Standing up for diversity & inclusion, the problem with thought leadership & more

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 trying to curate some decent content for you (both my own & from others) so please bear with me whilst I optimise the content.

If you aren’t up for this anymore, please hit the unsubscribe button and I will fade out like Marty McFly.

Out today, my episode with Merina Khanom, product manager at BBC iPlayer and a strong advocate for diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Merina is the only hijab-wearing Muslim woman in the history of BBC iPlayer, and realised that the only person she had seen at the BBC that looked like her was the cleaner. We talk about this and a lot more. Check it out!

Coming next week we have 2 episodes, from Derek Osgood, founder of Ignition, a product GTM platform, and Holly Hester-Reilly, podcast proprietor and consultant at H2R Product Science. Stay tuned!

I’ve long been suspicious that some of the excellent books and thought pieces out there can put a burden of expectation on product managers working on less-than-ideal product companies. This is not new news, but Twitter user Ian Hipschman gave Inspired author and former podcast guest Marty Cagan both barrels with this Tweet:

Now, first things first, we have to call out that product management can be hard and it can be incredibly easy to get into a rough place mentally, and I’m glad Ian’s in a better place now. Marty himself gave a classy reply and a link to this article about managing PM time. I also wrote my own take on how product management can be a terribly difficult job. My only gripe with the initial Tweet is that it felt unfair to call out Inspired and Marty directly. Inspired is very, very explicit about how tough product management is. The 60 hour working week (which is toxic, as I’ve written about) is not presented in the book as a target, more of a warning!

In any case, make sure you look after yourself out there. We have a tough job, and you need mentors, coaches & leadership support. I’ve been doing a lot of mentoring recently, and am still pretty booked up but my DMs are always open on Twitter if you need to spitball.

I was lucky enough to be invited by Randy & Lily onto the Product Experience podcast, to talk about the transition from individual contributor to product leadership. I had a great time chatting to them about an important topic.

Here’s the article I posted originally on the topic too.

I’m currently digging back into Strong Product People by Petra Wille - I interviewed Petra on the podcast a while back and scanned the book but never dug into it properly. I did however create my own implementation of the PMwheel to help people visualise the results of the team evaluation mentioned in the book.

I also recently read the very popular Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. It’s a fantastic book, packed with actionable tips and strategies for how to build a product discovery culture in your organisation. I interviewed Teresa on the podcast a while back too.