Phillip Starke
Read less, trust yourself more
Most people don’t read enough. However, there are also some who read too much. For these folks all the reading can counterintuitively lead to decreasing confidence and to analysis paralysis.
Category Self Management
The power of quitting: a smart move for your career and happiness
A large portion of the workforce is unhappy in their job. Why do they not quit? What are the benefits of quitting a miserable job?
Why you don’t need a mentor – you can create your own!
Not all of us have a "real" mentor. Formulating your issues and imagining the mentor's advice works as well! It is surprisingly easy.
Opportunity Solution Tree – a simple visual for organizing opportunities
The opportunity solution tree (OST) was invented by Teresa Torres as a means to collect and visualize the opportunity space. It is a model or mental representation that clearly links product goals to user needs and to the options for solving those needs. In product discovery, it is a powerful tool for creating a clear structure of what the team wants to achieve.
Keep quiet – the rare ability to endure and withstand silence
We often feel the need to immediately fill silence with answers, comments, or questions. And I get it, being in a group where nobody speaks for some moments can be extremely uncomfortable and awkward. Being able to withstand the urge to say something in those moments of silence is not easy to do.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – 4 takeaways from a powerful book
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is probably the book that had the most overall impact on my life. Other impactful books mostly touched my professional life. This one not only did that, but also changed my life outside of work. It impacted my character.
Start with Why – 3 takeaways in applying this powerful concept
All companies know their What. It is what they are offering, the services and products they are selling. Some companies know their How. It is how they are building and offering their products and services, their values, their culture. The how is often also called Unique Value Proposition (USP). Only the rarest of companies are able to actually say Why they are doing what they are doing, what the real motivation is, what their purpose is
Deep work: a powerful concept – five takeaways from an inspiring book
have read a few books that had a significant impact on my professional (and personal) life, maybe none more so than “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective people” by Stephen Covey. However, a few months ago, I discovered the work of Cal Newport and read his book “Deep Work”. Its impact on my thinking was and is on par with the classics listed above.
Our unreasonable hope that software tools will magically save us
Don´t get me wrong, many software tools are fantastic products. I use a wide variety daily. However, I feel like their impact is overvalued. Or maybe, to put it better, I think they are misused. Far too often is some new license for a tool purchased because “we are not meeting our targets”. The hope is then that the tool magically solves everything. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.
The four core competencies of an effective product owner
The Product Owner (PO) is an extremely important role that includes a diverse set of responsibilities and an empowered PO can have a tremendous impact on product development, if he or she is able to handle the many jobs of a PO. This raises the question of what skills are needed to do just that. Thus, in this third installment of the series on the PO I will focus on answering the question What are the core competencies of a Product Owner?