Richard Russell Coaching

ADHD Coach

I split my time between Luxembourg and London.
Available for NED and Fractional Hybrid roles also.

Product Leadership Coach

Whether you’re scaling a product-led company or transforming how you work, I can help you move faster, with less pain *

* There's always pain. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

But we can make the pain worth it.

My product and engineering background from Google, Amazon and my exposure to countless startups and corporates means I understand where you're coming from.

My experience across every function (marketing, strategy, partnerships, operations, customer service and more) and in many industries (SaaS, Consumer Internet, Retail, Travel, Logistics, Banking, Insurance, MedTech, Crypto, Media, etc) means I know where you want to go.

The key for most of my clients is helping them empower themselves so they can empower their teams. This means transforming from tactical and functional to strategic and cross-functional, developing courage to take the right risks, and balancing the need to hold firm on some topics while disagreeing and committing to the rest of the executive team on others.

If this sounds like you, book a free chemistry call and we can get to know each other and see if there is a fit.

Scaleup Leaders

I host a video podcast and write a newsletter for and about leaders who are scaling up.

Creator & Host

Amazon

Two roles, firstly driving pan-European technology projects to improve the European customer experience, and secondly in consumer localization, where we translate and localize millions of product listings each day across all Amazon’s marketplaces

* Acting Director for Consumer Localization from Jul-Nov 2015 with multi-discipline team of 100
Leading 2016 planning with 2.5x revenue growth (goal met in October 2016), and 2017 planning with 2x revenue growth

* 2015 Q4 Localization output exceeded previous seven quarters combined, and 2016 year end goal met during 2016 Q2

* Cut the time to launch new languages by six months (50%), without affecting revenue or customer experience

* Led “language of preference” program for global consumer websites, delivering second language experience on multiple marketplaces (e.g. Amazon.de and Amazon.co.jp in English), and a program of ongoing expansion to new market segments

* Proposed and secured funding for a broad technology transformation program covering hundreds of interdependent services to allow Amazon’s consumer websites to use non-latin languages

Senior Manager Product Development

High Street Labs

Developed Wlcome (yes, welcome without the e) a mobile loyalty app for brick-and-mortar stores, using geo-location to automatically check a customer into a store location to provide personalised service, loyalty rewards, and payments.

I developed the proof of concept, then product managed ongoing development with offshore dev team. I launched pilot in two coffee shops with 60 weekly actives after 1 month. I learnt a huge amount about marketing and innovation - the hard way!

In November 2013, after becoming a father, I took an interim role as Chief Product Officer at MoPowered, a listed mobile commerce startup.

MoPowered provides a SaaS solution to online retailers, enabling them to sell on the mobile channel. I took on management of the R&D division (Engineering, Product, QA, UX and Security).

- Implemented an agile transformation, accelerating release cycle from quarterly to weekly

- Halved merchant integration costs, reduced maintenance cost per issue from days to hours

- Implemented UI overhaul to enable metrics-driven user experience improvements, increasing basket size and conversion rate for our customers, and enabling improvements across multiple clients at once

- Created a hiring pipeline, set up recruiting process, and trained team on interviewing techniques, doubling team size from 8 to 18 people in 4 months.

- Proposed strategy to reduce cash burn, reducing locations and headcount, bringing key functions in-house, and focusing on product development, implemented by new management after I left

Founder

Google

I was part of the engineering team reporting through the sales division. Over four roles, I was responsible for: delivering Google AdSense technology to European partners including search engines (eg Ask Jeeves, Seznam.cz), portals (AOL, Yahoo), publishers (eg El Pais, De Telegraaf, Le Monde), and broadcasters (eg Channel 4, Sky); developing eCommerce payment partnerships for Google Checkout (eg Kiddicare, eBuyer); negotiating partnerships for global public transport agencies (eg TfL London, Deutsche Bahn, and MTA New York) to put their data on Google Maps; and managing a client solutions team supporting advertising agencies (WPP, Publicis, Omnicom) buying ads through DoubleClick BidManager.

- Recruited and managed a team of 5 in London and Paris offices, receiving a 94% rating as a manager from my team, representing top quartile performance across the business

- Built tools used by DoubleClick Bid Manager Sales & Services teams saving >20 FTEs globally

- Executed EMEA Bid Manager upgrade project, exceeding US counterpart team on all key metrics

- Developed tools to enable scaling of map data operations, launching 4x faster with 50% fewer FTEs

- Product managed european Checkout features including VAT, Chip-and-PIN, and Contactless Payments

- Managed AdSense Broadcast, Publishing and Portal partnerships worth £100M/yr with 80% YoY growth

Senior Engineer & Manager

Deutsche Bank

Ran a team which would now be known as DevOps, managing the build and deployment process and environments for Deutsche Bank’s market-leading online wholesale foreign exchange, bonds and derivatives trading platform, Autobahn, working with traders from DB and white label clients.

