This has been frequently requested of me ever since my earlier post about ‘The Six Month Conversation’ resonated with so many people. This follow up is about the framework Alexis and I devised with hopes of guiding our life journey together independently and as a couple. I know this post is arriving several years late, after tons of requests, so thanks everybody for your patience!
Note for any readers: this is written to myself for future reference.
While going through the exercise of year-end cleaning, the process includes checking bookmarks for what will be highly relevant going forward. These are a few I’ve kept throughout 2018, which are now lower priority but which I may like to reference again in the future.
Frameworks and Tools:
Having recently attended a number of events this autumn to speak with university students, young professionals, and small business owners, I’ve fielded many questions about what reading I would recommend to them.
While I’ve previously shared my thoughts on this topic, my journey has taken me down many paths and through many hoops in the three years since then. I have a few more thoughts to share.
The big one is that everybody should learn Sales. > Cue groans <
Listen, I get it: ‘selling’ is thought of as something dirty… but that’s such an outdated notion. The reality is that we are all selling, all of the time. Selling is the art and science of…
What is it? Do I need it? Where does it fit in the org? I've also heard of Sales Enablement; is it different? How do I do it right? What career paths get you to Sales Ops and where can you go from there? Is Sales Ops leadership the same as Sales leadership? So many questions. So few good answers.
I was recently in Las Vegas for DEF CON, the world's largest Hacking Conference (Site, Wikipedia). For four days, 20,000+ nerds descended upon Vegas and put security professionals on edge. It was my first time participating in DEF CON, and it won't be my last.
Over the course of my week in Las Vegas, I caught up with old friends, met new people, learned about the Hacker world, was exposed to novel ideas, had fascinating and thoughtful discussions, lived it up Vegas-style, explored the famous city's culture, and ate too much unhealthy food (*cough* Typical West Coast).
I've been left with a lot to ponder since coming home from DEF CON…
Product development/management is tough as hell. Thankfully there is an amazing community of practitioners. The book, Product Leadership (website, Amazon), has so many nuggets of wisdom encoded in it. Check it out :)
Here are some quotes I found noteworthy and strive to commit to my DNA:
Great product people will ask questions about the product, the market, and the business. Not only this, they show an interest in all aspects of the team they work with, from unified vision to individual communication styles. Understand that producing great products can be difficult and frustrating, but still want to do the work.
Ultimately, the job of the product manager is to get results through other people.
What is common in high-performance teams is that…
As I've been pushing hard on pursuing new opportunities lately and working through a handful of challenging projects, I've been pondering the question, "What is truly worth striving for?" in considering how to allocate my limited resources of time and energy.
This is the list of things I keep circling back to:
Excellence
Integrity…
This is a Shitty First Draft post that I never got around to completing. Coming back to it now cause I've been having mentoring calls every week for a while now. Same things KEEP coming up. So, here I am, writing a post about it so I can point to it.
Are you doing what you do to meet your personal expectations, or the expectations of your parents/society/tribe? It's your life, dude. Live it as you see fit.
It's great to be excited ("passionate") about a particular industry, but how much do you really know about it? I hear far too many people who were sold on the 'sexy' of a particular field of work, where the majority of their understanding came from marketing efforts by industry associations or people who've themselves been sold on an idea…
Ever since I went to university, I've been thinking about writing more in a public manner. Finally pulled the trigger in 2016 after years of deliberating. Here's a post I found that I'd written an entire draft for back in August of 2013.
I enjoyed reading this because it offered me an interesting look into how I've developed concepts and workflows since then. Sharing this in all of its original glory because it's rather funny and still pretty relevant!
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This post is an ongoing attempt to create a universal checklist for the preparation of presentations. Note that I am assuming that the presentation deck and demo product are already complete after considering objective, available time, time of day, audience, and so on. This checklist is a combination of actions and reminders with some definitions included after the checklist...
This weekend, I attended Product Camp Vancouver 2018 alongside hundreds of Vancouver's tech community. I walked away from the event feeling inspired and connected. What a great event and wonderful community!
I attended the event without a clear understanding of what is typically in or out of scope for the Product Management (PM) line of work. My perspective is mostly heavily informed by my firsthand experiences on the delivery and growth sides for high-tech and professional services companies. I learned a bunch that helped connect some missing dots of concepts in my mind - very thankful for this.
Below are some of my takeaways, whether new or old ideas, which I am mulling over. These points are mostly from talks by Chloe Morrow (of Vision Critical), Cory Ayres (of Pendo), and Steven Forth (of Ibbaka), as well as with fellow participants...
Digitizing a thought I had written in a journal back in 2010 around the idea of a Centre of Influence (COI). I had defined COIs as those people we have relationships with who possess a level of influence over our decision-making. The influence is exerted by virtue of their primary relationship dynamic with their network. These are people trusted & networked as an influencer, and their advice is often taken with little further thought.
It's apparent that my then knowledge of personal/professional relationship dynamics was much more limited than it is today, but interesting nonetheless...
