Review

Roman is one of my favourite product management authors. His concise, to-the-point writing style is incredibly respectful of your time. He delivers wall-to-wall concepts without any storytelling fluff, providing just enough prose to get the point across.

This book focuses on the practical challenges of the product management role. To be a successful product manager, you need to work closely with your team and with stakeholders. Roman does a great job of identifying the challenges of working with others, and provides actionable advice on how to overcome them.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Product management is hard because…
• You lack transactional power (you’re not their boss)
• You work with a large and heterogeneous group
• You have limited influence over the group selection
• You have a dual role (leader and individual contributor)
• You have to lead at different levels (vision, strategy, tactics)
• You have to be available to participate in agile practices
• Leadership is about influencing people to work toward shared goals
• Empathy is a key leadership skill. Empathy is our capacity to understand other people’s feelings, needs and interests and to take the perspective of the other person.
• Knowing your s*** makes it easier for people to trust you (users, market, competition)
• You have to choose the right leadership style for the moment: visionary, democratic, affiliative, delegative, coaching, pacesetting, autocratic leader.
• Build trust with your development team by leading with curiosity and care. Be open minded and act with integrity. Get to know people, and involve them in product decisions.
• Don’t take on scrum master duties. You’ll overload yourself while making it look like your team don’t need one
• The best performing teams are formed around products, colocated and stable.
• Collaborate with your stakeholders (don’t manage them). Involve the right people, build a stakeholder community and involve them in strategy. Leverage their expertise and creativity, build a shared understanding. It will make alignment easier.
• Goals are the key to guiding a development team and stakeholders. They create purpose, align effort and enable autonomy
• As a product manager, it’s your job to create a chain of goals, that stretch out into the future and make it clear where you’re going, and how what you’re doing will help

Type	Goal	Description	Timeframe
Visionary	Vision	Ultimate purpose, positive change.	5 years out
Strategic	User and business goals	Value propositions and business benefits, captured in the product strategy	For the life-cycle stage
	Product goal	Desired outcome or benefit product should provide, stated on the product roadmap	2 to 6 months
Tactical	Sprint goal	Benefit of a sprint, shown on the sprint backlog	1 to 4 weeks

• Great goals are shared, realistic, inspirational, alignment creating, autonomy fostering and linked together

• Listen deeply. It helps you build connections, acquire information and garner support for decisions
• Covey’s listening levels: ignore < pretend < selective < attentive < empathic
• Listen inwardly → what thoughts and emotions are being triggered? are they helpful?
• Be mindful of your mood before you start a conversation. Your mental state changes how you see reality.
• Ask clarifying questions, summarise what you’ve heard, pay attention to body language
• Let people finish, don’t interrupt. Pause before you respond.
• Buddhist principles of ‘Right speech’
• Say only what you believe is true
• Only speak if it’s beneficial for the person listening
• Don’t use harsh or harmful words
• Make sure you speak at the right time and place
• Flipping and framing:
• Name it: What is the problem?
• Flip it: What is the positive of the problem?
• Frame it: What is the desired outcome of the positive opposite?
• Separate problem from person.
• Apply kind speech to not only the people who are present but also those who are not

Paraphrase	Summarise	Clarify	Mirror
Draw out the other person	Acknowledge feelings	Encourage	Pause
Postpone if you need to	Chunk	Positive first	Flipping
Keep on track	Redirect

• Conflict is normal, it can be a source of creativity and innovation if handled well.
• Win-lose dynamics create unhelpful strategies (Competitive confrontation, passive aggression, conflict avoidance, passivity). They don’t provide sustainable positive outcomes, they damage relationships, lead to a lack of trust and have a negative impact on well being
• We often think ‘we’re right’ because…
• We think our perceptions are correct
• We’re attached to our ideas
• We find it hard to admit that we’re wrong
• Bad behaviour isn’t justified, it helps to understand how it developed. Accept some responsibility. Move from a blame game to a contribution mindset.
• Resolve conflict with non-violent communication.
• Look for positive qualities in the individual
• Stop reinforcing negative thoughts and emotions
• See things from the other persons perspective
• Be willing to forgive and ask for forgiveness
‣
Share observations (what you saw and heard)
‣
Explore feelings and recognise emotions
• Share your feelings
• Uncover the needs at the root of your feelings
• We all need recognition, respect, trust, safety and financial security
‣
Be comfortable making and receiving requests.

