The best weapon against the HiPPO
I think we all have been in the situation, where a decision was coming from up high – the Highest Paid Persons Opinion. The decision was made, that this new feature has to be developed now and the product manager and her team is expected to just follow suit. This of course contradicts all notion of an empowered product...
What product managers can learn from the corona crisis
We’re experiencing strange, curious times right now. For all my fellow product managers this is the time to watch. We see product management practices operating at a scale none of us will ever have to manage. For every product manager uncertainty will be their bread and butter. Let’s use this crazy time as a learning opportunity. Where...
How to deal with sales (feedback)
“We need feature X!”, “We have lost an important deal to the competition, because we do not offer Y!“Every product manager, who is working with a sales team will know these or similar sentences. Product-led vs. Sales-led No product manager likes these comments and many in the product management / agile community...
The product feedback machine – A blog series
Every product team should care to build products that users love. But many teams, especially in a B2B context, don’t have enough, if at all, contact to real users/customers. How can they build the right product, when they do not get a deep understanding of the user and her problems? How often do your teams talk to an actual user?...
My first month as a manager
Now I’ve been a manager for a full month. Boy that’s a change bigger than I’ve expected. But I love the new direction, problems and challenges. So let’s talk about some of them. A new calendar The first and biggest change for me was the complete lost of control over my calendar. As an engineer I was complaining...
Why I ditched my Mac
I’ve been a Mac user for the last 9 years. Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook and I bought a new one last month. This is one of the reasons why most people look at me with disbelieve, when I tell them that I’ll be working on a windows powered laptop from now on. Why the heck am I doing it? As mentioned before, I took on a new...
A new adventure for 2019
I’ve been self-employed my entire career, ever since my dad enabled me to get paid for web design almost 20 years ago. But throughout the last year working for Trusted Shops as a contractor on their new platform I realized, that I may be able to improve my contribution dramatically, if I’m not the one coding but instead helping to decide...
How I used OKR for 2018 without knowing the concept
In this post I'm going to share the way I planned the year 2018 and how I unintentionally used Objectives and Key Results.
GrowIT 2018 conference recap
I’ve just arrived home from an wonderful trip to Novi Sad, Serbia. Over the weekend growIT took place, where I was invited to speak about mob programming. These are my thought on the event.
Coaching at :agile accelerator launchpad
Yesterday I was invited as a mentor to the e:on :agile accelerator launchpad supported by google. It’s an one week bootcamp for early startups focusing on one separate topic each day. A friend of mine did already mentored at the last launchpad in Düsseldorf and he introduced me to Marc, the Lead Mentor at the launchpad. We had a...