Chris Compston

What is product culture? That was the topic at last night’s Product Group London meetup, expertly and brilliantly facilitated by Asomi Ithia (as always). It was a great discussion, but the wrong question imo 😊. Most product people know a good product culture when they see one: vision, outcomes over outputs, continuous discovery, empowered cross-functional teams, user-centric focus, yada yada. Just read any Marty Cagan. But that’s missing the point in my view. More interesting questions in my mind are: * Why is a good product culture important? * Is it even important? * Who is it important to? Personally I think the Product community is at risk of giving itself a bad name (probably has already) by debating the “how to create a good product culture” question. About a third of PMs last night said that their company has a bad product culture. No surprise! Product people care about product culture. What I think everyone should care most about is “is the culture effective or ineffective for the business?” How many of those PMs work at successful companies that are earning good revenue? There were a few household names - I won’t mention them. I really like Jason Fried’s definition of culture: your company’s culture is **the rolling average of everyone’s behaviour and actions over the last 50-days**. 50 days isn’t long. So if you want to change the culture of a company or a department or a team start persuading them to change their behaviour. Here are a few ideas: * Share a new actionable insight every week * Add clear context and measurable success criteria to every user story in your backlog * Speak to a new user every week (or sit in on customer calls) and share the key highlights with your team * Tell everyone about the impact of that last change (or what you learned) * Introduce regular team retros Whatever it is, if you think something can be better, embody what good looks like, do it for 50 days and if it worked then your [team/org/company] culture is now more effective, thanks to you.

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One of the most common questions I get from Product Leaders about Discovery is “How much is enough?” And as a Product Coach, I’ll give them a comforting answer about finding the right cadence for their teams, whilst explaining that it doesn’t need to be a big commitment. A solid answer, right? But it’s only a half truth. It’s the part of the answer that makes committing to a regular schedule, and maturing their discovery practices more comfortable. But the whole truth is that the volume of discovery you do matters a lot. Because the volume of discovery sets the pace of learning in the team. And every time you decide to delay discovery, to skip a touch point with a customer for something ‘higher priority’, you're skipping an opportunity to uncover crucial insights that could make or break your product. The product teams that I see killing are enthusiastic about getting hold of their customers, they’re excited about showing them what they’re working on, and they’re obsessed with solving their problems. For them it’s not a question of ‘how much is enough’ it’s question of ‘how much can we manage?’ Because they understand that the volume of Discovery that they do important. What do you think would happen to your product if you double, or tripled the amount of customers you spoke to per month?

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The driving force is enthusiasm, though, it is a good design only when the creator and receiver's thoughts are in harmony. Harmony usually is not easy and quick.

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At No Moss we've been hard at work developing our Guide to Product Discovery: How to Validate Your Product's Business Case. Some great thought starters so read the full piece here > https://buff.ly/4bpjo29 #ProductDiscovery #StartupTips #ProductStrategy #Innovation #MarketResearch

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Anyone working in a design system team will know there’s lots to do and lots to learn. To celebrate twelve months in my role as Senior Product Manager on the BBC’s WebCore Design System I wanted to share nine lessons I’ve learnt from working in this interesting and complex space. They include.. 📚Design systems are an essential part of modern development and design 📚There’s huge potential for accessibility wins 📚Research is key 📚People are your product too 📚Community matters 📚People love design systems. People hate design systems 📚Demonstrate value and celebrate wins 📚Governance, yes please 📚Metrics ftw As I mention in the article, the design system community is supportive and mega helpful and people have given me a lot of their time and expertise. Shout outs to Steve Messer Ellis Capon Marianne Ashton-Booth Amy Hupe Dan Donald Scott Strubberg Robin Cannon Grace H. and good folks that run zeroheight's Converge Festival for being super knowledgeable and all round good eggs 🥚. If you work in design systems, which of these lessons resonate with you? Or, more importantly, have you got your own lessons to add to this list?

