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Switching back the focus from ‘Build only’ to ‘Build-measure-learn’

Product career special part 2: Making a change

Build what matters with vision-led product management

Lessons in fearless leadership

Building a product organisation from scratch by Kevin Mansfield

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Mind the Product

Product Management

The executive product leader persona

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Andres is a freelance writer and digital marketer with a background in engineering and a keen interest in the latest technology advancements. He currently helps tech companies and startups tell their stories by turning their complex ideas into easy to understand material. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn

Andres Phillips

<p>In this ProductTank Wellington talk, Kevin Mansfield, CPO at Nomos One, provides an iterative approach that product managers can use to build a product organisation from scratch. Watch the video to see his talk in full, or read on for an overview of his key points:</p>
<ul>
<li>Start with a vision</li>
<li>Ruthlessly prioritise</li>
<li>Structured collaboration and communication</li>
<li>Great teams build great products</li>
<li>Culture is a great enabler, empowering teams</li>
</ul>
<h2>Start with a vision</h2>
<p>As a product leader, you will have experienced both good and bad environments, and you need to use that to map out your vision of your product. Working with a blank canvas can be hard, but knowing what good looks like gives you a starting point. This vision shouldn’t be too rigid either, as you need to take on the specifics of the business.</p>
<h2>Ruthlessly prioritise</h2>
<p>Product managers need to focus first on the development cycle; otherwise they won’t get to do anything else. In the beginning, you’ll be wearing two hats and move between leading and doing, so you’ll need to prioritise what you can achieve.</p>
<h2>Structured collaboration and communication</h2>
<p>As the product leader, you are the one who knows the value of alignment. No single business discipline can achieve anything without another, and the product leader must champion the product. One way to do this is by constructing a product council, where each member represents a part of the business. The purpose is to provide all the areas of the business with a forum where they can find answers.</p>
<h2>Great teams build great products</h2>
<p>Product managers need to hire well, so there must be a process. Focus on team-building with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills" target="_blank" rel="noopener">T-shaped</a> personnel and have a strong interview process with a product thinking case interview and a technical interview.</p>
<h2>Culture is a great enabler, empowering teams</h2>
<p>Product managers need to focus on outcomes over outputs by doing things well first and then trying to do them fast later by using a fixed-length cycle with varying scope, where the aim isn’t to produce the same quantity of work per cycle but the same value.</p>
<p>The key takeaways from this talk are that you need to have a vision and you must ruthlessly prioritise as you can’t do all the things you need to do at once. Collaboration and communication must be put in structured recurring forms so that teams can discuss and work together. Great culture is a great enabler of conscious tactics, and coaching will likely be needed to progress and gradually build your world so that culture can spread.</p>
<h2>Enjoy more ProductTank content</h2>
<p><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/producttank-about/content/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ProductTanks</a> are informal meetups, created by Mind the Product, to bring local product people together and to enable speakers to share amazing product insights. Today we have ProductTanks in more than 200 cities across the globe and there’s probably one near you.</p>
<p>Learn more about ProductTank – find your local meetup, explore more ProductTank content, see the latest ProductTank news, and discover ways to get involved!</p>


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