One Knight in Product newsletter
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The Swimming Pool Question, Mapping your Way to B2B Success and Considering Desirability vs Defensibility
Imagine the scene. You're on a work retreat and you've been working hard. You're taking a well-earned break at the on-site pool, but you bring your laptop in case you need it. You're also a reasonably successful recreational TikTok user. You record a short vi…
Playing poker at the big table, PMs having access to the code, being the first PM at a startup & more!
Hello everyone 👋 Here's your regular reminder that product management terminology and book talk is all well and good, but it's very unlikely to win you any admirers outside of the product team. Draw a line between the best product thinking and actual business…
Teams that manage themselves & the other type of developer tools
We'll talk a bit about working with developers in this issue. Before we get into that though, we need to call out that product people aren't developers and don't have to have a development background. However, some of us do have this background. This is great…
How to Make Managers, the dreaded BBQ question. and what the heck is DevRel?
There's probably a whole article to write about fake AI in products, but for now just remember that there are a non-zero number of products claiming to use AI that probably just use a bunch of if statements.
Boondockers, Wizard of Ozzing, landing on your feet in your next product leadership role
I've been a bit quieter on social media recently, and this newsletter is a little late too, mainly because I started a new job! I'm super excited to be working with the team at Unmind to revolutionise mental health support in the workplace. It's genuinely a p…
Mentorship, fixing your Scrum and, wait, do PMs need project managers?
I recently came off the back of a mammoth 76-person mentoring streak which has lasted from January through to this week. I originally put out a call in December expecting a handful of responses but was blown away by the appetite for mentorship.I've come to th…
The importance of teamwork, here comes the science bit & managing customer requests
One of the things that really bothers me about product development is the dynamic that can exist between product management and other teams... the constant back and forth where developers are fighting with designers who are fighting with product managers (or …
Users, buyers, not picking favourites & noodling on North Star Metrics
In B2B product management, the topic of users vs buyers often comes up. Who do you do discovery with? Who do you have to keep happy? Who do you optimise for?The answer is, of course, both. You need to keep buyers onside otherwise you won't make any new sales.…
The role of QA in product development, and why not read a book about sales?
It's always easy to make fun of the relationship between the product team & the sales team, but we have to call out the fact that both are essential if you want to sell big ticket products to big companies. I'll talk about sales teams in a future issue bu…
Slava Ukraini, the importance of mentoring, and engaging with engineers
No one signed up to this newsletter for political commentary, so I'll keep this brief but I've been really struggling to focus recently because of the situation in Ukraine. I had a few trips to Ukraine with school in the mid 90s and have fond memories of the …
Returning from holidays and thinking about technical debt
Showing typical lack of foresight I started a newsletter then went on holiday. I went snowboarding for the first time in 9 years and just about survive. Here's a picture of my taping my foot together to avoid having to spend hundreds of pounds replacing a boo…
Standing up for diversity & inclusion, the problem with thought leadership & more
Hello!I've migrated the mailing list over to Revue for its Twitter integration - thanks for sticking with me (and to the new signups from Twitter!). I'm aiming to keep this at one a week and summarise some great content alongside new podcast drops. I'll be tr…