Teaching You How to Become Fit For Product Management

Hi! 👋🏻 My name is Simon and I’m a product and technology leader with 10+ years in global payments, open banking, and digital product strategy. At Boku, I am leading reconciliation and settlement systems processing over $9B annually, and as a founder I am building a portfolio tracking and stock analysis app from scratch. My background combines deep technical fluency (Ph.D. in Computer Science) with hands-on product execution and leadership across global teams.

Even though big organizations and startups are at different ends of the spectrum, the approaches and techniques that you will need to possess as a Product Manager (PM) are the same. Big organizations often lack the initial power and drive that a startup has. Startups in their early phases are naturally product-driven because that is what they are bringing to the table and it surely has to be good so that the startup can get traction and obtain a significant share of the market. As the startup matures and scales up, as more people are joining the organization, as more processes are put in place, there is a danger of the organization to pivot and become less product-driven than it originally was. Not only will you need to learn the skills of Product Management, but you will also need to learn what it takes for organization to keep Product Management at its heart so that it can continue to deliver what any organization needs: products that remain competitive in the market by continuously delivering on the important features that solve relevant customer problems with maximum satisfaction.

What You Will Learn in This Blog

This blog aims at providing as much value to you as possible by sharing valuable PM insights. The topics that this blog should cover are diverse and will most likely evolve as this blog is growing. For a start, we will cover customer research, building an MVP, finding product-market fit, roadmapping, execution, tools and techniques that can help PMs to deliver their best solutions including how to make best use of Artificial Intelligence to solve typical PM problems faster and more efficiently, product marketing, and – even though not commonly talked about – failing. Yes, failing – because only if you can deal with failures you will be able to achieve great things in your career!

Even though this blog will contribute much about building MVPs and try to convey startup mentality, it will also look into how organizations need to be set up to remain or become product-driven again. We will discuss typical problems that can be observed in bigger organizations and explore how these problems can be addressed to keep the organization on the path to success. A PM that also knows how to transform organizations to remain or become product-lead again will not only be fit for product but also a promising candidate for the next C-level position.

No matter if you are just aspiring to become a PM or you want to improve your skills as a PM, this blog is made for you! Let’s embark on this exciting journey together!