• Make complex high impact decisions with your stakeholders and team. You need their expertise and their buy in
• Decide when to decide. Don’t rush, but don’t procrastinate either. Determine the last responsible moment
• Engage the right people in the right way → set ground rules
• Choose a decision rule: unanimity, consent, majority, PdM decides afterwards
• Disagree and commit. Even if you disagree… commit to it, accept it, follow through with it
• Delegate decisions that others are better qualified to make.
• Take the right decision making steps
1. Gather diverse perspectives
2. Build shared understanding
3. Develop an inclusive solution
• Avoid negotiation if you can. Else try these techniques…

• Are you negotiating too much?
• Lacking authority
• Lacking vision buy in
• Not involving the right people in the process
• Individuals are not willing to be collaborative / transparent
• Develop options together

• Benefits of Developing Mindfulness
• Greater serenity → catch yourself getting tense and stressed out, stay calmer for longer
• Calmness → trustworthy
• Increased capacity to be empathetic
• Better decision making, so you can take into account your mood and bias
• Improved communication → you’ll be more considered
• Hold personal retrospectives
• What did you get done this week?
• What did you learn?
• What challenges did you overcome?
• How are you feeling?
• How has your mood and energy level been?
• What changes do you want to make?
• Be aware of your workload and manage your time
• Adopt a suitable pace, so you can go indefinitely
• Ruthless prioritisation > cramming

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Introduction

• Six Product Leadership Challenges
• Lack transactional power (you’re not their boss)
• Large and heterogeneous group (diversity in the team, but also stakeholder specialties)
• Limited influence on group selection
• Dual role (leader and individual contributor)
• Leadership at multiple levels (guiding at 3 levels (vision, strategy, tactics)
• Agile process (make yourself available and actively participate)
• Leadership is about influencing people to work toward shared goals
• FBI: Behavioural change stairway model (Voss 2016)
• Active Listening → Empathy → Rapport → Influence → Behaviour Change
• You can’t skip the steps, and you have to do them in order
• People follow you only if they trust and respect you, or because they fear you
• Empathy is a key leadership skill. Empathy is our capacity to understand other people’s feelings, needs and interests and to take the perspective of the other person.
• Warm-hearted, open and kind attitude
• Care about the other person
• The best way to help them change is to empathise with them
• Empathy is the most important leadership quality, allows you to influence others and encourage change but also creates trust and psychological safety
• an environment in which people feel safe to speak up and are comfortable to be themselves
• Cultivating empathy makes you more likeable and a happier person.
• Two barriers to empathy
1. the things that reduce your receptiveness to the needs of others
• focusing on what you think
• being in a negative mental state: tense, irritated or worried
2. Confusing projection with empathy
• projection… making assumptions about how somebody should feel according to preconceived ideas
• Getting better at empathy
• Be mindful of your mental state
• Come from a place of curiosity and care
• Take an interest, make an effort to listen with intention
• Don’t prematurely judge

• Servant leadership: serve and help others, not to gain a personal benefit. Be concerned about their needs. Essentially the opposite of viewing people as resources

• Make sure you know your shit (users, market, competition) it makes it easier for people to trust you
• To be good at product you have to constantly be learning because…
• it’s young and still changing
• there’s no standard education path
• Regularly reflect on your knowledge and skill level
• Leadership, strategic, tactical skills
• Embrace a growth mindset.

