Hi there!
Why am I here? I'm a strong believer that the best way to learn is by teaching and I would love to have the opportunity to listen and provide value by sharing my perspectives and experiences.
I'm an experienced professional in digital products primarily in B2B in analytics and business automation spaces. I have been climbing the Product Management ladders over the last 7+ years and having fun failing and learning along the way. I led a small team of PMs at my las company ensuring they have everything they need to be successful while I keep alignment between R&D and GTM teams.
These days I'm exploring Product Management contract and consulting opportunities while starting to build a family business.
More details in my linkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmalbet/
My Mentoring Topics
- Product Development
- Team Management
- Leadership
- Product market fit
- How to deliver value over projects and features
- Turning Product teams from Feature teams to Empowered teams
- Prioritization
- Aligning Stakeholders
- Translate company mission and strategy to product strategy and roadmaps
- Tech feasibility vs business sense
- Killing products and features
EMPOWERED - Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
Marty Cagan
What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.
ViewINSPIRED - How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Marty Cagan
How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.
ViewMonetizing Innovation - How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price
Madhavan Ramanujam, Georg Tacke
Surprising rules for successful monetization Innovation is the most important driver of growth. Today, more than ever, companies need to innovate to survive. But successful innovation—measured in dollars and cents—is a very hard target to hit. Companies obsess over being creative and innovative and spend significant time and expense in designing and building products, yet struggle to monetize them: 72% of innovations fail to meet their financial targets—or fail entirely. Many companies have come to accept that a high failure rate, and the billions of dollars lost annually, is just the cost of doing business. Monetizing Innovations argues that this is tragic, wasteful, and wrong. Radically improving the odds that your innovation will succeed is just a matter of removing the guesswork. That happens when you put customer demand and willingness to pay in the driver seat—when you design the product around the price. It’s a new paradigm, and that opens the door to true game change: You can stop hoping to monetize, and start knowing that you will. The authors at Simon Kucher know what they’re talking about. As the world’s premier pricing and monetization consulting services company, with 800 professionals in 30 cities around the globe, they have helped clients ranging from massive pharmaceuticals to fast-growing startups find success. In Monetizing Innovation, they distil the lessons of thirty years and over 10,000 projects into a practical, nine-step approach. Whether you are a CEO, executive leadership, or part of the team responsible for innovation and new product development, this book is for you, with special sections and checklist-driven summaries to make monetizing innovation part of your company’s DNA. Illustrative case studies show how some of the world’s best innovative companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Porsche, Optimizely, Draeger, Swarovski and big pharmaceutical companies have used principles outlined in this book. A direct challenge to the status quo “spray and pray” style of innovation, Monetizing Innovation presents a practical approach that can be adopted by any organization, in any industry. Most monetizing innovation failure point home. Now more than ever, companies must rethink the practices that have lost countless billions of dollars. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, and a clear promise: Go from hope to certainty.
ViewContinuous Discovery Habits - Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
Teresa Torres
"If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success." - Marty Cagan How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.
ViewObviously Awesome - How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
April Dunford
You know your product is awesome--but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn't a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base. So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, will enlighten you. Her new book, Obviously Awesome, shows you how to find your product's "secret sauce"--and then sell that sauce to those who crave it. Having spent years as a startup executive (with 16 product launches under her belt) and a consultant (who's worked on dozens more), Dunford speaks with authority about breaking through the noise of a crowded market. Punctuated with witty anecdotes and compelling case studies, Dunford's book is at once entertaining and illuminating. Among the invaluable lessons you'll learn are: - The Five Components of Effective Positioning - How to instantly connect an audience to your offering's value - How to choose the best market for your products - How to use three distinct styles of positioning to your advantage - How to leverage market trends to help buyers understand why making a purchase is important right now Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer or salesperson struggling to bring inventive products to market, Dunford's insights will help you find your awesome, so that your customers can too.
ViewLean Analytics - Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz
If you’re involved with a startup, analytics help you find your way to the right product and market before the money runs out. But with a flood of information available, where do you start? This book shows you what to measure, how to analyze it, and how to report it, whether you’re evaluating your business model, testing new features, enticing investors, or reporting progress to advisers. Written by Alistair Croll (founder of Coradiant) and Ben Yoskovitz (co-founder of Year One Labs), Lean Analytics lays out practical, proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond. Examples and case studies show entrepreneurs and intrapreneneurs (entrepreneurs inside larger organizations) how to identify and measure a startup’s single most important metric, and how to iterate until you get it right. While the authors primarily cover technology startups, their lessons can be applied far beyond the Web. Even traditional businesses are embracing a lean, learn-first approach, as demonstrated by owners of a San Francisco deli that used a temporary "pop-up" method to optimize their menu and operations before launching a permanent restaurant.
ViewThe Lean Startup - How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries
Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean.
ViewGetting to Yes - Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In; Second Edition
Roger Fisher, William Ury
Getting to Yes offers a concise, step-by-step, proven strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict—whether it involves parents and children, neighbors, bosses and employees, customers or corporations, tenants or diplomats. Based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals continually with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution from domestic to business to international, Getting to Yes tells you how to: * Separate the people from the problem; * Focus on interests, not positions; * Work together to create options that will satisfy both parties; and * Negotiate successfully with people who are more powerful, refuse to play by the rules, or resort to "dirty tricks." Since its original publication in 1981, Getting to Yes has been translated into 18 languages and has sold over 1 million copies in its various editions. This completely revised edition is a universal guide to the art of negotiating personal and professional disputes. It offers a concise strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict.
