Dear all, Am I the only one who’s eyes are turning square in the pandemic? This week I could hardly stand looking at screens anymore. Working on our digital product (more on that soon), Zoom calls with clients and partners, webinars – it felt increasingly dizzying....

Dear all, My apologies, I am late this week. Between work on the syllabus for my new course “Strategic Business Model Innovation” that I will be teaching this fall, attending (part of) a virtual conference, and some personal errands, there was just not enough time...

Dear all, a night ago a Tweet from Marty Cagan popped up in my feed in between the meanwhile somewhat boring threads about how to do product discovery remotely in times of Corona etc.. It referenced a post he had written in response to Jeremiah Lee's somewhat...

Dear all, those of you who have been working with me for a while, know about my passion for software simplicity (and my secret desire to become Product Manager for Word and Outlook with the sole intention of slashing their bloat down to something focused and useful)....

Dear all, are you as tired as me reading, hearing, watching Covid-19-stuff every day? Actually, I was so tired of it yesterday that I went offline for half a day and took a hike up one of the smaller mountains around here with my wife and Moritz, our Weimador. Back...

Dear all, Approaching the Easter weekend, there are some hopeful signs of the current crisis subsiding somewhat – at least here in Europe. Still, the world will not go back to “normal” any time soon. In this context I’d like to share the video of Simon Sinek’s (“Start...

Dear all, recently I was watching yet another late night talk show (the benefits of extended home office!) discussing the current crisis. As part of the conversation, the host asked the Bavarian state premier, who was video-conferenced in, which methods and heuristics...

Dear all,  at this moment we all are facing major disruption, for once unfortunately not technology driven. To deal with it, we'll have to change. Think about what was, what is, and what will be. To spark some thoughts, this week's reads cover three different aspects...

Dear all, we're a comparably small company and in our field of work, remote work is the rule rather than the exception. Therefore our office has never been much more than an informal Friday gathering place. We have been using messaging (Slack, iMessage), shared...

Dear all, in the current crisis, many people, including managers, are working remotely for the first time. We have had multiple conversations about what’s required to make working from a home office productive while maintaining everyone’s health. Here are a few short...

Dear all, this week's Weekend Reading is early and we are not suggesting any new reading materials. As many of us are finding ourselves grounded in laudable voluntary or involuntary social distancing or even quarantine schemes (here is a Medium post that - among other...

Dear all, to develop products successfully, it requires learning strategies and team alignment. The larger the product organisation becomes, the more important these factors are. Objectives and Key Results are a proven means to steer the implementation and continuous...

Dear all, during a workshop last week with a client's IT "product team" and their "business" counterparts, we experienced a typical conflict. Working through a particularly thorny backlog of requirements from the business’ side, we came across an item, which described...

Dear all, trick question: What do Elon Musk and Alexander the Great have in common? Answer: They probably apply/have applied the same critical thinking method, First Principles Thinking. A first principle is "the first basis from which a thing is known" as Aristotle...