• Choose the right leadership style
• Visionary: align people through shared inspirational goal
• Democratic or participatory: inclusive
• Affiliative: connects people, builds teams
• Delegative: empowers others to make decisions
• Coaching: develop people and help them achieve their goals
• Pacesetting: directive leader and setting of standards
• Autocratic leader: makes the decisions and tells people what to do
• What type were you in your last difficult situation?
• Be attentive to people's needs:
• Take into account group cohesion and expertise
• If you’re not sure what guidance people need, ask them
• Leadership is about achieving the what, but being mindful about how you achieve them
• Take into account the situation you’re in, as a team, and as a company

Interactions

• How to build trust with a development team:
• Come from a place of curiosity and care
• Listen with an open mind
• Speak and act with integrity
• Get to know people and allow people to get to know you
• Involve people in product decisions / encourage them to share ideas and concerns
• Be supportive and offer help
• Strengthen your product management knowledge and expertise
• Partner with the scrum master
• The scrum master should do:
• Staffing, roles, process and collaboration, meetings, productive work environment, organisational change
• The scrum master shouldn’t:
• Product management → instead they should teach the team to plan and track progress of the sprint and release)
• Product backlog work → instead the team should do that together, joint responsibility
• Team management → instead help the team self-organise and manage themselves
• Don’t take on scrum master duties:
1. You’ll overload yourself and neglect important work (discovery)
2. You need to learn the skills
3. If you do it, you’ll always have to do it
• Let people self select to be on the team
• Align teams around products. Make them responsible for a product (or part of one)
• little or no dependencies
• occasional component teams
• Make sure the team members have the right skills
• Cross-functional vs cross-skilled
• Cross skilled folks have a broader skill set
• Cross-skilled teams are better at planning and managing work
• Form stable teams (it takes a while for people to learn how to work with each other)
• Consider collocating team members
• Help create the right environment (make it easy to collaborate)
• Let the team own the solution (empower the team with the right knowledge)
• Include them in product discovery and user experience work
• What if your team insist on detailed requirements?
• Check if they fear punishment? Misunderstand agile?
• Care about the product (not only the team) - encourage self-organisation
• How to interact with the development team:
• Get the product backlog ready, collaboratively decide on the sprint goal
• Respect the teams right to determine the workload
• Make time to interact with the team
• Hold people accountable
• Participate in the retrospectives
• Give the team time to experiment and learn
• As a PM balance product execution and product discovery
• As a team balance delivery with experimentation and learning (new tools, skills etc)
• Lead the stakeholders:
• Involve the right people
• Work out how to engage them (power/interest grid)

• Move people into the right quadrant (understand their concerns)
• Build a stakeholder community
• Often their not aware of each others needs
• Collective wisdom can be powerful
• Build togetherness, to make shared goals possible
• Instead of 1-2-1 interaction, bring them together to work for an extended period of time, build trust, respect.
• Move from stakeholder management to stakeholder collaboration
• Form a stable group
• Practice collaborative goal setting
• Create clear roles and responsibilities
• Bring people together
• Hold retrospectives
• Engage the scrum master

• Involve individuals in product discovery and strategy work
• At the beginning → product vision and strategy kickoff
• Ask them to help you validate the strategy and find a workable business model
• Share user research
• Detail the product strategy and roadmap
• Involve them in continuous discovery and strategy work
• Review product performance (KPIs), market trends, emerging technologies, what other temas are doing.
• Leverage their expertise and creativity
• Build shared understanding
• Helps people acquire knowledge about users and customers
• All of this makes stakeholder alignment much easier

• Engage stakeholders in product development work → Sprint review meetings,
• Hold people accountable for following through on shared agreements
• Foster phycological safety

Goals

• Goals are the key to guiding the development team and stakeholders.
• They give a shared purpose
• Align effort
• Allow autonomy
• Chain of goals