- Promoted to team lead, developed release process and launched new product 3x faster than before

- Planned and executed the first successful Business Continuity Test in Global Markets eCommerce

Lead Deployment Engineer, Global Markets eCommerce

Yellow Goanna PTY LTD

IT Infrastructure Consulting - clients included The RSPCA South Australia, The South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service, Austrics (Trapeze), a Satellite ISP Startup, and a B2B Accounting Startup
- Deployed a Satellite ISP and Education CDN in schools around rural South Australia
- Consulted for an online accounting startup, advising on technology strategy
- Developed and run a diploma level IT course for TAFE SA

Systems Administrator and Consultant

Department for Environment and Water

Managing production, development and testing Solaris server environments for mission-critical services for Department of Environment and Heritage (DEH), a preceding agency of DEW.

Systems Administrator

Trapeze Group

Developing a new user interface for a public transport management product.

Programmer - AUSTRICS (Acquired by Trapeze)

Helping leaders do more with less | OKRs & Leadership | ex Amazon & Google

* There’s always pain. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
But we keep it to a minimum—and make the progress worth it.

You've read the books.
You're working harder than ever.
But the changes aren't sticking, and you're slipping behind.

Ever felt like that?

The three usual suspects:

𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: Teams pull in different directions
𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐆𝐚𝐩𝐬: Decisions stall in deadlock
𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Bold slides, but nothing ships

If you don't change, you’ll miss opportunities, exhaust talent, and watch faster players overtake you.

And it will keep getting worse.

I help you break that cycle — fast.

I’ve led large teams at Amazon and Googl, helped 20+ startup executives navigate these challenges successfully and worked with corporates up to Fortune 500 scale. I love helping leaders like you bridge the gap between technical excellence and business leadership.

These challenges show up differently for every leader, but here are some recent results:

🔥 Series C CEO – Unblocked strategy, shipped a scalable fix in weeks, then raised a Series D.
🔥 Series A CEO – Broke the decision bottleneck, strengthened delegation, and cut attrition.
🔥 Series C VP Eng – Beat impostor syndrome, shaped strategy, and stepped up to CTO.
🔥 GM, Traditional BU – Shifted a 70-person product org from tech-focused order-takers to customer-centric empowered teams.

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧?

Here's how I can help:

✅ Focused coaching, one-to-one or with your leadership team, to get you unstuck fast
✅ Facilitated strategy, OKR, planning and review workshops to create momentum
✅ Develop proven leadership habits to help you maintain progress
✅ Targeted training to upskill teams

As an individual, this will help you:

👉 Move from functional leadership to company-wide impact
👉 Build alignment across growing teams
👉 Navigate relationships with co-founders and stakeholders
👉 Transition from BigTech or Corporate to Scaleup leadership

For your organisation, this will help you:

🎯 Build your management operating system
🎯 Develop clear vision, strategy, and goals (OKRs)
🎯 Create cross-team alignment and buy-in
🎯 Build execution and review cadences that drive consistent results

Message me to explore if we're a good fit.

Richard Russell

“Best Conference Ever”
“One and a half days of inspiration”
“We made so much progress”

Real quotes from leaders at a transformation conference for a Swedish company that I really enjoyed leading over the past two days.

Heading home now - tired, but energised and happy.

I could do this again. :-)

Performance Coach for ADHD Leaders | Business Coach for Product and Scaleup Leaders | I help you move faster — with less pain*

No alternative text description for this image

I'm on my way to Stockholm for a transformation workshop with a client.

Looking forward to this!

Who doesn't love to receive feedback like this?

"The conference was one of the best, if not in fact the best conference I have attended" - from Håkan Johansson, Lead Business developer,  Tietoevry Industry.

At the end of the conference, I asked each of the 45 attendees for one word that described their experience. The number of people who said some variation of "hope", "inspiration", "progress", or "team" was overwhelming - such a thrill to hear.

I loved the energy, enthusiasm, and potential in this team - and it was a privilege to lead them through this conference kicking off their transformation project. I'm excited to see what they come up with.

