My 2022 review and lookout

2022 was a great year for me.

It was exhausting, but also very rewarding. I got to do interviews with a lot of product owners and product managers about the current conditions of their product management practices. Also, I was able to have a little impact on the German product community by hosting 11 product lunches this year.

And that happened while my son started walking. Nowadays, he even babbles incessantly about fire departments, cranes, and excavators. Just unbelievable.

Aside from that, there are a lot of things I can proudly look back to:

• I’ve written 130 posts in the past 134 days
• Josua and I have established a new webinar format Product Lunch
• Conducted way over 50 interviews with product people from Germany
• Closed 2 entirely new clients
• Have over 10 prospects in our pipeline
• I’ve narrowed down what I want to write about: strategic clarity
• My first big public talk at Digitale Leute Summit about business experiments

I've taken on a lot of responsibilities this year, and I wish I had done a better job of most of them.

This is what the yearly review is about, isn’t it?

Shocker: Not time is my scarcest resource – energy is.

I’ve been struggling with my to-do list for quite some time now.

But this year I improved my consciousness about the root causes a lot. The first epiphany was, that it’s not only a problem of finite time. It’s that I just have 2 or 3 hours a day, where I can really push forward in deep work.

So planning 8 hours of hard thinking just leads to unrealistic expectations and ultimately stress.

I don’t finish the things I do, and I get sloppy. So, my review questions have changed to:

• What did I enjoy?
• What gave me Energy?
• What drained my Energy?

They help me to realise that there is very limited room for fields I can grow in.

In the past, I’ve always learned by overselling myself. I took on responsibilities for things I wasn’t capable of solving yet. So, I pushed, learned, and accomplished it somehow.

But this only works for 1 to max 2 things in parallel – not 5.

Assessment of the last year

The main thing, which drained my energy this year, was missing focus.

I've taken on too many new tasks where I don't have the skills I want to have to meet my standards. As mentioned earlier, taking on just one of these responsibilities leads to challenging and good growth.

I did it with these 5 to different degrees:

• Leading my consulting team as its Head of
• Doing discovery for our consulting services [in a very demanding setting because of non-obvious customer segments with different levels of problem-awareness]
• Selling consulting services [in B2B]
• Consult my clients in finding viable business models, starting with product discovery and developing a strategy
• Starting to write

The results by which I am ultimately measured are sales numbers.

On one hand, I was lucky, as sales comes relatively easy to me and the challenge at hand isn’t as complex and hard-to-navigate as the discovery or client work.

But I have to get familiar with a new process. Juggling all the different sales opportunities, documenting them and following up on everybody was very stressful for me. I expect this to become an easy and automatic process in the future, but initially, it’s quite energy consuming.

The processes I have to establish:

• Juggling all the sales opportunities, documenting them and following up on everybody
• Documenting my work, so I can communicate clearly what I did to stakeholders
• Document my strategic status quo to give context to my team
• Write posts in a clear manner

So in the future, I want to acknowledge and limit the number of complex challenges I tackle simultaneously. And establishing a new process counts as a complex challenge.

Having that said, I realised again in my reflection, what gives me energy and drives my work: Creating strategic clarity.

I love being confident, that what I do is contributing to a big and meaningful goal. And I love doing that for my clients as well. Whether it's pointing out the weaknesses in their unit economics or telling them to focus on another part of their business.

And many customers are just as grateful as I am for this outside view of their challenges at the strategic level.

My Resolutions

In 2023, I want to be clearer about my challenges at the various strategic levels. To this end, I will use Martin Erkisson’s decision stack.

I also intend to keep writing and find an even easier mode with less friction to invest my energy in other things. Plus, I would like to create more blog posts as they are less ephemeral than posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

I would like to expand my relationship with the German product community, as I really enjoy interacting with this diverse group of people.

Finally, I want to put less pressure on myself. Much of that pressure comes from the desire to buy a house in 4 years. Instead, I intend to give myself some air and grow next year from the opportunities I face at tarent right now.

This means in Q1 of 2023 I will focus on my sales skills and processes to broaden my network and help more people identify what potential modern product management can have in their businesses.

On the other hand, I stay active in leading the consulting team, in discovery, and in writing, but I don't aspire to grow to the next level. This is my conscious prioritisation of complex challenges to tackle.

I will never compromise my client's work.