I’ve been using Slack for my past few communities. Yes, I know, even Stewart Butterfield said it wasn’t built for that, but many community folks use it and it’s best to go where your members are. A few folks have asked about my approach to building Slack communities, so I thought it would be helpful […]
Author: benry
On building community
I was asked the other day about how you build a successful community. So I thought I’d share how I think about it, in broad strokes. To start with, a lot of my thinking was deeply inspired by the books Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kai Elmer Sotto, and Kevin Huynh, The Business of Belonging […]
How do I break into product? I just took XYZ bootcamp in product and need to find a job – can you help me? I’m working in {insert role here} and want to move into product, how do I do that? I get asked these kinds of questions a lot. As a white, cis-gendered male […]
Product Management books
I’m often asked for a list of my favourite product management books, here’s my list of suggestions. I’m going to note though that one of the issues I see with this list is a lot of it is written by white men, and those privileged. We as a product management community certainly need to do […]
Product management podcasts
I often am asked for a list of my suggested product podcasts. So here it is — the full list I currently subscribe to. As content varies per podcast, I don’t have particular favourites, so listen to what engages you and is relevant to your product learning and needs. All links below are to Apple […]
Get it done
We all have the same 24-hours. Some of us get it done, others don’t. Why the difference? Priorities. It might not be that I’m not “getting it done”, it could be that I’m not for the right reasons.
IA toolkit
Great quote from Dave Gray (hat tip: Austin Kleon) “Index cards and sticky notes operate like the playing cards, counters and other game components: they make it easy to sort, shuffle, arrange and rearrange information. Flip charts and whiteboards function like playing fields or game boards – they bring logic and order to a space, […]
Curiosity
…a curious person is one who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications — Seth Godin
Google decided in 2009 to apply its prowess at technical research and analysis to find out what made great managers stand out from merely good or bad ones. It analyzed mountains of performance reviews, surveys, and other sources of information and submitted them to extensive crunching, pulling apart “more than 10,000 observations about managers—across more […]
Love, change
For the first time in a few years, change abounds. New opportunities, new people, new ways of working. Change is a friend not a foe and often signals opportunity more often than not. Each change seemingly a positive bit of momentum towards something better.