Product Consulting, Driving Outcomes, and Managing a Product Career
Oct 26, 2023
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Evie, a seasoned product consultant, shares her journey from product leadership to consultancy, revealing insights on enhancing product maturity. She discusses how to grow and transition a product management career while aligning it with personal life goals. The conversation highlights key elements of successful product teams, like cultivating a strong culture and prioritizing outcomes. Evie also touches on the importance of travel for personal happiness and the role of mindset in achieving professional success.
Transitioning from a product manager to a consultant enhances flexibility, allowing one to leverage existing skills without company constraints.
Balancing professional aspirations with personal life goals fosters career satisfaction and encourages holistic life perspectives essential for fulfillment.
Essential traits of successful product managers include continuous learning, strong communication, and the ability to adapt based on team dynamics and feedback.
Deep dives
Navigating the Shift to Product Consultancy
The speaker describes their transition from a full-time product manager at Booking.com to becoming a product consultant after the pandemic. This change was influenced by a conversation that opened their eyes to the possibilities within consultancy, showing them that they could leverage their existing skills without being tied to a specific company's internal processes. As a consultant, they focus on assessing product maturity within organizations, identifying gaps in capabilities, and providing tools and strategies that empower teams to improve their product development processes. This approach allows for a higher-level engagement that fosters the overall growth of product teams while maintaining personal career satisfaction.
Finding Balance Through Travel and Life Goals
The speaker emphasizes the importance of work-life balance, which they achieved through extensive travel, having worked from 14 countries post-pandemic. This journey included memorable experiences like scuba diving and attending Carnival in Rio, contributing to a well-rounded life perspective. Additionally, they stress the need to set holistic life goals rather than just career objectives, thereby aligning professional aspirations with personal happiness. This reflective practice allows for a more comprehensive understanding of priorities and the cultivation of a fulfilling lifestyle.
Key Qualities of a Successful Product Manager
The discussion highlights essential traits of effective product managers, such as a commitment to continuous learning and reflection on project outcomes. This self-awareness allows for adaptations based on past experiences, customer feedback, and team dynamics. Strong communication skills also emerge as vital, as product management is inherently collaborative and requires cohesiveness among team members to drive success. Ultimately, a product manager should align their strengths with team efforts, enabling a more synergistic approach to product development.
Creating Effective Product Strategies
The speaker discusses the fundamental aspects of a strong product strategy, which includes having a clear long-term vision and specific North Star metrics that guide teams towards measurable outcomes. They advocate for a limited number of strategic pillars to maintain focus and prevent dilution of efforts across too many initiatives. Additionally, the strategy should incorporate both customer insights and market dynamics, emphasizing specific objectives rather than vague ambitions. This clarity facilitates alignment within teams to ensure that product development aligns with broader organizational goals.
Balancing Outcomes and Uncertainty in Product Development
The conversation delves into the challenge of balancing outcome-driven product development with the inherent uncertainty of not committing to a strict feature list. By advocating for a roadmap centered around achieving specific outcomes and hypotheses, teams are encouraged to remain flexible and agile. This approach fosters a culture of experimentation and learning, enabling teams to respond to feedback effectively and pivot when necessary. Ultimately, fostering an environment that embraces uncertainty while focusing on delivering value requires continuous dialogue with executives to shift the conversation away from rigid timelines to a more dynamic view of product development.
Evie is a product consultant who has taken her experience as a product leader and now works with companies to help them grow their products, refine their product strategies, and shift their focus. On this episode, Kyle and Evie discuss how product managers can grow their careers, both within companies or moving into product consulting roles.
We also discuss managing your career in the context of your broader life vision and goals. And how what makes great product managers and great product teams. As well as bridging the gap between expectations and reality for ourselves and our teams as we align around priorities
Evie Brockwell: Evie is a Product Leader who has gained valuable insights into what it was like to grow a PM career successfully. Now she's on the path to find the perfect balance between career satisfaction and life, all whilst consulting with huge businesses & continuing to learn and grow in the product field.
