Free Copies of IMPACT-FIRST PRODUCT TEAMS for your C-Suite!

Bonjour from Paris! I’ve spent the last few weeks criss-crossing Europe to talk to folks about Impact-first Product Teams, and I’ll be wrapping up this leg of touring with stops in Porto and Lisbon this week. It’s been an absolute joy to meet so many members of the European product management community—thanks to everybody who came to an event despite Meetup outages, train delays, and named storms.

I’m headed back home on Friday and looking forward to getting into a more regular writing practice as I settle in for November and December, so stay tuned!

Get Free Copies of Impact-first Product Teams for your C-Suite!

A product leader recently told me, “Our CFO read your book, and you’re his new favourite person.”

This was a very nice thing to hear, and it got me thinking about how I can get the book into the hands of C-Suite folks outside of our product bubble. So, I’m making an offer: If you have a CFO (or anyone else in the C-Suite) who you think would benefit from reading Impact-first Product Teams, drop me a line and I’ll send them a physical copy for free. If they’re based in the UK, I’ll even sign/inscribe it. Just write back to this email or use this form to let me know where to send a book or two or three.

Seriously, I hope y’all will take me up on this! It’s a great way to show your company leadership that you’re committed to an impact-first approach, and to facilitate some really important cross-functional conversations.

Planning to Change, or Planning to Avoid Change?

Last week in Paris, I asked a question that has been rattling around in my head for the last few months:

Do your planning activities help you understand the way the world around you is changing, or give you cover to ignore the way the world around you is changing?

When I was researching my book Agile for Everybody, experienced Agile consultant Kathryn Kuhn made a point that really stuck with me. To paraphrase/summarize: more planning can actually make you more adaptable, if you use that planning as an opportunity to adjust course and interrogate your past assumptions.

For most of the folks I talk to, though, “planning season” is a black hole into which assumptions and projections disappear, never to be seen or heard from again. (Or at least, not to be seen or heard from again until the next planning season.)

I’m generally pretty hesitant to talk about anything Agile-related these days, but I’ve made the “planning for uncertainty” chapter of Agile for Everybody available for my newsletter subscribers (that’s you!) here. Enjoy!

Get Discounted Tickets to Martin Eriksson’s Upcoming Decision Stack Workshop in London!

OK, so I generally don’t do a lot of cross-promo stuff, especially when I’m so invested in hawking my own wares. But Martin Eriksson’s Decision Stack is genuinely one of my favourite ways to think about systematising product decision-making, and Martin Eriksson is genuinely one of my favourite people. He’s doing a workshop in London this December, and you can get £100 off tickets using this link. If you’ve got some L&D budget floating around to use before the end of the year, this is a great place to invest it!

What I’m Listening To While I Write All This Stuff

My dear friend Casey Dienel has just released her new album My Heart Is an Outlaw and it is sooooooooooooo good. Casey and I worked together on her last album Imitation of a Woman to Love in 2017, and it’s been amazing to see that album get some long-overdue flowers as well. Hard to pick a favourite song on this album, but I’d have to give it to “Seventeen”:

Thanks so much for taking an interest in my work. As always, you can reach me directly at [email protected].