I’m in Sweden, at this lovely villa in the snow. The conference starts in 90 minutes and I’m all set.

Yes, most of the preparation happened last minute. I spent a few weeks percolating ideas, with very little to show for it. Then the deadline looms, adrenaline kicked in and I focused like a weapon and got the whole workshop built in a day.

I used to think of this as procrastination and beat myself up for not getting it all done ahead of time.

But now I know this is how I do my best work. The time before the deadline is my brain doing the work in the background. Making connections, testing insights, iterating through concepts.

I have made peace with it, and it works.

How do you do your best work?

Is ADHD really a “deficit” or a “disorder”?

Technically yes, that’s what the definition says.

But practically, it’s just a difference, which at least 5% of the population share - and likely more.

The real deficit and disorder is in our expectation that everyone should be the same.

Yes there are disadvantages to having ADHD. But the with every disadvantage comes an advantage.

Distractability —> Curiousity
Impulsivity —> Creativity
Hyperactivity—> Drive

The challenge is not how to compensate for the weaknesses so much as how to maximise the advantages.

Build a career that fits your brain.
Don't try to adapt your brain to suit someone else's ideal career.

Most careers demand attention to detail and consistent execution. Fast brains tend to fail at this.

 You'll be told to adapt, be more consistent, get organized, try harder, hustle more.

But here's the truth: you're trying to wear someone else's career.

It's like wearing someone else's underpants—fun initially, but gets weird fast, and you're gonna end up with a career wedgie.

So start with your brain.

Find out what your real strengths are. Not just what you're good at, but what gives you energy.

Because if you build around that, your work amplifies you instead of fighting you. That's when you can be world-class.

Ask yourself:
→ What do I do effortlessly that others find hard?
→ What lights me up?

Design around the overlap. Build a career that works for you.

If you agree, hit the share or like button.

If you're a fast brain leader frustrated by the gap between your potential and actual performance, you probably know what to do.

Exercise, sleep, nutrition, habits, productivity systems—it's not rocket science.

But here's the problem: knowing isn't doing.

When you're a fast brain leader, you know what to do, how to do it, when to do it, why to do it.

But actually doing it? That's the hard part.

There's one key thing that makes the biggest difference:

Being surrounded by people who are trying to do the same thing.

* Your spouse as a supportive partner
* Friends who get it
* A coach (reach out if interested)

But one of the best ways is community

That's why I'm setting up Fast Brain Leaders—a community for people working on closing that gap between potential and performance.

We share the same challenges.
We support each other through them.
We've just started.

Check it out at fastbrainleaders.com

Is ADHD overdiagnosed?

No.

About 5% of the population have ADHD.
About 0.5% of the population have a diagnosis.

Yes, we're seeing a lot more awareness and a lot more diagnoses now than ever before. 

But when telescopes were invented, and people got hold of them and started pointing them at the night sky, we started seeing more stars than ever before. 

That doesn't mean that the new stars we saw were "over-detected" or were created by the telescope. We just got better at seeing them.

Same with ADHD.

We are more aware. We're better at assessing it. There are more people qualified to make assessments than ever before (but still nowhere near enough). So we're seeing more of it.

If you're finding yourself frustrated by the gap between your potential and your performance, and you find some things hard that other people find easy, and if "trying harder" or "discipline" just doesn't seem to work for you, maybe you should get checked out too.

Who cares what the nay-sayers think? This isn't about them - it's about you, and finding out what works for you.

But even if you can't find an assessment (there can be long waiting lists), you might benefit from non-medical help like coaching or community. Nothing stops you from getting help without a formal diagnosis.

“See, in my world, leftover pizza is not a thing. If I order a pizza, I’m going to eat THE PIZZA. Not a slice or two, but THE PIZZA. There won’t be leftover pizza. Heh. Leftover pizza. Even the name sounds funny. It’s like leftover wine. It’s not a real thing for the majority of us with ADHD.” - Peter Shankman , Faster Than Normal

ADHD-dar: that seemingly supernatural ability of people with ADHD to find and befriend other people with ADHD in any group setting, even when they aren’t (yet?) diagnosed themselves.

FAQ: Yes I am still offering product leadership, scaleup exec team, and transformation coaching.

I’ve been talking about ADHD coaching for leaders a lot because I love it, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped doing what I was doing.

If you need help with:
- transition to the product model (eg from projects or feature factory)
- strategy development and execution including OKRs
- becoming a leader whether as a CEO, CPO, executive or even first time manager of product manager

I’m here for you. 

