Isn’t it about time, Bond? Your license to win in product management

* Image courtesy of Omega Rumours are rife that the next James Bond film, “No Time To Die”, is set to be delayed again from April to autumn this year. If so, that will be the third delay to the release, a scenario that would be a nightmare for a product manager. I’m sure it’s …

Motivational leadership: from knowing you’re shit to knowing your shit

I was asked this week for my thoughts on leadership styles and how to get the best out of a team. Given the challenging times in which we live, I thought I would share some of the guiding principles and lessons I have learned over many years of developing high-performance product and marketing teams. Being …

Goals, objective and strategy… same same but different?

If you’ve ever been to Thailand, you will have probably heard the phrase “Same same but different”, but how does this relate to strategy? Using the right words to communicate with clarity and precision is invaluable, and that equally applies to the use of the words goal, objective and strategy.

From good to great in product management

A good product manager is able to perform many functions very well, a great product manager adapts behaviour to different situations and excels in each one

Customer Experience: Turning good intentions into great execution

For quite a while, I’ve been intending to write about motivation and customer experience, but never quite got to it. Why write now? More on that later. With customer experience, there has been much research that has highlighted a mismatch between what companies believe they deliver and what customers think they get. And other research …

The machine translation debate: enough is enough

How many experts over the years have proclaimed that, because of the latest advances, the time has now arrived to invest in MT? Full disclosure… I include myself in this, as I launched SDL’s integrated MT solution nearly ten years ago. And it’s still happening today, as Lingo24’s recent press release highlights. How many times have …

To reach and react: why mobile and social are so disruptive

Although I would argue that the pace of change is maybe not as fast as some would have us believe, there is no doubt that there are significant disruptive forces at work in the shape of mobile and social. They are disruptive because they are game changers in your ability to reach, and react to, …

The pace of change is accelerating! Or is it?

How often have you been in a presentation which begins with something like, “The pace of change is accelerating” or similar? I was at the keynote by Google at Technology for Marketing and Advertising last week, and this was one of the key points. But is this really true? When you have as many grey …

If you’re not listening, you can’t learn

No, this is not something my old teacher used to say to me, although it could easily have been. This is something that has become increasingly important with the advent of social media. That old adage, you’ve got two ears and one mouth, so use them in that ratio, now applies as much to businesses …

Strategy, planning and motivations

Check out this Harvard Business Review blog post and all the comments. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/dont_let_strategy_become_plann.html A very interesting collection of thoughts, from which you can deduce that strategy is probably the most over-used word in business, while also being the most misused and misunderstood. I have found that by critically examining the motivations of your business, your customers …