Welcome to the first edition of Life, Lessons, Product & the Podcast.

I am sooo excited to welcome you to this little community of thoughts. I've been really inspired to start writing again recently, and I have had the most insightful conversations that I've wanted to write down anyway and thought that more people would benefit from hearing these words of wisdom - so here we are, the newsletter is happening! Hopefully you'll find it insightful, it will put a smile on your face & there will be a gem for you in here!

Life lessons...

As much as Product is interesting, I also wanted to share some of the highs and lows of (nomad) life. But honestly, it is the most rewarding, inspiring way of life - so I'm hoping that you'll enjoy some of the insights that I share along the way.

So lets get to it...

I had to take my van for a service this morning before heading off to Europe for a couple of months. I've been hit with a hefty repair bill, but it's at least fully road ready now! (I forgot about the joys of vehicle ownership).

On the way to pick up my van I had the MOST interesting conversation with my Uber driver.

He is from Afghanistan and had to leave the country 12 years ago - leaving behind acres of land, a beautiful home and everything that he knew and loved. He started afresh, and he had the most amazing attitude to life. Here are just some words of wisdom from my new friend:

• Stop fearing losing things - live in the moment and enjoy absolutely everything that you have
• So much of life is mindset, as long as you have the minimum needed for a comfortable life, you can create happiness anywhere
• Life is not about working as hard as you can, becoming stressed and neglecting the things that are important to you - it’s about putting them first and finding enjoyment in everything you do
• When you learn resilience and life skills - you can still be sad, but you won’t be stressed / panicked - even when the worst happens

From a man who literally had to leave every single thing that he knew, and has still found this much happiness and this amazing outlook on life - this conversation was everything I needed this week. & it’s so in line with my outlook on life, but every once in a while we lose our way a little bit and need a reminder (especially when being whacked with a repair bill).

I also took myself for a mini break in the peaks. & really remembered that sometimes a little switch off - even for a day - is what we all need.

Product Talk

Ok - the part that most people might care about..

This week my work has been focussed on Product Maturity.

A lot of large organisations use ‘agile maturity’, answering a bunch of questions on a prescribed timeline, and identifying where they’re strong / weak.

My thoughts on this:

• The idea is often that this is linear growth, where you always improve. This isn't always true - you only have limited resource and sometimes it means you go backwards in some areas and forwards in others.
• Any maturity metric isn’t to give you a score and put you in a box, but should instead exist to allow you to have conversations and identify where YOU want to improve in areas that will add value

I believe that any frameworks should be taken with a pinch of salt and looked at from a lens of what matters to you - so tweak / change them as you see fit.

The REAL benefit (of any framework), is really for you to take a stop and think and see if you want to focus on improving any of these larger areas to grow your product practises, and often save you time and increase impact vs the practises you might be using to survive at the moment.

So here’s the matrix that I’ve developed to use based on teams I’ve worked with (note, I do tweak it for each organisation and what is important in their space - but the general concept is always the same).

I know this image is tiny - there's a lot to get in there, so jump straight into the file if you're interested.

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The podcast.

This weeks episode spoke to Ekeata Inyang. I loved having Ekeata as a guest. She was such a joy to chat to. Covering everything from the attitude that got her started in Product - basically always trying something new, to teaching us about data products (which I have to say, I know very little about). It was super insightful & good fun. + Ekeata beat me to be the first one to swear on our podcast and I actually can’t quite believe that I hadn’t managed that yet 😅

Thanks for listening to my ramblings - hopefully you'll be back for more!

Evie

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