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Last night at ProductTank London we heard from 4 different speakers on the topic of Product Culture. My key takeaway is this... 'Good' product culture lacks definition. You might read about the importance of product culture, or ask about it when interviewing. You may even try to evaluate how good or bad the product culture is at your company. But here's the bottom line: product culture 𝘪𝘴𝘯'𝘵 something that you'll usually find written down, like you would a strategy, a roadmap, or a vision. Hearing someone describe it will inherently be biased. Product culture is the shared values, beliefs, behaviours, and practices that shape a team, org, or company's identity. It changes when you change your beliefs, behaviours, and practices. Not satisfied with the product culture at your company? You're more empowered to change it than you might think. How have you gone about improving product culture at your company?

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I often get asked 'What is a product manager' because despite product management having been around for decades it's not one of the professions you learn about growing up (at least I didn't), so those outside of the industry aren’t always familiar. To me, it's about managing a product through its lifecycle from ideation, validation, build, scale, enhance and even sometimes sunset once it's reached the end of its valuable life. You need to think about the strategy and vision for the product, how it aligns with your company goals and what outcomes you are trying to achieve. From here you can start to plan how you achieve those outcomes which is operationalized on a roadmap with a set of prioritized features and validated through user research.   The activities you do really vary depending on what stage the product is at but typically include identifying the problem, market research, competitive analysis, market sizing, roadmapping, planning, technical workshops, business cases, user research, training, documentation, go-to-market, and anything else that’s needed to ensure the success of the product. Roles can really vary across companies with the scope typically getting narrower the bigger the company.   I firmly believe that anyone can be a product manager regardless of your background it's simply about finding the right company, product and role that fits with your skillset.   For other product managers out there what does being a product manager mean to you?   P.s No it's not managing projects, although being organised and able to plan is definitely helpful

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I’ve been at lots of events recently and I’ve noticed speakers etc fueling a trope: “product management didn’t exist 15 years ago”. As someone who became a product manager in the nineties, I’d discourage this thinking as it under-values what our job is actually about. I was fortunate to spend eight years learning from leaders who were part of an MBO from Lotus. We built award winning, highly profitable enterprise software, but mostly on CD-ROMs. Consequently we didn't have AB testing, fake door tests, CI/CD or HotJar. But we did have sales-led pressures, prioritisation conflicts, remote teams, pricing complexity and disruptive new market entrants. What we also had was a passion to understand the customer’s pains and to then design and deliver something that was commercially valuable that addressed it. My wife works in FMCG, where for decades brand managers have been uncovering insights, then working with manufacturing, supply chain and sales & marketing to delight customers and create business value. That’s product management. Our tools, frameworks, product books and our understanding are ever evolving. And the enormous benefits of online deployment all mean that for many the job is done very differently now than it was in the nineties. But the business basics remain as they always have done. Especially for the very many product managers who aren’t solely working just with digital solutions. I bring this up not to defend those of us with grey hair (or little hair, in my case). My concern is that AI will be a paradigm shift to rival the upgrade from CD-ROM to Internet, and that may frighten some. Your future self will have Copilot instantly whip up a prototype, test it on synthetic personas leveraging mountains of sentiment data, and a Monte Carlo simulation will present you with your best options, in a compelling doc/ppt created by an LLM. But it's just another tool change, and another set of ways to better understand the opportunity, leverage the art of the possible and de-risk getting to a good commercial outcome at even faster rates. A peer has chosen to re-train as a carpenter because they've realised they're at heart a problem solver, and the context isn’t relevant. So please don’t think your super-power comes solely from being current on the tools and techniques of how you do your trade today. Product management has always been necessary and always will be, even if AI creates another shift in the technology, techniques and the pace of the work. #productmanagement

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Nice! That fits with the definition I've been using for ages: A Product Team is a group of people who can: 1. Ask a question 2. Get an answer 3. Understand that answer 4. And take action based on that understanding It doesn't have anything to do with who comes to stand up, who takes Jira tickets, or even reporting lines. If you don't have a group of people that get together regularly who can do all of the above, then all you've got - at best! - is people who can push code into production & make it look pretty. And that's just not good enough. Clifton Gilley - shout if you're up for a chat sometime.

