Oli Gibson

How to do Funnel Analysis for Product Managers [with template]

Funnel analysis helps product managers optimize conversion rates by analyzing user journeys and identifying points of friction. In this blog post, we explore how to conduct a funnel analysis and how to use it to improve your product. We also discuss the benefits of combining funnel analysis with segment analysis.

The Ten Best Product Management Books

A few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the product managers at ThoughtWorks to put together a list of the ten best product management books. In this post, I’ll share the list I put together. If you’re new to product management, start at the top and work your way through, If not, jump around and pick what’s interesting to you. They are all fascinating reads that will help you become a better product manager!

A Guide to Product Metric Reviews

Do you want to use data to make better product decisions? Of course, you do! Companies that make product decisions based on data outperform their competitors on average, but how do you embed this data-centric product culture at your company?

Why You Need a Product Roadmap Without Dates

Through my consulting work at ThoughtWorks, I see a lot of product roadmaps. I’ve seen many different approaches, but one format I’ve seen one to many times is the timeline roadmap. These roadmaps, which are full of features and delivery dates, still seem to be standard practice – but they are far from best practice. By continuing to use dates, we as product managers are setting our teams up for failure.

The Path to Product Teams

Over the years, I’ve coached and worked with some fantastic companies, but I have seen very few true product teams. Most companies are not yet at the stage where they can operate product teams like Amazon, Google or Netflix. People often say these companies lack a product mindset or don’t have the right ‘culture’. However, I think it is about having the organisational readiness to operate product teams that empower people to work as they need to.

3 Roadmaps for Product Managers

Creating a product roadmap is not easy. Every company seems to have a different approach, and most miss at least one of the critical components that make a roadmap successful. Here is my step by step guide to creating the three roadmaps you need to deliver your company’s objectives.

Hooked by Nir Eyal

Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. The hooked model describes how to design a product experience that creates a customer habit in four steps. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

What I Learned Running a Remote Product Discovery

Last week I led my first fully remote product discovery. This was a step into the unknown as I took our co-located workshop techniques and tried to translate them into a remote-first world. Through this article, I’ll share this experience and what I learned in the process.

Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

The Technology Adoption Lifecycle creates a vast gap between the needs/wants of the early adopters and those of the mainstream market. To reach the mainstream market innovators and marketers need to narrow the chasm and find ways to accelerate mainstream product adoption. This book explains how to target a specific niche market, offer a whole product solution and become the market leader.

Scaling Lean by Ash Maurya

Early-stage products can’t be measured using traditional metrics like revenue and profit; a better metric is traction. Modelling traction enables you to recognise the one clear goal for your product. With your goal in mind, identify the constraints within your product (i.e. bottlenecks) and focus on improving the output of that constraint, repeating until you reach your goals.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Small changes make a big difference. Habits provide compounding returns over time, but until you cross a critical threshold they appear to make no difference. To form or remove a habit make it obvious, make the positive action attractive, make it easy to start and finally make it satisfying to do.

My 2019 Annual Review

Here we are. 2019 has passed, and we are readying ourselves to enter 2020! Before we turn the page and start a new chapter, I’d like to share my Annual Review with you. I conduct my Annual Review at the end of each year. The process reminds me to look back on the previous twelve months, celebrate my victories and evaluate my failures. Inspired by James Clear, I have decided to share this year’s review for the first time. I hope it will make me more accountable, and maybe you will also find value in my stories.

Facilitating Retrospectives for Large Teams

Recently I was asked to facilitate a retrospective for 26 people. Of course I said yes, but only afterwards did I begin to realise the challenge I faced. The reality is people work better in smaller groups, but sometimes you have to bring a large groups together. In this post I'd like to share how I ran this retrospective along with some of the learnings I gained. I hope you find it useful!

The Rise of Open Startups

An open startup is a company that has chosen to publicly share metrics about their company. Normally they share revenue, users, and traffic numbers but in some cases they will even share, logs and dashboards too. They refer to themselves as an Open Startup, but what does this mean and why would you run a company publicly?

