What an insightful evening. 😇

I had an opportunity to take interview of Toby Johnson. Who loves and lives product management in the true sense. I got a lot to learn from him regarding product management, team & stakeholder relations, Life lessons.

I have been working with Toby on one of my projects for the last few months - It was a wonderful experience to learn from him today.

Being a Product manager takes a lot of skillsets and being good at what you do. Here are the learnings from Toby:

☑ Role of product manager with team

✔ The main role of the Product manager should be - To be the shield for the team. Whether it's a lot of requirements, team facing any issues in the delivery - The product manager can be the shield and make sure the team do not suffer. Because at the end of the day, team delivers the product.

✔ Here is the Mantra Toby believes - If your team is happy, they will deliver well. Creating strong relations with the team you are working with goes a long way.


☑ Agile

✔ Agile provide the structure for how work should be done. The best part about Scrum is constant feedback. Toby suggested running 1-week sprint - if that serves the purpose in your product. Running one one-week sprint really helps to gather the feedback faster, to improve faster every single week.

✔ One of the techniques I love that Toby has been implementing is - "Add Happiness matrix." In retrospective meeting, also ask to team on a rate of 1 to 5 - how happy they are. This really makes a huge difference. If team is not happy, if team is facing dissatisfaction or facing any issues - how can you expect them to work efficiently?

✔ Knowing how your team is feeling and helping them out makes really huge difference.

✅ Stakeholder management

✔ It can be the hardest part for product managers as every stakeholder is different - they have their priorities, fears, mindsets.

✔ There is no secret formula to learn this. You learn it by experience. You might have to consider stakeholders' business requirements even if it does not match with current timelines.

✔ What helps here is the mindset that Toby talked about - Break down the issues in Macro and Micro. You as a team cannot control everything. What you can do is focus on micro problems - How you can help the team to achieve what is requested, How you can make sure team don't suffer.

✔ The interesting topic he mentioned was - Keeping the team sustainability in mind while doing stakeholder management.

✔ One quick mindset is - "Always project does not come first, Your team does." Often Project managers focus on the project more and team less.

✅ Life lessons:

✔ Whatever work you are doing, whatever role you are playing - you should be happy and fulfilled. Work satisfaction matters.

At Phood, Toby Johnson and the team are doing wonders to achieve new heights of success. The best part is when you get to not only work with client but learn from them as well. Thank you Toby, for your time:)