ViewDifficult Conversations - How to Discuss what Matters Most
Douglas F. Stone, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
Members of the Harvard Negotiation Project -- the organization that brought you the megabestseller GETTING TO YES -- show you how to handle your most difficult conversations with confidence and skill Whether we're dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with our spouse about money or child-rearing, negotiating with a difficult client, or simply saying "no", or "I'm sorry", or "I love you", we attempt to avoid difficult conversations every day. No matter how competent we are, we all have conversations that cause anxiety and frustration. This book can help. Based on fifteen years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations walks you through a proven step-by-step approach for how to have you toughest conversations with less stress and more success. It shows you how to prepare yourself; how to start the conversation without defensiveness; and how to keep it constructive and focused regardless of how the other person responds. You'll learn how to: -- Decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation -- Interpret the significance of what is said -- and what is not -- Identify the erroneous but deeply ingrained assumptions that keep you stuck -- Manage strong emotions -- yours and theirs -- Spot ways your self-image affects the conversation -- and ways the conversation affects your self-image Filled with examples from everyday life, Difficult Conversations will help you at home, on the job, or out in the world. It is a book you'll turn to again and again for advice, practical skills, and reassurance.
ViewGood Strategy/Bad Strategy - The difference and why it matters
Richard Rumelt
When Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing. Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognise and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies that honestly acknowledge the challenges being faced and offer straightforward approaches to overcoming them. Strategy should not be equated with ambition, leadership, vision or planning; rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. For Rumelt, the heart of good strategy is insight into the hidden power in any situation, and into an appropriate response - whether launching a new product, fighting a war or putting a man on the moon. Drawing on examples of the good and the bad from across all sectors and all ages, he shows how this insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools that lead to better thinking and better strategy, strategy that cuts through the hype and gets results.
ViewUnderstanding Michael Porter - The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy
Joan Magretta
Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter's frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter's name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts. Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter's revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter's full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter's ideas. Magretta uses her wide business experience to translate Porter's powerful insights into practice and to correct the most common misconceptions about them?for instance, that competition is about being unique, not being the best; that it is a contest over profits, not a battle between rivals; that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy, not being all things to all customers. An added feature is an original Q&A with Porter himself, which includes answers to managers' FAQs. Eminently readable, this book will enable every manager in your organization to grasp Porter's ideas?and swiftly deploy them to drive your company's success.
View7 Powers - The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
What are the secrets to making a company enduringly valuable? 7 Powers breaks fresh ground by constructing a comprehensive strategy toolset that is easy for you to learn, communicate and quickly apply. Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy advisor, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher, Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of Strategy rooted in the notion of Power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create Power. And create Power it must, for without it your business is at risk. He explains why invention always comes first and then develops the Power Progression to enable you to target when your Power must be established: in the Origination, Take-Off or Stability phases of your business. Every business faces a do-or-die strategy moment: a crux directional choice made amidst swirling uncertainty. To get this right you need at your fingertips a real-time strategy compass to discern your true north. 7 Powers is that compass.
ViewCreativity, Inc. - Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Ed Catmull
Lessons in creativity and business from the president of Pixar and Disney Animation _____________________________________________________________ 'Just might be the best business book ever written.' Forbes Magazine This is the story behind the company that changed animation forever. Here, the founder of Pixar reveals the ideas and techniques that have made Pixar one of the most widely admired creative businesses, and one of the most profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the world's first computer-animated movie. When an early partnership with George Lucas led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986, he couldn't have known what would come. Nine years later and against all odds, Toy Story was released. It was the start of a new generation of animation. Through its focus on the joy of storytelling, inventive plots and emotional authenticity, Pixar revolutionised how animated films were created. Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, with behind-the-scenes examples from Pixar itself. It is a book about how to build and sustain a creative culture with a unique identity. And through this story, we learn what creativity really is. 'Ed reveals, with common sense specificity and honesty, examples of how not to get in your own way and realize a creative coalescence of art, business and innovation.' George Lucas
ViewHooked - How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal
Revised and Updated, Featuring a New Case Study How do successful companies create products people can’t put down? Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with: • Practical insights to create user habits that stick. • Actionable steps for building products people love. • Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.
ViewBlitzscaling - The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
Foreword by Bill Gates LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies. What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion –as quickly as possible. When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company’s life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more. Whether your business has ten employees or ten thousand, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.
ViewStart With Why - How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action
Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek's recent video on 'The Millennial Question' went viral with over 150 million views. Start with Why is a global bestseller and the TED Talk based on it is the third most watched of all time. Why are some people and organisations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again? In business, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters WHY you do it. Start with Why analyses leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Jobs and discovers that they all think in the same way - they all started with why. Simon Sinek explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then to ask the more important question-WHY? Why do we do what we do? Why do we exist? Learning to ask these questions can unlock the secret to inspirational business. Sinek explains what it truly takes to lead and inspire and how anyone can learn how to do it.
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D.
11.February 2023The session was very refreshing and helped me orient my actions better.
Alex listened with empathy and genuine curiosity, and then gave me pragmatic and specific tips.