How Jurgen Klopp Transformed Liverpool's Culture

Over the last few years, I've been watching the change at Liverpool Football Club with interest. It's not so much the success that intrigues me but more the change in culture that began with the arrival of manager Jurgen Klopp. Over the weekend, I listened to a great analysis of Klopp's leadership on the podcast Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. After listening to the show I think there are two critical elements that have supported change at Liverpool and I want to share these with you today.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Between September 20 and 27, a record 7.6 million people took to the streets and went on strike for climate action. It was the most significant climate mobilisation in history involving 186 countries, 73 trade unions and 3024 businesses.

Taking Time to Reflect

In a world where we are always asking ourselves "what's next?" I think it can be equally, if not more, important to look back and ask, "how did that go?". At work, we run retrospective sessions regularly with our teams to allow us to reflect on the previous week. We share what went well and how we could improve. I find this such a powerful practice, but it's only recently I've begun to embrace retrospectives more personally.

5 Lessons I Learnt From My Failed Startup

BitMate was a web application that helped developers start new projects faster. Was, is the keyword in this sentence. I founded BitMate in August 2016, but nine months later, I was closing it down. Here are the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned through my experience as a founder. If you are thinking about starting a company or at the beginning of your journey, I hope this post helps you avoid making the same mistakes I did.

The 5 Stages of Productivity

Productivity is a measure of output over time. All other things being equal, the more you produce per hour, the more productive you are. There are lots of ways to increase productivity, but I believe all increases in productivity fall into one of these five stages.

Ask More Questions

Today I was told a great consulting proposal should be made up of 70% questions and 30% answers. While it's a rough guide, it's surprising. Writing a proposal is a response to a set of problems you have been tasked with solving, yet this suggests questions are equally, if not more, valuable than answers.

Mental Calluses

When I first started kayaking seriously, I would rarely finish a session without having sore hands. The friction between my hands and the paddle would build up until it rubbed the skin away, leaving painful sores. Other kayakers would try different techniques to prevent this, but I found the only thing that worked was to let my hands harden naturally.

The Accelerating Pace of Change

The world is changing at a faster and faster rate. It’s not our perception; it’s a genuine phenomenon that is explained by the networking principles that form the basis of our social systems.

Whole Selves

Workplaces have traditionally encouraged people to show up with their "professional" self and to check all other parts of themselves at the door. This strange personality separation can lead us to some pretty bizarre behaviours.

Can Companies Grow Infinitely?

Over the last eight years, I've worked with a lot of different companies as a consultant. One question I've asked every company is, 'what goals do you have?' and I cannot think of a single one that didn't mention growth. I have nothing against growth, but I wonder if it's always the right goal.

An Introduction to Collaborative Innovation Funding

Every business wants to be a competitive success. We want to build great teams, that can continually innovate to delight greater and greater numbers of loyal customers while reducing costs and increasing revenue. However, for most organisations, this is a dream

Just Ship It!

Every time you send an email, launch a product or release something you created into the world, you’re exposing yourself to criticism. We’re all fearful of this criticism and maybe other things as well like wasting money, annoying someone in power or making a fool of yourself.

Finding a Purpose for Posting

How writing regularly helped me clarify the purpose of this blog across individuals, organisations, and products.

Why Product Teams Can't Work in All Companies

Empowered product teams need more than a rename; they require a leadership model and organisational paradigm built on trust and autonomy.

Four Books for Leaders

Four leadership books that shaped my thinking on evidence-based management, empowerment, culture, and self-awareness.

Standing in the Tragic Gap

A reflection on Parker Palmer’s “tragic gap” and the courage required to stand between today’s reality and a better future.

The Vulnerability of Writing

Writing in public is uncomfortable, but that vulnerability can become a powerful source of growth for both writer and reader.

Embrace Constraints For Startup Success

Why early-stage startups should embrace financial constraints and use them to focus on market validation and real revenue.

