Product Life

AI assisted interviewing

15 February 2025 ·

AI will not replace you, but people who use AI will.

I captured this quote from one of the speakers at our annual ReThink conference in Zürich last week. While it’s short and simple, I believe it holds a lot of truth. AI assistants will increase productivity massively, and because of this, the people who know best how to use such assistance and agents will have a considerable advantage over others.

I recently had a virtual interview with a candidate who captured my audio and passed my questions on to an agent who helped him answer them better. While I was initially amazed and somewhat opinionated, it also made me think positively about the candidate and how future-ready he was by applying new technology as it became available.

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.

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.