• Goals should be linked and aligned.
• Vision → helps you discover → user and business goals
• User and business goals → helps you discover → product goals
• Product goal → helps you discover → sprint goals
• Product vision:
• Ultimate reason for creating a product and the positive change it should bring about
• Inspirational and motivational
• Keep it free of solution specific information (there should be enough room to pivot the product)
• User and business goals:
• Strategy: The approach you intend to use to move towards the vision
• User goal: problem users want addressed
• Business goal: benefits to the company
• Make sure user and business goals are specific and measurable → so you can select the right KPIs
• Make the goals appropriate to the lifecycle stage of your product (e.g. finding product-market fit, growth, profitability)
• Product Goals
• Each product goal is a step toward meeting a user or business goal
• They describe specific benefits, such as acquire users, increase engagement, generate revenue, or remove technical debt to future proof the product
• More specific and shorter time frame than user and business goals
• Great to align and direct the work of the team
• Capture product goals on the product roadmap together with their metrics → use a goal orientated roadmap
• Sprint Goal
• Desired outcome for a sprint
• State a reason for running the sprint
• Should be a step toward the product goal
• Keep it visible - get the team to make a commitment to it

• Make your goals great, make them…
• Shared
• Realistic
• Inspirational
• Alignment creating
• Autonomy fostering
• Logistic and systematically linked
• Be goal-led, not goal driven
• Establish a healthy relationship with goal setting (it’s OK to fail, as long as you’re learning and doing everything you can)
• Don’t set unrealistic goals and pressure people to achieve them. Establish honest realistic goals - say no to unrealistic expectations and unhealthy working practices.
• Choose ethical goals. Products should benefit people, or at least not cause harm to anybody
• Don’t intentionally encourage addictive behaviour
• Look for business goals and business models that don’t negatively impact the user
• Ethical goals attract people
• Give people ownership
• Secure strong support from the people you need to follow them
• Aligning people will therefore feel like herding cats
• Create a shared set of responsibility

Conversations

• With users, customers, team members and stakeholders → are at the heart of product
• Listen deeply, it helps you…
• acquire new information
• get more support for decisions
• build deeper connections
• Start conversations with a brief check-ing → How are you feeling right now? Why ?
• Builds awareness, empathy and trust
• Covey’s listening levels:
• Most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand
• Ignore < pretend < selective < attentive < empathic
• When attentive listening, you’re concentrating so hard that it’s difficult
• Empathic listening is about empathising and understanding what somebody is saying
• Listen inwardly → what thoughts and emotions are being triggered? are they helpful?
• Be mindful of your mood before you start a conversation. Your mental state changes how you see reality.
• Give the other person your full attention.
• Make sure you have enough time for the conversation
• Minimise distractions and interruptions
• Turn toward the speaker, establish eye contact
• Listen with an open mind
• Be mindful of how receptive you are
• Be warm-hearted
• Be humble and grateful
• Listen for facts, feelings and needs
• Ask clarifying questions
• Summarise what you’ve heard
• Be mindful of your body language
• Ask why questions to understand people’s needs/
• Pay attention to people’s body language, try to understand their feelings
• Listen with patience
• Let people finish what they have to say
• Take a few moments before you answer
• Be mindful of your body language
• Learn to be more comfortable with silence
• Time box people to stop them monologging
• Speak effectively
• Buddhist principle of ‘Right speech’
• Say only what you believe is true
• Only speak if it’s beneficial for the person listening
• Don’t use harsh or harmful words
• Make sure you speak at the right time and place
• Use the right channel
• Speak with care and warm-heartedness
• Become aware of your intentions, so you don’t say something that you will later regret
• Positive first (before a negative)
• Flipping and framing. E.g. go from highlighting the negative, to requesting more of the positive
• Name it: What is the problem?
• Flit it: What is the positive of the problem?
• Frame it: What is the desired outcome of the positive opposite?
• Separate problem from person
• Pause before responding
• Be grateful for the other persons time and interest
• Keep speech free from anger
• Apply kind speech to not only the people who are present but also those who are not
• Saying no in the right way, firm but caring.
• Be grateful, empathise, be clear, make sure you understand the importance to them

