All Things Product

It’s been a little over five months since I’ve had full-time employment and it has turned out to be one of the most productive times of my life. As a lifelong Christian, it’s embarrassing to admit but I have never read the entire Bible. I started reading in January and now I am halfway through. I took a leap and started my own consulting business, started blogging, and even built a website. But what I’m most proud of is something that has stretched me far beyond my comfort zo

I have talked a lot about my wins; the moments where clarity, alignment, and persistence changed everything. Where I was the hero. It is my blog, I can do that. But there have also been times when it was not enough, times when I messed up and times when I gave up. Times when there were no winners. I was at a company for about a year when a major restructuring occurred. I noticed a lot of issues with the way we were approaching our work. In fact, we all did. I consistently voi

On Monday, I wrote about the discipline of narrowing focus, the power of doing less with intention. But sometimes the only logical way forward is to widen your scope. Some may find this hard to believe, but sometimes the stakeholders are thinking too small. A while back, I was asked to prioritize a credit‑card vendor replacement, “just a contractual obligation.” They were matter‑of‑fact about it: “Just a swap out. Nothing more. Quick and simple.” But my natural curiosity enti

A pattern I’ve noticed in my career is that product leaders rarely get hired until the chaos becomes unmanageable. I’ve also worked alongside plenty of product colleagues who didn’t have a product mindset or skills, just deep technical expertise and the results were the same. Wildly overflowing scope, no focus, money being poured into work with nothing valuable to show for it. This is not rare; this is why KV Product Consulting was created. One of the many moments that stands

Throughout my career, I have been part of several large scale efforts where we were building something, and it wasn’t clear, at least to me, that we didn’t know the problem we needed to solve. We only knew the outcome we wanted. In many instances, stakeholders and leaders were convinced that a new flashy solution would be the trick to increasing profits, reducing losses, saving time, insert any metric. Portals, SaaS tools, AI, a new data structure, insert any flashy technolog

Some will probably say this crosses the line between product and delivery. No lies detected. But as I told a client yesterday, "If someone else wants to do the work, I will gladly let them. But if no one is, and it needs to be done, I’m going to get it done." That is the kind of product manager you want. No excuses, just results. One of the four values of agile is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. In fact, it is the first value listed in the manifesto,

People often ask me, "How do you become a product manager?" I could easily point to my first role as a product leader and say that is when I learned how. I was trained on all the agile processes and ceremonies: backlogs, sprints, refinement, stories, pointing, retros, demos... all the things. But great product management is much more than that. One of the most important things a good product leader must have is a strong product mindset and the authority and guts to use it. Wi

Over the past 2 decades, I have saved several companies from spending hundreds of thousands on technology they did not need. I have helped product teams cut cycle times in half. I have turned failing product transformations into successful execution in a matter of days. I consistently find solutions no one else is looking for that provide huge wins, like giving several days of time back to executives. And so much more. Even inside the companies I worked at, I witnessed the sa