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Product Unplugged Episode 3 with Pierce Healy

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👩‍🚀🚀   Live now for MTP members: <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/membership/#events" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Driving Innovation AMA with Tendayi Viki</a>

Roadmaps: Break the rules without breaking the principles

Got questions about your product career?

Product roadmaps vs data – Jeremy Levy on The Product Experience

From engineering to product management at Google

Mind the Product joins Pendo

As a certified Product Manager and freelance writer, Jon likes to bring clarity of communication to his work at BibliU - making digital learning more effective. Jon loves how fast the world of product management is evolving and is always interested in opportunities to be part of the conversation.

Product Manager

Jon Horvath

<p>In this ProductTank London talk, Senior Director at <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/thetaray/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ThetaRay</a></span>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaun-smith-taylor/?originalSubdomain=uk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Shaun Smith-Taylor</a></span>, provides insights into how you can grow a product-led company by having the right culture. He explains the history of becoming product-led, the characteristics and culture of a product-led company, and the importance of the CEO and company structure to success.</p>
<p>Watch the video to see his talk in full or read on for an overview of his key points:</p>
<ul>
<li>Where have we come from?</li>
<li>Don Draper’s guide to being product-led</li>
<li>Product-led characteristics and culture</li>
</ul>
<h2>Where have we come from?</h2>
<p>In the early days of product management, many companies were <span style="font-weight: bold;">marketing-led</span>. In this situation, the customers were the ones driving decisions. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.pg.co.uk/">Procter &amp; Gamble</a></span> was an example of such a marketing-led organization, focused on brand management and customer-centricity.</p>
<p>Eventually, businesses became <span style="font-weight: bold;">sales-led</span>. The primary goal was to bring value to the market. However, this was a long process where revenue was king and a focus on the customer journey with a go-to-market strategy at the end.</p>
<p>Next came <span style="font-weight: bold;">project-led</span> companies. For these companies, culture was not aligned to market-fit, vision, and strategy. In this scenario, the customer dictates 100% of what the company does. However, it’s hard to scale and prioritize. Also, products in these companies are seen as a supporting function, which ultimately doesn’t deliver the required value to the customer.</p>
<h2>Don Draper on product-led</h2>
<p>Shaun references <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Draper">Mad Men character, Don Draper</a></span>, to provide some key traits relevant to being product-led. Like Don Draper, he says, they must have:</p>
<ul>
<li>a desire to be a market leader</li>
<li>the ability to move fast</li>
<li>an ambitious management team</li>
<li>the ability to apply blue-sky thinking</li>
</ul>
<h2>Product led characteristics and culture</h2>
<p>Shaun then touches on some of the key characteristics of a product-led company and the cultural values they employ.</p>
<h3>Characteristics</h3>
<p>A product-led company understands its market fit and is customer-centric. It focuses on product value and has alignment from the C-level right down on a shared vision as well as excellent speed to market and a low acquisition cost.</p>
<h3>Cultural values</h3>
<p>A good product-led organization and the product manager in such an organization utilizes a blue ocean mindset and can think outside of the box. They are customer-centric; they understand the value the product brings to the market, take full ownership of the product line, act fast and challenge the usual way of doing things. For more on this, check out this article by <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/profile/Federico%20Iglesias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Federico Iglesias</a></span> on <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/building-extraordinary-teams/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Building extraordinary product teams.</a></span></p>
<p>To achieve all of this, your CEO and management team must be product people. They need to own the product roadmap, be innovative and visionary, empower and structure a team to move fast, and recruit a core executive team of product people.</p>
<p>The key takeaways from this talk are the questions that you need to ask to determine if your company is product-led. Some of these include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Are the company values at the heart of your product strategy?</li>
<li>Is there a 360 feedback loop within the product lifecycle?</li>
<li>Do you act fast and not afraid to fail?</li>
<li>Does your management team understand and support product?</li>
</ul>
<p>If the answer to most of these questions is no, then you are not product-led.</p>
<h2>Enjoy more from ProductTank</h2>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/producttank/">ProductTanks</a></span> are informal meetups, created by Mind the Product, to bring local product people together and to enable speakers to share amazing product insights. Today we have</p>
<p>ProductTanks in more than 200 cities across the globe and there’s probably one near you.</p>
<p>Learn more about ProductTank – find your local meetup, explore more <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/producttank-about/content/">ProductTank content</a></span>, see the latest ProductTank news, and discover ways to get involved!</p>
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core/freeform

ProductTank

Putting people at the heart of product led growth by Ian Booth

Why roadmaps don’t matter (that much) by Stephen Culligan

The role of the first product manager by Andrew Moll

Developing a customer centric mindset by Amon Kiplagat

Driving customer adoption and retention as a product manager by Karen Adie

Product-led company powered by culture by Shaun Smith-Taylor

How to be successful in enterprise software management by Thomas Otter

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Prioritised Member AMA - Perfecting product roadmaps

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