Jan Werner

Why do we need a new approach to product management? That was the bold opening to my talk, ‘How to Strategically Leverage Product Ops,’ at Impulse #9 by Modulr.Design GmbH. And I stand by it. Here’s the harsh truth: We’ve stretched Product Owners and Managers too thin. We’ve turned them into Swiss Army Knives - expected to do everything, for everyone. 📈 Define strategy. 🔍 Manage backlogs. 👥 Align stakeholders. 📊 Analyze data. 💻 Advocate for users. 🔥 Put out fires. It’s impossible. And let’s be honest - dogmatic Agile isn’t helping. We’ve taken something designed to bring adaptability and turned it into rigidity. The result? 🚫 Product teams feel stuck. 🚫 Vision gets lost. 🚫 Products fail. It’s not that we need to throw Agile out completely. But we do need to evolve it. The future isn’t about superheroes. It’s about building teams that work together like the Avengers. Watch the first part of my video to understand my reasoning. In Part 2, I’ll dive into what this new approach looks like. For now, I’d love to hear from you: What’s the biggest challenge your product team faces today? Let’s rethink product management together. #productmanagement #leadership #productops #teameffectiveness

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One of the biggest challenges I see product leaders face is the expectation gap. There’s often a significant disconnect between the expectations of: 🤩 How we believe things “should” be - influenced by product gurus, books, podcasts, posts 😬 The reality of the situation - feature factories, low / no discovery, limited metrics 🕴 How our key stakeholders believe things “should” be - based on a different set of ideologies and books. Navigating this gap can be exhausting. We’re trained in product management, yet we find ourselves in roles leading transformation whilst keeping up the (already demanding) day job. 🐟 Leading change is extremely tough. It can feel like you are alone in swimming against the current. 😓 We feel like we’re failing. Our product process doesn’t look how it “should” do meaning we feel like we’re not adequate. 🚚 The mis-match in expectations between product leaders and stakeholders often results in us being held accountable for delivery, yet we most often have limited influence over it. It takes time, patience and top class influencing skills to work through this problem set. Sometimes we have to make compromises in order to make longer-term progress. This is not failing, it’s being smart. 👩‍🎓 To avoid burnout, it’s critical you put the right energy infrastructure in place for yourself. The activities that recharge you become non-negotiable in your schedule. If you’re navigating this situation right now and would like a coach / mentor, get in touch!

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Very timely I just received the news in my inbox. 📣 Flash Sale Alert! 🚨 For a limited time, my book is available at an exclusive 50% discount! 🎉 🔗 Grab your copy here: https://lnkd.in/e5WKJNJU 🛍️ Use Coupon Code: FLSH50 ⏰ Offer valid until: October 3, 2024, 11:59 PM EST Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just starting out, this book offers valuable insights into crafting a winning Go-to-Market strategy, emphasizing a customer-centric approach, and effectively enabling your teams for success. 🎧 Also, don't miss out on the podcast where we dive deep into these concepts! 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQQdicRC I'm passionate about helping others navigate the complexities of product management, and I hope these resources provide you with actionable strategies and inspiration. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts or questions—let's keep the conversation going! 🤝 Happy reading and listening! 📖🎙️ #GoToMarket #ProductManagement #FlashSale #BookDiscount #SoftwareDevelopment #GTMStrategy #ContinuousLearning #SalesEnablement #Marketing #Podcast

