Ask the UXperts: The secrets of leading successful product teams — with Jen Marshall

Leading successful product teams is all about relationships and credibility. It’s about understanding the network of players and stakeholders, and figuring out where your strong relationships lie. It’s about building those relationships before you need them and knowing when to leverage them.

Next up in our Slack channel, Jen Marshall will share experiences from her work as a product leader, trainer and product management consultant. We’ll talk about understanding authority, communicating with integrity, and getting the important messages heard.

The Details

• Where: Our dedicated ‘Ask Jen’ Slack channel (You’ll need to request an invitation if you haven’t yet joined our Slack channel)
• When: 4 pm Wednesday 28th September PDT or 9 am Thursday 29 September AEST
  (or find out what time that is for you)

Meet Jen Marshall

Jen is a product leader who believes in continuous learning and improvement: for her products, herself and the product managers around her.

She has deep expertise in news media and publishing, having worked at Fairfax, Optus Digital Media and Sky News. Jen’s early career saw her producing television news bulletins. From there she moved into newsroom leadership roles and began to specialise in digital media. This led to an opportunity to transition into Product Management, which achieved Jen’s goal of becoming more deeply involved in the business.

Jen has experience in eCommerce, telecommunications, commercial evaluation, portfolio management, business casing, senior stakeholder management, contract negotiation, and all aspects of the product lifecycle. Her peers recognise her for her ability to deliver strategy and bring people along on the journey.

Jen holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management and a BA in Communications from Charles Sturt University.

How to Ask Your Questions

If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and we’ll ask Jen on your behalf. You can submit your questions here. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

1. Sometimes my passion gets mistaken for emotion. Is that something I should be wary of when communicating my ideas to stakeholders?
2. Have you got any tips for commanding respect and framing myself as credible in an environment when I’m constantly explaining what I do?
3. How important is playing the game? Should I expect to have to make compromises if I want to get ahead?

How does Ask the UXperts work?

These sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent. We use a dedicated public Slack channel. That means that there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session.

Ask the UXperts, ATU, product management