Niklas Stephenson

Multiple times in my roles as a product leader and in my coaching of other leaders, I have met the expectations of The Product Vision, the one document that should be the north star of our company, the document that we expect to show us a path towards...

When writing about product leadership, it’s easy to write about the process—the stuff that is easy to visualise and express. But the truth is that we only have processes to facilitate the lowest denominator of creativity in a team. We would have no...

I am often asked about when I am going to start a startup again and why the hell I am working for someone else instead of myself, and I know that a lot of former founders are getting asked the same when applying for jobs, heck even getting rejected...

For the last year, I have worked at AutoUncle, which runs four-day workweeks, and I wanted to share my reflections a year in. First off, there are so many different setups called "four-day workweek" that I need to outline what it means at AutoUncle...

Twitter has blown up over the last few days after Paul Graham released his post on Founder Mode, which refers to a private talk that Brian Chesky, the founder of AirBNB, did at a Y Combinator dinner.

I had to read the post three times before I went...

In Shape Up, a common mistake is to shape only when doing cooldown. “Cooldown is too short; I don’t have time to shape!" is a common complaint when introducing Shape Up into a product organisation.

However, the problem is not the length of the cool...

As a craft, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. There is overall in the market a huge influx of product managers, and we have ended up in a place where we are hiring too many product managers of too low quality, ending up hurting the value that...

Shape Up is a fantastic framework for expressing opportunities and deciding what bets you want to place. Over the last few years, I have used multiple variants of Shape Up and helped a handful of companies implement the parts of Shape Up that fit their...

Shape Up by Basecamp is an awesome, practical, and pragmatic introduction to the process surrounding product management. It offers great tools to describe and prioritize what to build and when. However, it also describes power dynamics that will slow...

Lately, I have talked to a lot of people about the shaping process of Shape Up. A common misunderstanding most have is that writing pitches are something you do in the last days leading up to the betting table, nothing could be more wrong.

Writing...

When you start a company, it quickly becomes a big part of your identity. For many years, I was "Niklas from Firmafon". I had friends I met through the startup journey that only knew me due to my company.

Putting your identity and feelings into your...

Yesterday I talked to a candidate who was considering applying for a developer role at Legal Monster , he could not understand why we did not apply ML/AI to solve problems.

ML/AI is great for some things, but a lot of things can be solved with simpler...

I'm an entrepreneur and I often compare my work life with a rollercoaster ride. There are ups and downs. Some days are bad, others a good and some are a bit of both.

The ups can be everything from closing a sale, writing some great code, making a customer happy or solving something tough. The lows are all the things you don't hear about: firing your first employee who just invested his entire saving in you, the upcoming board meetings where you missed all numbers or the big client who just left you.

Startup life is like a sine wave.

• Code should add value
• Everybody should be able to read the code
• Code should be easy to make scalable on a later stage
• Code should not create too many edge cases
• Code must be reviewed
• Code should not attract too much attention when running...

It's a little bit ironic to write a blog post with advice that asks you to stop taking advice, but here we go.

I advise a lot of people, especially around product management, but sometimes it feels like I am the 10th person they ask for the same advice...

One of the awesome things about Medium is that you get a blogging platform with a build in audience, you don't need to build your own from the ground up. It's hard work building an audience on your blog, I am doing it right now, and it takes a long...

One thing I liked about the good old days of desktop software was that applications always created a physical file on my local desktop. That file I could copy, share and open with other application as I wished.

I could export CSV files from my accounting...

Slack seems to be the tool all companies need if they want to be a real tech company. Email is dead, and real-time group chat is required to be cool.

Slacks tagline is "Slack - Where work happens" but I must admit that I have never done real work...

Last week I talked with a startup that had struck a deal with a tech company, for a percentage of the startup the tech company would build their product.

When I asked how their product process was, the founders of the startup looked like at me like...

A few days ago I read a blog post about the current relevancy of Ruby on Rails, a piece of "old" technology that has been the core of all businesses I have created. The blog post in itself is not that interesting, but the following discussion on Hacker...

It's now a few months since I left Trustpilot to start a new company together with my great friend Søren. It's 8 years since I last spent time only focused on such an early adventure.

It's amazing to be back in the trench, but also interesting to...

Through my many years as an entrepreneur, one of the hardest things to deal with is the constant flow of thoughts. Your girlfriend were speaking to you, but all you were thinking about was that one support case that were hard to solve. I remember...

A while ago, an old friend asked me, “What do great product managers do?” More importantly, he asked, “What don’t they do?” That’s a huge question. In fact, we could talk hours about this…

Product managers have such a wide array of responsibilities...

The other day, one of our product managers at Trustpilot came to me with a question: "Should we build what our sales team is asking for?"

Martin is a new product manager, and he has used the first few months in the role to go around and meet different...

This is not the post I should write about how I crashed my motorcycle in the Sahara desert and deemed both my arms out of action resulting in a silent blog, well sorry for that!

This is instead a post that has been brewing in the back of my mind...

At Trustpilot, we are 550+ people across 7 different offices all over the world. When we set OKR's for a product team it's often hard for the entire organisation to understand why we are focusing on one area and not another.

I do a lot of stakeholder...

Long live the roadmap.

When you are working within product management there are a few principles that you need to accept and all of them point in a direction where the typical roadmap is dead.

Its hard to describe our full process at Trustpilot in an easy to read blog post, it would take words enough to write a full book, not because it's complicated, but because it's different.

Instead of describing the full process from goal setting to...

I often talk with startups and product managers from larger companies about how we work, how they work and how we would all love to work. Often in our talks, their dream process and workplace is quite close to how we work at Trustpilot. Our conversations...

Okay, todays post is basic product mangement, but still a tool we often use to quickly take decisions on what features we should work on next. The tool is made to be a quick view on the cost/value split between ideas and features. Its the kind of tool...

I often mentor early-stage start-ups on how to validate, test and pitch their ideas. I talk to almost everybody who contacts me even if I think their ideas sound like bullshit. I don’t know what really works and what doesn't, but I help the founders...

Throughout my career I have always been involved with product management in one way or another. I also have had various roles in leadership, but in my current role as VP of Growth at Trustpilot it’s my first time combining the two, leading product...

When you as a product manager is working on a business problem there are so many factors to consider that it some times can be hard to get a holistic view of what the problem is, what solutions are out there and how its going to impact your business...

Being a product manager is one of the wides positions I know of when it comes to required skillsets. You need to be awesome at understanding and use data, talking to users, stakeholders, presenting for larger groups, running workshops, evangelizing...

We do a lot of user interviews at Trustpilot. Our consumer-facing team speaks to users that write, read and share reviews on Trustpilot.com, and our business-facing teams talk with companies that use Trustpilot. From January–May 2017 alone we’ve interviewed...

We have all heard about the Build, Measure, Learn loop from Lean Startup. It’s a modern way of describing a true agile product development process. But how do we speed up the process? How do we make sure that we get true insights, run fast tests and...