic digital product management: strategy

Few words in corporate lingo are more overused than “strategy.” Frequently, problems in companies are attributed to the lack of a clear strategy. In practice, however, it often is the lack of alignment around the strategy. This tends to lead to a situation where there’s an official strategy in the documents and presentations and another, … Read more

Strategic digital product management: product

To state the obvious, product management is about managing products. Often, the product manager is described as the CEO of the product, expected to decide on everything that touches it. In practice, things prove to be significantly more complicated and product managers often spend a considerable part of their time on stakeholder management. Previously, we … Read more

Strategic digital product management: features

The word “feature” is used in very diverse ways in the companies I work with and means different things to many. In some companies, it represents the key differentiation that we offer to customers and that helps us stand out from the competition. In other companies, a feature is a nice-to-have but rather irrelevant chunk … Read more

2024: 10 Predictions

Normally I try to be very careful with predictions. As Yogi Berra so eloquently said, prediction is hard; especially about the future. When looking at the folks predicting the stock market, the data shows that their accuracy is about as good as random, or even worse. For example, at the end of 2022, many predicted … Read more

End of Year Reflections: 2023

There is a saying often used by people of more advanced ages that the days go slow and the years go fast. Although I am not of retirement age yet, I must say that I feel this year has gone by really fast. Normally, this is because little of significance happened, but at least in … Read more

Strategic digital product management: trade-offs

One of my favorite sayings is that you can do anything in life, but not everything. This is sometimes hard to accept as it requires choices as to what not to do. And if there’s one thing most people prioritize, it’s optionality. Making choices that close off paths that were available to us up to … Read more