I work with leaders from vc-backed startups (eg series B-D CEOs), Fortune 500 companies (eg VP product), and individual leaders.

There’s still time left if 2025 to get help within this years budgets.

Connect and send a DM for a chat.

I often use the Oterap principle.

That’s where I do 80% of the work and get 20% of the results.

It’s not intentional. I just Pareto backwards.

“You just have to try harder.”

Every ADHDer’s heard this — from teachers, bosses, even friends.

And for most people, it’s good advice. Doing important things gives their brains a dopamine hit — the “feel-good” that powers motivation.

But ADHD brains work differently.
We’re already trying harder.
The problem isn’t effort — it’s chemistry.

We don’t get dopamine from what’s important.
We get it from what’s interesting — things that are novel, challenging, urgent, or fun.

That’s why what’s easy for most people can feel impossible for us, and what they find hard can light us up.

So stop trying harder.
Start working with your brain:
make tasks interesting, share the load, trade strengths.

Effort isn’t the issue.
Alignment is.

I’m excited because the founding group of fast brain leaders kicks off tomorrow (Thursday) at 4pm UK/5pm Europe, and every Thursday after that.

Interested?

Send a DM!

Most day planners make fast-brain leaders feel worse, not better.

You open them up and they’re full of:

abandoned weeks
half-finished days
old goals you don’t even recognise
and the quiet shame of “why can’t I just stick to this?”

I’ve tried everything:
Bullet journals, GTD, digital calendars, beautiful spreads, colour coding…
And every system eventually collapsed under the weight of its own expectations.

Here’s what finally worked for me:

👉 A one-page daily plan you throw away at the end of the day.

No backlog.
No planner guilt.
No flipping through old failures.
Just a clean slate — every single morning.

I’ve been using this for months now, and it’s the first planning system that genuinely works with (not against) a fast brain.

I recorded a short video showing exactly how I use it, including:

how to time-block your day realistically
how to choose your One Thing
how to adapt the plan when life inevitably changes
why throwing the page away is the magic

🎥 Watch the video here:
https://lnkd.in/eWaV37Z4

📄 And if you want the free Fresh Start Daily Planner PDF:
https://lnkd.in/eukdqBTp

If you struggle with consistent days — or feel a bit ashamed looking at your old planner — this might help you reset your relationship with planning altogether.

A fresh start, every day.

Sometimes when people connect to me I ask them if they are just here for the content or if they are dealing with ADHD themselves.

It’s a way to open up conversations - and seems pretty natural to me as an ADHD coach who mentions it in my banner, my headline and most of my content.

But last week, the question upset someone who considered it too personal and “unprofessional“.

What’s your take?

Bear in mind that my reason for posting about ADHD on LinkedIn, and the reason most people connect with me is because a core part of my business is helping people with ADHD, and so my question is basically “are you looking for my help?”.

Just listened to Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s three episodes on Google (links in comment).

Had two realisations:

1) Google’s best days were approximately 2006-2012 - not coincidentally, the years I was there. I can’t claim credit for everything, but I played my part!

Released or acquired in that period: YouTube, DoubleClick, Android, Docs, Chrome, Nexus (now Pixel), “the cat paper” (which led to the Transformer that is the T in GPT), Drive, Workspace, Appengine (now Cloud), Checkout (now Wallet), Analytics, Calendar, Transit and Traffic (on Maps), Play store, Photos, Hangouts (now Meet), Translate, etc

2) Google is not a product company. It’s a technology company. Every really successful product is built on a technical insight (and brilliant infrastructure), not a product or customer insight.

Similarly, Amazon is an operations company. Microsoft is a sales and marketing company. Netflix is a media company.

Apple and Meta (Facebook) are the only big tech product companies.

What’s your thoughts?

GHG Consulting

Speed Alone Won’t Win the Market—Experience Will.
Teams are shipping features faster than ever, yet adoption is stalling, retention is falling, and buyers hesitate. The problem isn’t execution—it’s product experience misalignment.

Most teams believe building faster leads to success. But without execution clarity focused on product experience, every launch is a gamble. Execution should move smarter—ensuring every release strengthens the user and buyer experience.

➥ How I Help:
● The Signal-to-Clarity Method™—A structured execution framework that ensures every decision enhances engagement and buyer confidence.
● Experience-Driven Execution Alignment—Unifying product, engineering, design, and GTM teams to deliver seamless product experiences.
● Adoption Acceleration & Buyer Confidence Frameworks—Connecting execution clarity to market success and scalability.