Conflict

• Conflict is normal - we just have to handle it well. It can be a source of creativity and innovation
• Win-lose
• Having a win-lose dynamic leads to 4 unhelpful strategies:
• Competitive confrontation (chosen to win) → being forefull
• Passive aggression (chosen to win) → practice resentment
• Conflict avoidance (chosen to minimise loss)
• Passivity (chosen to minimise loss)
• None of the 4 strategies result in sustainable positive outcomes. They damage relationships, lead to a lack of trust and have a negative impact on peoples well being
• Don’t see it as win and lose, see it as an opportunity to connect, learn and generate mutual gains
• Truth assumption
• Disagreeing with someone shouldn’t be a big deal
• We often think ‘we’re right’ because…
• We think our perceptions are correct
• We’re attached to our ideas
• We find it hard to admit that we’re wrong
• Remember people see the world in different ways based on their experience.
• Remember the longer you work on something the fonder we tend to become of it
• Don’t get caught up in the desire to win
• Problem-solving mode
• Emotions make it hard to concede even if it’s logical
• Take a real interest in what people have to say before you look analyse it
• Blame game
• It’s rare that a conflict is just one individuals fault
• Bad behaviour isn’t justified, it helps to understand how it developed.
• Accept some responsibility. Move from a blame game to a contribution mindset.
• Take some responsibility for their feelings and actions
• Artificial harmony
• Happens for a few reasons (fear of confrontation, wrong priorities, work culture, lack of trust)
• Ignoring conflict doesn’t help
• Encourage divergent thinking, fostering diverse ideas leads to creativity and innovation.
• Resolve conflict with non-violent communication.
• Look for positive qualities in the individual
• Stop reinforcing negative thoughts and emotions
• See things from the other persons perspective
• Be willing to forgive and ask for forgiveness
• Share observations (what you saw and heard)
• the less blame and criticism the easier it will be for the other person to hear you
• Explore feelings and recognise emotions
• Emotion: how do you feel?
• Location: where do you feel it?
• Tonality: Tone of the emotion? Neutral or unpleasant.
• Meaning: What word best describes it?
• Need: What is it connected with it?
• Share your feelings
• Uncover the needs at the root of your feelings
• We all need recognition, respect, trust, safety and financial security
• Be comfortable making and receiving requests.
• Ask don’t demand
• Make your request clear, specific and positive
• Hearing and saying no

Decision Making and negotiation

• Complex high impact decisions are better make together with your dev team and stakeholders
• you need stakeholder expertise
• you need team buy in
• Benefits of collaborative decision making:
• Better decisions: by leveraging knowledge, creativity and more view points (helps reduce bias)
• Stronger alignment: address the challenge of aligning people without having the power to tell them what to do
• Increased motivation: involving people makes them feel valued and respected, more likely to be empowered and motivated
• Decide when to decide → don’t rush, but don’t procrastinate either. Determine the last responsible moment (the moment when the cost of delaying a decision outweigh the benefits of not making it)
• Engage the right people in the right way →
• Involve the key stakeholders (understand their needs, take advantage of their expertise, get buy in)
• Employ a facilitator (allows participation from everyone, prevents domination). Avoid facilitating as the person in charge of the product
• Foster a collaborative mindset (full participation, mutual respect and understanding, open-mindedness)
• Set ground rules, example guidelines:
• Always speak from a place of respect
• Assume good intentions
• Respect differences in opinion (value diversity)
• Listen with an open mind
• Speak honestly and openly
• Stick to observable facts
• Refrain from judging and labelling people
• Ask questions when you sense misunderstanding or disagreement
• Speak up and participate
• Make room for others
• Don’t interrupt
• Stay present
• Choose a decision rule - make it clear who decides
• 4 common rules: unanimity (agreement) / consent (absence of objections) / majority / product person decides after
• If using unanimity → you can use a 1-5 agreement scale

1	Wholeheartedly endorse the proposal
2	I endorse it with minor reservations
3	It’s not great but I support it
4	I don’t support it
5	I have serious disagreements

