Roman's Product Management Podcast

For any business to succeed, it is crucial to make the right strategic decisions. To achieve this, you’ll benefit from using four different types of strategies: business, portfolio, product, and technology strategy. But that’s not enough. You’ll also have to successfully align the plans. To help you address these challenges, I have developed a new framework, the Strategy Stack, which I introduce in this podcast episode.

Being empowered can make all the difference in doing a great job. Sadly, not all product people have the authority they need. This observation is hardly new, though, and just wishing for more empowerment isn't enough. In this podcast episode, I explain what empowerment in product management really means. I help you determine how empowered you are, and I share specific tips to increase your empowerment.

Products often don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are part of a product portfolio. Think of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which belong to Microsoft Office. Such a portfolio benefits from having a dedicated strategy—a product portfolio strategy. But what information should it contain? Which template can you use to describe it? How does it relate to the overall product portfolio management work? And who should create and update the strategy? Listen to this episode to find out my answers.

Product discovery has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to determine the right solution. In this podcast episode, I explain why you need a product strategy to succeed with product discovery, how the strategy helps you determine the right outcomes and opportunities, and how you can use the Product Vision Board to build an Opportunity Solution Tree.

Strong product leadership is crucial to offering successful products and enabling product-led growth. Unfortunately, there is disagreement and confusion about what exactly product leadership is and who should exercise it. Is product leadership limited to someone working as a head of product? Or can—and should—others lead in product management too? In this podcast episode, I share my advice to help you effectively practise product leadership and and become great at leading others.

The GO Product Roadmap is a simple yet effective tool to help teams create goal-oriented, outcome-based roadmaps. Despite its simplicity, I find that it’s not always correctly applied. To address this challenge, I’ve created a checklist, which I share in this podcast episode and which you can download for free from my website.

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team,” Steve Jobs once said. This insight also applies to product management: As product people, we can’t achieve product success on our own—we rely on the support of others including stakeholders and development teams. This episode shares my advice on how to foster collaboration and form an effective product team in order to maximise the chances of offering a great product.

The product strategy is an important product management artefact. But despite its significance, it is not always effectively used. In this episode, I discuss ten common strategy mistakes I see people make so you can avoid them and successfully leverage the product strategy.

The product vision plays a crucial part in achieving product success: It sets a shared direction and helps create strong alignment. Despite its importance, there are two competing views of what a product vision is and how it should be captured. In this podcast episode, I discuss the different approaches and explain which one I recommend.

To create value, product people, stakeholders, and development teams have to work together. But when people collaborate, things don’t always go smoothly, and problems emerge. As the person in charge of the product, you should address these issues and offer constructive feedback. That’s often easier said than done, though. Asking people to change their behaviour can be difficult, especially when you are not their boss. To help you with this challenge, I have developed a new framework, which I describe in this podcast episode.