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Most products fail. Why? How to prevent it? There is an easy answer: By knowing the building blocks of any successful Product and getting them right! Take a look at the graphic attached to the post, based on the Lippitt-Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change (h/t Tom Alder). This is a simple framework that will allow you to create great products: ➨ 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: You have to know what you want to achieve with your product. Have a guiding vision on how to solve a problem worth solving. ➨ 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁: You need to know your potential clients and market size to know how to craft your product to make it appealing. ➨ 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀: If you don't measure and move towards the right goals in your product, you might as well not build it at all. You won't know why it was successful or failed anyway. ➨ 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁: Building a great product requires a set of talented people, including developers, designers, QA engineers, data analytics, and more! On top of that, you need to make sure they support you and your product! ➨ 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻: You need to have a plan on how to get clients in your market. Thus, even when being Agile, you have to know when and what you want to achieve and have a great strategy to support the right development direction. ... As well as what happens when each is missing. • No clear 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 = Your team becomes a feature factory jumping from one potentially useless feature to another. To achieve success you need focus and feature rush is the opposite of that. • No 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 = If there is no one to sell to, then building the product never made sense in the first place. • Wrong 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀 = Without this, you won't be able to iterate in any successful direction, thus limiting maximum potential growth. • Lack of 𝗧𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 = Without the right people around, there will be no dedication and future-proofing. You need help to create great products together! • No 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻 = Without it, you will never know when the right time to release your product is, and thus, you might waste time or arrive too late with your product. Last but not least, here's an example for my Product Management course: 1/ Vision: Provide a course allowing students to replicate my successful PM journey. 2/ Market: Based on other known courses and the size of influencers, it's about 500,000 product aspirants and practitioners. 3/ Goals: Maximize average course rating, growth will follow with strong social proof. 4/ Talent: Well, it was only me, but it was enough :) 5/ Plan: 3 months of work to create MVP (in the end, 12 ;) ) and all the improvements to reach a 4.6 rating afterward. Do you agree with my framework? What else is needed to have a great product? Sound off in the comments and, by all means, apply the framework to your chosen product there! #productmanagement #productmanager #strategy P.S. Create great products! Check out my courses on www. drbartpm. com :)

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Product Management is being instagramified.... and we are all suffering.... Tomorrow at 8:45 (Berlin) it is time again for one of our beloved round tables. In the last one, we talked about: 🌟 The instagramification of product management Product Managers start to get massive imposter syndrome by their shiny perfect LinkedIn feed world of how product should be done, while looking at their organization and seeing the mess. 🔥 Our Key Takeaways: - People do not post the bad stuff, but highly polished stories - The PM job is in fact really messy - Nobody has the perfect setup - LinkedIn pushes the fancy content - A lot of the problems, we are facing already starts with how our company is selling products Seats are limited to 20 people. Check out link in comments. Dominik Dern could you please post the link, so that LinkedIn is not penalizing the post 😉

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🤔 Is Product Management having its teenage crisis? At the Product Management Festival in Zurich, I shared a rather uncomfortable and very personal observation: our field might be going through some serious growing pains. "Is product management becoming cringe?" That's the title of a massively upvoted Reddit thread. And you know what? They might have a point. Some Signs of Struggle 🚩 ❗The "Gig Mindset" Having interviewed around 2500 PMs at Thiga, I've noticed a significant shift in how people view our profession. Remember when Product Management was considered the holy grail of tech careers? Those days seem to be fading. More and more professionals now see it as just another "gig" - a stepping stone rather than a long-term career path. ❗ The Hard Truth About Layoffs 500K+ tech layoffs in 2024 with PMs 2.6x more likely to be impacted than engineers. We're often seen as "not directly tied to immediate revenue" ❗ The Product Model Fatigue Traditional companies are reverting to top-down structures because we sometimes failed to deliver. And let's face it - C-levels are rightfully questioning why their tech teams have multiplied by 10 while the outcomes didn't follow. How Did We Get Here? 🤔 1️⃣ Lack of Humility Let's be real with ourselves. For years, we saw ourselves at the center of the map, as indispensable. We even started calling ourselves the mini-CEOs of the product. Remember those Venn diagrams about jobs in tech? Somehow, PM always ended up at the intersection of EVERYTHING. 2️⃣ What I call the "Marty Cagan Effect" 🎯 Don’t get me wrong, Marty’s content and SVPGs are probably the best out there. However we've blindly applied principles and methodologies across entire organizations, slapping new labels on people while looking down on the old ways. We lacked the humility and pragmatism to acknowledge that the product model isn't one-size-fits-all. Where to Next? 💡 Every crisis is an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, and AI is the perfect tool to make that happen. It enables us to focus on the essence of our work: bridging the gap between business and technology. Fewer product requirements, more creative problem-solving! It's up to us to regain our credentials and show the immense impact we can have! Raphael Leiteritz, Kai Hansen, Iulia Porneala,Adrian Zwingli #productmanagement #leadership #prodmgmt #productthinking --- I post on LinkedIn very irregularly and with varying quality → Feel free to follow me! 🔔