• You can get people to put up the number of fingers that represents how they think
• Don’t confuse unanimity with design by committee
• Using the majority approach is fast but its’ a win-lose scenario, which can leave stakeholders frustrated
• Product person decides after… you retain control, its fast. Use when you need expertise, but also when
• Others don’t have product and market knowledge
• Speed is more important than buy-in (e.g. in crisis)
• People are not showing a collaborative mindset
• Disagree and commit. Even if you disagree… commit to it, accept it, follow through with it
• Only really works if you’ve listened and shown empathy
• Make low-impact decisions yourself.
• Delegate decisions that others are better qualified to make.
• Take the right decision making steps
1. Gather diverse perspectives
2. Build shared understanding
3. Develop an inclusive solution
• Negotiation Method A: The Principled Negotiation Method (1981 Ury and Fisher)
• People: separate people from problem
• Interests: don’t argue over positions, look for shared interest
• Options: invent multiple options, look for mutual gains. Don’t rule out options too early
• Criteria: use objective criteria for a feat standard to determine the outcome
• Negotiation Method B: The Behavioural Change Stairway Model
• Active listenting
• Empathy
• Rapport
• Influence
• Behavioural change
• Cultivate a friendly warm hearted attitude.
• You don’t have to agree with somebody to feel empathy
• Work to ud
• Think about people’s positive qualities
• A friendly warm attitude builds trust
• Listen deeply
• Don’t be wrapped up in your own position
• Don’t defend your position, look to understand theirs
• Don’t interrupt
• Don’t bargain over positions
• Understand the why behind the requests:
• Four conversations techniques:
• Mirroring and positive reinforcement
• Labelling
• Open-ended questions
• Patience
• Develop options together
• Once you understand the why you can explore alternative options together
• Help them let go of their fixed position, but give them a way to meet their needs
• Open-ended questions help
• Find a win-win solution if you can
• Reach closure
• Check their happy with the selected solution
• If they seem hesitant, find out what’s making them uncomfortable
• We can only encourage change in somebody else, we can’t make them change
• Sometimes no deal (escalation) is better than a bad deal
• Make negotiation the exception not the norm.
• Are you negotiating too much?
• Lacking authority
• Lacking vision buy in
• Not involving the right people in the process
• Individuals are not willing to be collaborative / transparent

Self-Leadership

• Practice Mindfulness - develop a heightened awareness of what we do and how we do it
• Pay attention to the present moment
• Noticing feelings, thoughts, moods
• You don’t have to like the feelings
• Reflect on the causes of unpleasant emotions
• Benefits of Developing Mindfulness
• Greater serenity → catch yourself getting tense and stressed out, stay calmer for longer
• Calmness → trustworthy
• Increased capacity to be empathetic
• Better decision making, so you can take into account your mood and bias
• Improved communication → you’ll be more considered
• Hold personal retrospectives
• What did you get done this week?
• What did you learn?
• What challenges did you overcome?
• How are you feeling?
• How has your mood and energy level been?
• What changes do you want to make?
• Write a journal to detect patterns over time, helps you think and process
• Meditate regularly → become more aware of your thoughts
• Embrace a growth mindset → leadership and learning have to come together. You need to get better at making decisions and resolving conflict. Have a can-do attitude to learning, if you practice you can learn.
• It’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training
• Leverage Failure → don’t let it discourage you. With the right level of effort you’ll get betterd
• Cultivate self compassion → Self compassion is about wanting health and wellbeing for oneself. Let go of overly self critical thoughts.
• Be aware of your workload and manage your time
• Adopt a suitable pace, so you can go indefinitely
• Ruthless prioritisation > cramming
• Walk slowly (rushing isn’t worth it, saves just a few minutes)
• Know when you’re most creative and productive, use that time carefully
• Do one thing at a time → set a daily goal, set aside time to do it.
• Don’t neglect important but less urgent work. Use the urgent important matrix.
• Stop doing less important tasks
• Cut down on meetings
• Cut down on emails
• Timebox routine work
• Stop task switching
• Take regular breaks