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It's getting a bit old now, but we keep coming back to Google's UX Playbook for Retail. It's a super simple but thorough overview of how ecommerce stores with larger product catalogues should approach UX. There's some really sold tips in there - link in the comments!

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💕 What do I love about working as a Product Leader? 💕 Helping an organisation to transition to a product operating model is more than a structural change; it's a cultural shift that demands a new mindset across the entire organisation. As a product leader, my role isn't just about working closely with product teams—it's about coaching the wider organisation to embrace this change. Product coaching helps bridge the gap between product teams and other departments, fostering a unified approach to product development and customer-centric thinking. It equips everyone with the skills and understanding needed to drive innovation and deliver value. By extending coaching beyond product people to include marketing, sales, and support teams, you ensure alignment on goals, streamline processes, and break down silos. This holistic approach amplifies the impact of your transformation, driving better outcomes and a stronger, more agile organisation. Embrace product coaching—because true transformation starts with everyone on board. 🌟 #ProductLeadership #ProductCoaching #Transformation #Agile #Innovation #allaboard

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Obligatory post about ProductTank London last night. Brilliant speakers, specifically Jason Knight who just makes great sense and comes across so brilliantly. Also awesome to catch up with some friendly faces in the product communitity and meet some new ones. Looking forward to the next ones! I'm editing this so as not to come across too glib. I really value the ability to get out and meet people in the product community and hear other people's experiences. In this case, about #ProductCulture and how we talk about it like we're trying to change the world. The fact is, we product folks are cautious individuals who are often just trying to mitigate and educate others about the anti-behaviours the organisation is doing and has done for weeks, months, years, decades...insert your own timeframe. I believe more product folks working in their product bubble will develop their own culture that works for them...however..... I've worked in many places where it feels like product is the glue that holds everything together and as such, this is where that product culture comes into focus. You can have a team of well purposed, highly skilled product ninjas, but if the rest of the interfacing teams, organisations, squads, tribes...[insert your nomenclature for a group of people] don't fully understand how to work with product and product don't know how to work with them, then this is the bit of product culture we're talking about. The organisation has to have a "Product Culture" and in order to do this, there's a large education effort and responsibilty that lies on the product teams and their leaders. #productmanagement #productcommunity #networking #productculture

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"Looking for designers who happen to manage people"—not your typical people manager, but someone who can still design while leading a team. It's rare, but I’m noticing more of this lately. It’s not just in design either. I’m seeing an increase in conversations from VCs and founders that their companies are taking longer to hire senior leadership roles, leaning towards ICs who can execute, rather than focusing on pure management roles. It’s interesting—companies flattening hierarchies, cutting out middle management, and expecting design leaders to remain hands-on. I’m wondering if this trend balances out in the long term. Truth is, I’d do the same if I were hiring today. I'd lean on senior folks in an advisory or fractional capacity for as long as possible and tap into my network for specific gaps, like GTM strategy. But when it comes to full-time hires, I'd likely focus on execution and ICs over exec-level roles. What are your thoughts? For those of you leading teams or in senior roles, how are you seeing this play out in your world? Do you see this trend growing or is it just a phase? Btw, looks like an awesome and rare opportunity, hit up Tom Scott if interested ↓ #design #management #leadership

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Happy Monday! If you've got a spare 30 minutes this week, you may want to jump on our Product Capability Assessment to identify your product strengths. You'll get a capability report immediately for all your hard work. Having a personalised report will help you have better development and career conversations with your leader. https://lnkd.in/gxQeeYN3 #productmanagement #capabilities