➥ Real-World Impact: Execution That Wins
An online education provider faced high program abandonment and a risky product launch. I helped identify key UX issues, reducing abandonment by 8x in key areas and enabling continuous data-driven improvements.

A SaaS company transitioning from services to product delivery struggled with execution misalignment. I worked with leadership to clarify buyer and user experiences, cutting manual support needs by 65% and accelerating product releases.

Imagine launching a feature that feels so intuitive that engagement spikes immediately. That’s the difference execution clarity makes.

➥ Why GHG Consulting?
Most firms stop at strategy. I embed execution clarity into workflows, ensuring product teams build experiences that users love and buyers trust.

Execution Misalignment is Costing You Adoption—Let’s Fix It.

DM me to start a conversation and begin transforming execution into your competitive advantage.

Product Experience Architect

Sand Technologies

▪️ Product Management Coach - Provided leadership coaching and mentoring, assisted with staffing decisions, refined product vision and strategy, and supported product operating model transformation.

▪️ Interim Product Design Lead (May-Aug 2024) - Scaled the UX/design function and team. Maturing design processes and practices.

Product Coach & Interim Design Lead

Jeff Patton & Associates

Fractional Product Management coach. Providing product transformation coaching, training, and facilitation.

Senior Product Coach

Vizient, Inc

Established and managed a product management team and function. Accelerated the development and implementation of B2B SaaS healthcare data and analytics solutions.

• Collaborated with senior executives and customers to establish product strategy and roadmap for hospital and life sciences data interoperability solutions.
• Finalized migration of a legacy pharmacy data product to a scalable Azure cloud architecture with minimal disruption to business operations, resulting in an 85% reduction in processing time and lower infrastructure costs.
• Championed the creation of a Product Management Guild, a company-wide initiative that increased collaboration and learning opportunities for over 100 product managers.

Head of Product, Acentrus Specialty

Elsevier

Led a team of 10 geographically distributed platform product managers supporting a $500M global portfolio of healthcare clinical decision support, reference, and patient education products.

• Streamlined product development and delivery by implementing platform shared services across 20+ established global products, resulting in a 30% reduction in expenses.
• Launched PaaS content search product, powered by medical ontologies, ML, and NLP, supporting 5 million clinical queries per month.
• Developed electronic health record (EHR) interoperability solution (HL7/SMART/FHIR) for 5 products, resulting in seamless bi-directional data exchange with large hospital systems globally.
• Led cross-functional teams to deliver innovative enhancements for drug data and patient education products resulting in successful partnerships with major industry players such as Amazon Pharmacy and Apple Health, expanding market reach by 32%.

VP Product Management, Clinical Solutions Platforms and Drug Data

Upscaled product and user experience practices for flagship clinical reference product, ClinicalKey, including facilitating UX/UI design workshops, leading feature ideation, user testing, and analytics instrumentation.

• Spearheaded product operations improvements focused on frequent, experiment-based user experience (UX) enhancements, leading to a 90% increase in release frequency and significantly improved user engagement.
• Implemented product search result improvements that reduced physician time-to-answer by over 40%, leading to increased user satisfaction and more efficient decision-making.
• Pioneered product entitlements and asset royalty tracking solution that reduced product configuration effort and maximized royalty transparency, avoiding a costly multi-year re-platforming effort that would have required a $6M investment.

Senior Director of Product Experience

Amirsys, Inc,

Established and led product management, customer support, software quality assurance, and user experience design organizations through a period of 100% organizational growth.

• Maintained 98% domestic market share and NPS above 85 for flagship product, STATdx, over a period of 3 years.
• Led the ideation, development, and launch of an innovative human anatomy learning product for both B2B and B2C markets, securing contracts with key medical schools globally.
• Collaborated cross-functionally to develop and execute a product diversification strategy, resulting in a successful launch of 4 new products and contributing to a 20% YoY revenue growth rate.

Head of Product

Skybend

Head of Engineering & Design, Co-Founder

🔸 Challenge Convention. Elevate Experiences. 🔸
Shipping a product is not enough. If your user experience does not meet expectations, buyers hesitate, adoption stalls, and growth slows. Yet, too many product teams focus on delivery velocity rather than a product experience that wins both users and buyers.

This is where teams get stuck. Internal misalignment, shifting priorities, and slow decision-making lead to inconsistent product experiences that fail to deliver value. Teams drown in data, but without clarity on what truly matters, execution remains reactive, and user adoption suffers.