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💔 Is product ops broken? Here’s my story of why leaders hated #prodops work, inspired by Antonia Landi's wonderful presentation today at Product-Led Alliance #summit in #berlin. Such awesome content there, go follow her now if you're not already. → We sold out of free codes yesterday, so here are some more! 3 months free with: 💰💸 Discount code: ProductLedAlliance2024 Now, back to the conference... Antonia had me at the cat memes this morning – but the questions she asked equally made my inner #PM sigh in relief. It confirmed things I learned the hard way. → Ops is not broken, but sometimes its leaders are. When working at BlaBlaCar, my team and I changed the roadmap & PDLC processes. I loved it. Over two years we created life cycle & discovery processes, collaboration guidelines, tracking & reporting solutions focusing on outcomes, prioritization schemas, quarterly presentations and more. → I loved bringing order and gaining visibility through feedback. It was all hand-in-hand with the Product, Engineering, and service teams. We iterated through several frameworks, processes, and methodologies together, and did retros (so many retros) to find what worked for the 80% and gave the other 20% the right to bend the rules -- within reason 😉. I think we did something right because soon after, they were profitable. → It ended great, but it didn't start out that way. I started with some strongly held beliefs. I was a tiny 5'4'' blond ‘murican bulldozer, and let me tell you it did not make me friends with leaders there. It was only in talking with teams and listening to their ways of working that I realized the truth: → Applying a book-recommended frameworks by the book failed. I'm so grateful for those experiences and the time the teams invested in *my* learning. They taught me this critical lesson from Antonia's keynote: → Ditch the assumptions: There is NO ONE WAY to do product work. Here are the 5 lessons learned inspired from her talk and some of my own experiences in ops. I hope you like them; and go watch the recording, it's still happening live! #product #productmanagement #pm #PMops #Ops #productops #productled #plg #conference #event #antonialandi

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"Let's acknowledge that the product model is not a one-size-fits-all" I 100% agree on that. I also believe that the best part of the product model is the mindset rather than the structure, methods, frameworks, and so. 🤓

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The Real Truth About the PM Role. 500,000+ tech layoffs in 2024. PMs are 2.6x more likely to be cut than engineers. Why? PMs are often seen as “not tied to revenue.” Many organizations don’t understand the value they bring. Or PMs fail to make it clear. PMs are the glue between strategy, execution, and results. But glue doesn’t get credit. It gets taken for granted. Your role is only as secure as your ability to communicate its value.

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How does a product trio work when some roles are outsourced? Learn more: https://buff.ly/3COjZxP Do you work on a team that isn't co-located? How do you collaborate with your cross-functional colleagues? Share your best tip in the comments below. #ContinuousDiscoveryHabits #ProductTrios

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Do your experiments take weeks to collect enough data before you can evaluate the results? The key to faster testing cycles is to uncover hidden assumptions and test those. Come learn how: https://buff.ly/3gAhF2c #prodmgmt #ux #engineering

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🌟 2 more days to go to our Webinar "Actionable User Testing Results in <1 Hour"🌟 📅 Date: September 25 ⏰ Time: 5 PM CET 🎙️ Speaker: Stefan Rössler, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Userbrain See how quickly you can go from scratch to actionable insights with Userbrain. Stefan will demonstrate how to use our new AI tools to craft user tests that deliver meaningful results in less than an hour. Watch as tasks are generated, customized, and launched in real-time, and learn how you can save valuable time by simplifying the user testing process Why should you attend? ⏳Save Time: Learn how to cut down on the time and effort needed to set up and run effective user tests. 📋Learn How to Write Good Tasks: Get actionable advice on generating unbiased, impactful test tasks quickly. 🤝Engage with Experts: Interact with industry leaders and peers, tackle your user testing challenges, and gain hands-on advice that you can apply immediately. Register today and transform your approach to user testing. See you there! #Webinar #UserTesting #AI #ProductDesign #UX #UserExperience

