Key Mentorship in Product Management

Out of the hundreds of nominations, and amazing finalists, the 7th annual winner of The Best Product Person is … Chris Butler.

The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group.

Take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2016: Chris Butler. (tweet)

Getting to here…

> What key people helped shape you into the product manager you are today?

The core of product management was something that I learned at Microsoft. We would joke that program managers aren’t useful for the first two years. They do an amazing job training and supporting the new product people. I was right out of college.

A particularly great manager I had started as someone I worked with as a peer. Liz Yang was a development lead on a team of mine and then moved to GPM where I worked for her. She is the model of what I use as a great manager. She would challenge me to grow, give me the chance to learn, and truly cared about helping me succeed in my career (both while I was at Microsoft and longer term). Besides generally caring about my growth, she really made the 1:1 important.

When I think about the people that have become voices in my head I think of John Boyd and Venkatesh Rao that runs the Ribbonfarm blog.

Boyd was the great granddaddy of agile with the OODA loop. His presentations while in the US military and the research path he took to that point is fascinating. It is taking everything before him from a military strategy standpoint and boiling it down to key ways to think about strategy.

Rao is originally an academic (a 2nd generation Boydian acolyte?) that sold out and became a management consultant. I love the long form topics he takes on in his blog. They are interpretations of what Boyd has talked about for the next generation of technology. He has written books I highly recommend including the The Gervais Principle, Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, among other things. His short fiction is pretty great too.

More to Come

Over the coming weeks we will be speaking with and learning more from Chris Butler.

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2017 has begun!  The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded!  This year, the first nominator of Chris received a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com.  Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://TheBestProductPerson.com

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2016: Chris Butler. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

About ‘The Best Product Person’

The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy (http://tpgblog.com) and The Product Group (http://meetup.com/theproductgroup).

TBPP Recognizes 1 person each year, invites them to speak and share their knowledge and experience with the larger product community. The nominations can be submitted by anyone. And, if you are the first to submit the winning nominee, you too will be rewarded  Over the course of the year, the various nominees are interviewed and the finalists narrowed down to: The Best Product Person of the year . The finalists are interviewed and evaluated for excellence in Product along the following lines… Becoming a Product Person, Your Product, Advice to Product People, and Future & Trends.

TBPP is both (1) the way the Product community gets together to recognize excellence amongst our ranks as well as (2) provide, to a large audience, insights into that excellence in a manner we can all learn from and leverage in our own Product journeys.

For more information about The Best Product Person award and past winners visit https://tpgblog.com/tbpp

About ‘The Product Group’

The Product Group is an opportunity for Product Managers, etc. to come together to meet, interact, and network. It’s an awesome way to meet fellow Product People in a laid-back, conversational environment within which sharing and learning can flourish and complement the knowledge base for all on a peer-to-peer basis. The NYC chapter of The Product Group meets the first Thursday of each month. If you are interested in a establishing chapter near you, please contact The Product Guy or The Product Group for more information. (https://tpgblog.com/theproductgroup/ )