Brilliance in the Basics – Leadership in Product Management

In the ongoing iteration and re-iteration of what I’ve learned, how I communicate it, what I learn anew and how I convey it, we have another release. I was very lucky to get to speak on lessons in Product Management with Growth School. They kindly provided a recording link and password that I can share …

Do good with your career! 80,000 hours

As I’ve shared before I’m driven by a personal mission in life: to grow powerful people: to learn and teach so that others can better survive and thrive through understanding knowledge! I’ve been very struck recently with the concepts of effective altruism, of doing good even better with careful consideration and measurement of impact. For …

Doing Good, Better.

I’ve finally read Doing Good Better. And I couldn’t recommend it more highly. I wish I had read this years ago (like many books.) I’m sharing my review both here and where I wrote it on GoodReads. I also gave an intro to it and shared it on YouTube or sharing-ready on LinkedIn Who should …

What this Marine learns from Malala’s Children’s book: Malala’s Magic Pencil.

One voice can change the world. There are few books that choke me up and move me to tears. That cause a deep and aching sadness in me. There are even fewer children books that have this effect. Malala’s Magic Pencil is one of these. My oldest daughter has been getting more and more skilled …

Strategy-Bot: Chat GPT

I asked Chat GPT to synthesize the competitive analysis frameworks that I have found most useful in my work as a Product Manager. It did a decent job of the summaries overall but made a critical error in part of its meta-analysis. Here’s what I think is the best it did: I’ll paste the full …

ChatGPT: cant chat for me (-yet on LinkedIn)

A good friend of mine raised an interesting point on LinkedIn: I drafted my genuine thoughts on the response, then fed that to Chat GPT to see if it could strengthen the point. Instead it made it more wordy, fluffy, omitted what I saw as the most insightful point, and took it in a few …

In a nutshell: Chat GPT is designed to sound good, not be right.

I tweeted this simplification. But it really is the most punchy insight I have so far. Lots of chatter about Chat-GPT. It’s important to try it out yourself to get a sense for it. But in essence the 20% learning that delivers 80% of the insight for this moment right now is: it is designed …

Mentorship in Product management – a template for you

In the 5 years I’ve worked at IBM and been tracking it I’ve helped contribute to the hiring placement or promotion of 22+ talented folks in product. I’m more proud of that than anything else I may have done in that time. I’ve found that mentorship is a continuous activity for me. Its something I …

The Product Manager Resume

How to write a Killer Resume? 1 – Strong action verbs lead every bullet2- Use your space VERY well3- Quantified metrics for everything The purpose of the resume is to get you the interview. These techniques are the areas that others I’ve helped out in the past tell me are the most helpful in preparing …