This is where I write about my experiences and thoughts on product leadership, entrepreneurship, and building software. My small corner of the interwebs that is not guided by algorithems. A strange mix of thoughts and feelings on our crazy industry.
October 16, 2024
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 a future so great that we have not been able to deliver it yet.
October 04, 2024
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 processes if we had better ways to innovate as a team.
September 13, 2024
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 due to worries about how long they are going to stay in the role. "What is your commitment? Are you not just going to leave us in a few months to go and start a new company???".
September 09, 2024
For the last year, I have worked at AutoUncle, which runs four-day workweeks, and I wanted to share my reflections a year in.
September 03, 2024
I had to read the post three times before I went from feeling pissed on by Paul Grahams’s lovely directness to reflecting on my journey from founder to manager (VP Product and Engineering), how my management style has been influenced by Manager Mode and how many founders I have seen struggle with the wasteland between Founder and Manager mode.
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.
August 23, 2024
Stop hiring junior product managers, you need to hire senior people and help them grow into leadership roles.
August 14, 2024
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 organisation.
October 28, 2022
Shape Up 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 you down and potentially kill your team’s motivation. It will also lead you to build the wrong features as you scale.
January 25, 2022
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.
March 10, 2021
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.
September 23, 2020
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.
April 08, 2019
What should code be?
January 02, 2019
It's a little bit ironic to write a blog post with advice that asks you to stop taking advice, but here we go.
December 29, 2018
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 time and requires a lot of grid.
December 28, 2018
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.
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.
October 01, 2018
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.
August 30, 2018
You should just go with Rails.
August 15, 2018
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.
May 12, 2018
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 when my mother turned 50, but all I could think about was how I would be able to pay the bills next month.
January 25, 2018
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…
December 19, 2017
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?"
September 26, 2017
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.
September 13, 2017
Long live the roadmap
September 10, 2017
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.
September 05, 2017
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 are often short and not really in depth so I leave them with a list of books and blogs to read, my full list is long, but below is a list of four books that are must read for all product managers and everybody working in a product organization.
August 18, 2017
As basic as it gets
July 25, 2017
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 (often pre-start-up) with ways to validate their ideas without them having to build any real products.
July 24, 2017
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 managers.
July 17, 2017
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.
June 26, 2017
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 102 participants.
June 23, 2017
We need to test faster then lightning speed.
Thoughts on product leadership, entrepreneurship, and building software. A founder's journey in the SaaS world.