🔍 Cut Through the Noise. Follow the SIGNAL.
Your product should not just work—it should delight users and inspire buyer confidence. Yet, too often, execution chaos creates a fragmented experience.

● Users abandon products that feel clunky or confusing.
● Buyers hesitate to commit when the value is unclear.
● Teams focus on feature output rather than user experience impact.

The challenge is not building faster—it is building better. To create products that engage users, convert buyers, and drive market success, teams must shift from reactive execution to intentional experience design.

🎯 The Signal-to-Clarity Method™: Aligning Teams to Deliver Exceptional Experiences
Execution should never be the goal—it should be the means to deliver the experience your users deserve. The Signal-to-Clarity Method™ eliminates distractions and ensures that every decision aligns with the ultimate goal: creating a product that users love and buyers trust.

Here is how it works:
➡️ Find the signal—distill data into clear, actionable insights that drive meaningful product decisions.
➡️ Elevate experiences—align teams around what truly matters to users and buyers.
➡️ Accelerate adoption—deliver frictionless, intuitive, and high-impact product experiences that build long-term trust.

🥇 Win Users. Convert Buyers. Scale With Confidence.
When teams shift focus from execution to experience-driven impact, everything changes:
✅ Stronger user adoption—because the product experience is seamless and intuitive.
✅ Higher buyer confidence—because every feature reinforces real value.
✅ More predictable growth—because retention and expansion happen naturally.

📅 Let’s Talk
If your product is not delivering the experience your users and buyers expect, let’s fix it. Schedule a conversation at https://cal.com/natemjones/ghgc-intro, and let’s talk about how product experience clarity can help your team build products that win.

Nate Jones

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

A pattern I keep running into is teams jumping straight into polished screens because of “move fast and break things”. Sure, mockups look great, and stakeholder and user reactions are addictive.

But when the underlying flow hasn’t been considered and challenged, those shiny designs crumble. The cracks start in the details: missing states, clunky transitions, or logic that doesn’t quite match the real world.

This isn’t new, but AI has put this on tilt.

I love iterative and incremental. I can’t last five minutes in a product discussion without mentioning Good, Better, Best. Iterating your way into a solid user flow is damn hard. Adding is always easier than taking away.

Take a beat. Talk through and capture a simple flow.

I prefer user story maps, but a quick journey overview or even a plain old flowchart will give you the clarity you need. Mapping lets you see the end without having to design it.

You’re using AI design tools anyway. That map becomes gold. Feed it in as context.

A few minutes of mapping upfront really does make everything else go faster.

Product Experience Architect helping scaling organizations turn ideas into validated impact with products users love and businesses trust.

Once, I agreed to a Java programming contract, having never written a line of Java code.

I came across this Richard Branson quote recently and immediately thought about the “amazing opportunity” I said yes to many years ago.

It was Java Spring 1.0 (IYKYK, I didn’t at the time). A complete replatforming and commercialization of a free clinician-facing HealthTech product.

I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I was confident in my ability to learn.
I’d built products in various other languages and frameworks. I’d figured this out.

It turned out great.
It was one of the most successful, profitable, and longest-running HealthTech products I’ve worked on.

What’s one of your say yes and figure it out later just-in-time-knowledge moments?

Better for who?
Seth Godin reminds us that “When we lack the empathy to imagine someone else’s ‘better’, we’re on the road to frustration.”

In product development, we’re often lousy with ideas.
And we’re often lazy with describing and understanding who the idea is for.

Personas, or the equally effective yet more approachable proto-personas, are a fantastic way to build empathy and focus, and filter your product ideas.

Don’t let the jargony name scare you off. Capture:
🔸 Descriptor/Name – Category of users (Time-Pressed ICU Nurse); use an adjective to add depth, optionally include a proper name (Jane).
🔸 Demographics – Quick, insightful descriptors. What information helps bring this persona to life?
🔸 Behaviors/Beliefs – Environmental and personal values. What matters to them? Where do they use your product?
🔸 Needs/Goals – Top goals. What could they “hire” your product to help them with?

Now you can reference a specific user type when discussing an idea.

➺ A detailed patient summary view would help Jane, a time-pressed ICU nurse, efficiently transition patients at shift end and ensure continuity of care.

Founders, visionaries, idea people, sales folks, and product development people (ya, you too), that [potentially] killer idea you had last night, it makes the product better for who?

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