A product leaders experiment: Building a weekly writing habit by sharing learnings made
I’m working as a product-focused CTO in an InsurTech startup based in Hamburg, Germany. This article should be the starting point for a series of articles I plan to write. A series about me and my team’s learnings. Based on more than 10 years of driving the product rollercoaster with all its ups and downs.
You know how it goes. A new year starts and new years resolutions are popping up everywhere. I’m not an excuse for this. For years I planned to write on all the learnings I made through my career in product and technology. I never did. Until now. Writing those lines and starting this series is super exciting. I already thought it will never happen. But as of you read those lines right now. I made it.
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Right now I make use of a tiny website called 750words.com I was reading about in this article. It wants to support you in making daily writing a habit. If this article is life and if a few more articles will follow we can say the product works. My personal key performance indicator (KPI) will be “articles released per week”. Yes per week because that’s the only way to make this practice a habit and especially an easy one. I don’t care in the beginning about followers, readers, comments. That’s something for later. I want to build a habit. So it’s kind of an experiment as we all know and hopefully love.
You ask why? And as someone who loves to build products you should always ask why.
Well because articles like this one reminded me how helpful it is to share your learnings. It helps to make them stick with yourself. This helped me to understand the following question. “How do I managed, until now, to remember all those things, I read in one of those 20 plus books per year.”
The answer was teaching. As a product and tech leader I highly believe in coaching and support. Or how Marty Cagan would describe it, servant leadership. This belief let me sit many hours per week in one on one meetings with the product managers, product designers, and engineers I’m praised to work with. Making use of my learnings based on my own experiences and my readings, bringing them into their context.
All these circumstances combined make me think that writing and sharing my learnings with a bigger audience will help me to learn more. Isn’t this the core purpose of product work: To learn? It is and if until now you haven’t thought about your job like this then do yourself a favor and do so. Make continuous learning your number one habit and the number one habit of those around you. My plan and driver is to inspire you to do so.
Therefore I want to share real stories from the product work we as a team have been through in the last couple of years. How we tried to put in place frameworks and best practices we read about. How we learned from the failures we’ve been through. The idea is to structure the articles in a way where we start from the theory and reads behind up to the real-life experiences we had. Giving you insights on what we did, why, and how.
The different topics I would like to cover will not appear in the order they appeared for us in reality. More in the order I would recommend you to focus on them.
Starting with the topic of the importance of communication and ubiquitous language. Followed by the understanding of product-market fit. Talking then about the right team and team size. So that we can then focus on how to develop and empower the team. After those team-specific topics will deep-dive into the world of dual-track agile. From product discovery and delivery to the moment where growth and scaling challenges appear.
If there are more topics you would like to read about feel free to let me know. Write a comment or drop me a message. As long as I will have something meaningful to share about this topic I will not hesitate to write about it.
And here we are. More than 750 words later my first article is done. Of course more a spoiler or teaser for what is coming. At least it is life and you can start to provide feedback to help me to improve my writing skills.
Published articles until now:
The one skill a product lead should focus on first
The hardest skill a product lead should practice
The One thing you have to expect as a product lead
Practices to get clarity into your roles and expectations
The magic loop — how to improve your product team continuously