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Break Free from Legacy Structures: Embrace the Future with Product-Led Principles 📈. Have you ever considered applying the principles of product-led growth internally? It's time to break free from the cycle of building features nobody asked for and start showcasing the real value of our work we deliver. How many of us have fallen into the trap of missing the mark with our systems and solutions? Let's flip the script and focus on providing solutions that truly solve problems. Imagine driving organic user growth within your organization by delivering quick, tangible value that directly addresses their needs. From trial versions to faster responses, to self service options for information, the possibilities are endless. "Try before you buy" should be the norm, not just for customers, but for our internal processes too. The bar should be raised for our day-to-day experiences. Who's with me on raising the bar for expecting more from our internal solutions? #ProductLedGrowth #InternalInnovation #TryBeforeYouBuy #ProductInnovation #PlatformProduct #DataStrategy #LinkedInCommunity

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November’s Product Group London saw the group discuss Stakeholder Management alongside insights from our Product Coaching Panel with Phil Hornby, Robin Zaragoza, Marton Gaspar and Evie Brockwell. Topic of the Night: Stakeholder Management - Stakeholder management can be a tough part of product management! Although the conversation started with many saying their stakeholder relationships are good, once we got into the discussion it was clear that most people face challenges in different guises. From individuals who operate as a kind of personal nemesis through to complicated and periodic highs and lows, changing dynamics as organisations scale and healthy tensions that need to be managed. - Suggestions for addressing these (and other) challenges included taking a very deliberate and systematic approach; understanding stakeholders agendas and what they care about; regular 1-2-1 meetings to build relationships; having honest conversations and being transparent and open-minded; going the extra mile to build trust; not trying to please everyone, and prepare to adjust approach over time. Guest Speakers: Product Coaching Panel with Phil, Robin, Marton and Evie With 4 coaches on the panel, we managed to squeeze in a multitude of topics with highlights including clarification that coaching is not about fixing bad management, but a source of personal development that enables you to be your best self; get a coach to address areas your boss is not able or does not have the time to support you with; use coaching to develop hard and soft skills such as strategy development and addressing imposter syndrome; when sourcing a coach, ask around and have an initial session (most will offer this for free) to understand how they can support you and build rapport; seek coaches who have knowledge and/or experience in the space or specific areas you require support on; ahead of sessions prepare, but don’t over prepare and between sessions reflect on your journey and progress; help your coach support you, by being open and sharing details about your context; think of coaching as a part of your job, not an additional piece to be fitted in when you have time, and be clear about your goals before approaching a coach. It was also interesting to hear that 72% of PMs face burnout at some point in their career, with coaching helping to avoid and/or address this if it occurs! Thank you Evie Brockwell, Robin Zaragoza, Marton Gaspar He/Him and Phil Hornby🙏. Thanks to everyone who came and engaged in the discussions 🙏. Thanks to Cleo🙏 for hosting us and providing the pizza and drinks. See you on 5th Dec! #tpglondon #prodmgmt #productmanagement #productcoaching

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✨🌱The Product Perspective✨🌱 I listened to Max Cowley-Beadman speak on this topic at ProductTank back in February and asked him to dive into it a little bit deeper in a blog with me. He covers - 💡How stakeholder misunderstandings of your role can make it difficult to show your value. 💡Burnout as a Product Manager and his experience as well as how he tackles burnout. 💡Enjoying your successes. 😊And more It's a really important one and a topic I think a lot of Product Managers will have resonated with at some point in their careers 💭

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Handy summary of discovery activities from Ant Murphy @ Product Pathways. For product teams, a toolkit to pick from as you tackle gnarly product challenges For ICs, a checklist for your own personal development For leaders, a handy lens to help decide how to assemble teams, and how to recruit and develop your ICs

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I frequently hear Exec teams simultaneously claiming “Customer focus”, whilst avoiding talking with their customers. 🤔 Establishing the practice of user research at the top-most level enables a culture of customer focus throughout the organisation. Some of the biggest breakthroughs I've witnessed as part of a leadership team have resulted from the whole C-level spending a couple of hours meeting with real customers. Examples: - Finding our customers have an alternate use case for our product - Realising who our real competitors are - Discovering a new channel where our customers are engaged - Understanding the real connection between our pricing and customer actions - Uncovering features/UX being used in an unexpected way

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