The Product Value Equation

In his book, Scaling Lean, Ash Maurya introduces the product value equation. I believe this simple but important equation holds the key to understanding any business model as it demonstrates how customer value, revenue and costs are linked together.

Seth Godin on the Value of Streaks

I’ve written every weekday since I started this blog and I know how valuable it is, I even wrote about it after two weeks of blogging, but knowing something is good for us, doesn’t necessarily mean we are always motivated enough to do it. This is why I’m up late writing this post, because keeping up the streak is important.

How Charity:Water is Changing The Model For Giving

In today's blog, I want to share what I think are the key components of the Charity: Water approach. I hope it will inspire you, as it did me.

The Secret to Achieving Your Goals

The simplest way to make progress is to place more bets, learn quickly, and keep doubling down on what works.

How We Form Mental Models And Why You Should Care

How past experiences shape our mental models, and why shared understanding depends on creating shared experiences.

Shareholder Value is No Longer The Main Goal

The Business Roundtable’s new statement signals a shift from shareholder primacy toward a broader responsibility to all stakeholders.

Conditions for Change

You can’t force people to change, but you can create the environment that makes new choices possible.

Busy is The Enemy of Productivity

Being busy can feel productive, but real progress comes from prioritising what matters rather than filling your diary.

Why is it Challenging to Connect The Dots?

Why predicting the future is so hard: as complexity grows, the number of possible patterns quickly becomes impossible to grasp.

An Alternative Approach for Public Sector Organisations

I think we need to rethink how our public sector organisations operate to make them sustainable for the future. We need new organisational structures focused on purpose, human relationships and new economic principles. This is more than just reorganisation. Through collectively reaching a new level of human consciousness we can improve the quality of life for all citizens at a lower cost.

How Amazon Designed an Organisation That Scales

A short reflection on James Lewis’s ideas about organisational design, flow, and why Amazon scales faster than most companies.

Two Weeks of Daily Blogging

What two weeks of daily blogging taught me about consistency, productivity, audience expectations, and finding my voice.

When Will We Learn to Embrace Mistakes?

Growth requires making new mistakes, but only if we take time to reflect and stop repeating old ones.

Anticipating a Breakthrough

That's what we spend most of our time doing — anticipating the breakthrough speech that will change everything or making a new connection that will open the right door for us. I used to spend a lot of time waiting for a breakthrough, but I realise now; breakthrough moments rarely happen.

Todays Products, Tomorrows Platform Capabilities

How teams can turn today’s products into tomorrow’s platform capabilities by investing in differentiated, reusable services.

Sticking to Your Principles

Principles only matter when they are inconvenient, costly, and tested in the small decisions nobody else sees.

Why We Need An Experimental Approach To House Buying

House buying is full of unknowns, so why can’t we test living in a property before making the biggest purchase of our lives?

The Product Management Talent Challenge

Why product management has become a critical capability, and what organisations must do to hire and develop strong PMs.

A Different Consulting Company

For a long time, I've felt there must be an alternative approach to work. It wasn't that I always knew what that alternative approach looked like, and to be honest I'm still figuring it out, but I did have that feeling. However, over the last few years, I have begun to understand how another approach could work in practice.

Leading with Facts over Opinions

Why leaders need better access to honest, shared data so decisions are grounded in reality rather than opinion.

The Pragmatic Bullet Journal

How I use a simple, low-maintenance Bullet Journal to improve reflection, organisation, and day-to-day productivity.

Out-think the Butterflies

A practical way to reframe nerves and anxiety by reflecting on past outcomes instead of fearing imagined extremes.

My First Daily Post

Why I started blogging daily to build discipline, refine my thinking, and practice sharing ideas in public.

The Three Types of Product Management

A few months ago I was asked to speak at a ThoughtWorks event about what a Product Manager does. This turned out to be very difficult to explain and speaking to other Product Managers didn’t help gain much clarity either! People are rightfully confused as to what a Product Manager does and to be honest …