Work

Books for Product Managers

15 February 2025 ·

I get asked regularly for advice on product and technology books worth reading. While this is all quite personal, there are a few books that I would advise any Product Manager or Product leader to read. Here are six of them in random order:

Talk Like TED, through which you gain insights on selling your ideas persuasively to your internal and external stakeholders.
Blue Ocean Strategy teaches you about finding or creating an uncontested market space that will make competition irrelevant.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is all about change management. Any leader must understand what it takes to generate momentum in their organization.
The Pyramid Principle teaches you to bring logic to your writing and presentation skills. This is essential when your role asks you to present to C-level executives regularly.
Transformed helps you understand what it takes to become a product-led organization to deliver game-changing tech products.
Six Simple Rules is all about managing complexity without making things complicated. Reducing complexity is today’s management challenge, as corporations have been adding complexity through business processes, organizational models, and software products for the past two decades.

How I stay productive and go through my tasks

25 January 2024 ·

I received a text message from a former colleague and friend about how I stay productive and avoid procrastination. This colleague is not the first to notice my strengths in this area and ask for tips, tricks, and book recommendations. So here I go.

First things first, there is no silver bullet to doing things right. Many things that work for me might or might not work for you. Ultimately, you need to design a system that works for you. Staying productive in my work and private life comes down to building habits, being consistent, and optimizing what needs improvement.

Strategic ambiguity

25 August 2023 ·

I heard a good reflection on the ambiguity that employees experience regarding the company’s direction/strategy.

As a manager, you are often confronted with employees who say they do not understand the business strategy. Your manager’s default reaction is to clarify the strategy again through a 1:1 explanation or by creating the next version of your strategic PowerPoint, which you then put on the agenda in a team meeting.

Usually, the problem is much simpler.

The employee understands the company’s long-term direction but does not know how they can contribute to it today.

Don’t forget, as a manager, it is often better to focus on the following action(s) for the employee (and yourself) instead of returning to work on the next version of your strategic plan.