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Building a product organisation inside a company is simple (but not easy). Note: this is different from turning the company itself into a product business. So how do you build a product org? 1) Hire a CPO / product director. The positioning of the role depends on how much emphasis you put on product in your company vision and strategy. 2) Align the product portfolio to strategy. Remember Jobs going from dozens of products at Apple down to four? 3) Form product teams on the new portfolio. Meaning directing and guiding the PMs that will actually set up the teams. 4) Form engineering, design, and support resources around the product. This is where the product director works either their peers in those areas. 5) Form a product community and set guardrails for product management. Establish standards from inception, development, growth to sunsetting. Let the PMs define the norms and best practices. That’s it. There aren’t many more steps to it. You can dive deeper into each and break it down but what you do and how you do it depends on your company and its strategy. #productmanagement

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Are you slowing down your own product development? You want the best product possible, so you ask for that "one extra thing" before launch. But here’s the hard truth: 𝐌𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭. Every new feature request causes rework, pushing timelines further out and creating frustration for everyone. The consequences? 🔺 Projects drag on forever, dealing with your additions. 🔺 Teams burn out, stuck in endless cycles of revisions. 🔺 Customers lose faith, frustrated by delays and empty promises. Perfection is the enemy of progress. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: 🔸 A “good enough” product in users’ hands beats a perfect one that never ships. 🔸 Fast feedback loops drive real innovation. 🔸 Progress over perfection keeps your team engaged, motivated, and productive. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭. 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐥. Your customers don’t need perfection. They need solutions. Ship something today.

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"Our goal with discovery is to determine if we are building the right thing before we design or build it—not after." 🔍 Stop testing entire solutions and start testing assumptions. Learn how top product teams run 12-15 discovery iterations per week by breaking down ideas into testable assumptions. Key points: ⚡️ Test assumptions before full prototyping 🎯 Align team understanding early 🧪 Match right research method to each assumption ⏰ Save time by failing fast Read the article: https://buff.ly/3D62b14 💭 What's one assumption you wish you had tested before building? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Greg Prickril and I spoke about how diversity isn't just morally right to have in teams, but a strategic factor for innovation and in building high performing teams. Different perspectives people bring are an asset to organizations working in highly volatile contexts. And diverse team outperform non-diverse team in business outcomes. I've had in depth conversations about how Diversity relates to Psychological Safety with Joao Moita, Andre Albuquerque and Sebastian Borggrewe in their podcasts. And Psychological Safety is the #1 predictive factor of a high performing team. There is no psychological safety in a team if some team members feel like they don't have equal voice. Which will immediately damage the level of trust between members of the team. Getting empathy, trust, inclusion and diversity right is a prerequisite for psychological safety in a diverse team. You also need diversity for innovation. Great new ideas stem from a constructive way to combine and build on ideas coming from all kinds of backgrounds and disciplines. We all know that this cross-functional way of working is at the core of successful product teams. Diverse backgrounds in people on the team are a strategic asset that shows in the outcomes of the team. So Product Leaders: you want innovative, high performing teams that create great outcomes for customers and the business, then you need to nail diversity, inclusion, trust and psychological safety.

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Explore more ways to organize your product team than just by product feature. It's a perfectly acceptable method, but it’s not the best fit for every situation. Here's why: 1. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘷𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘴. When you have a PM aligned to a feature, they’re highly unlikely to suggest killing that feature. It makes the PM devoted to the feature instead of the product as a whole. 2. 𝘐𝘵 𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵. It assumes that the PM who owns a feature will be able to direct their resources to the strategic priorities of the business. The problem is: this very often breaks down. Feature teams have to do the work, and often fail, in mapping the features to outcomes. 3. 𝘐𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘗𝘔 𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴-𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘥. In a PM-owned org, cross-functional leads contribute but aren’t equal owners to the plan. In cross-functionally owned orgs, multiple teams and cross-functional stakeholders contribute. 𝗦𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝘀 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀? The go-to framework I’ve seen is from Ravi Mehta in Reforge's Product Leadership course. In it, he explains that there are two questions to ask: 1. Are teams focused on features or outcomes?     2. Do teams own their metrics or share their metrics? The answers to these questions maps to the type of product org you have. I consider them the "2 Dimensions of Product Org Design." When you answer each, you end up in one of the following 4 categories: • 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿: This is when the PM has sole ownership over a metric and is responsible for driving it. • 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿: This is when the PM is focused on a metric (vs a feature) but does not solely own it. • 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿: This is when the PM has sole ownership over a feature. • 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿: This is when the PM is focused on a single feature but does not solely own it. None is "better" than the other. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

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