Hello! A shameless promotional post1.
As a reader of this newsletter, you care about good facilitation.
Remember Product Manager as Facilitator?:
Facilitation is the practice and skill of amplifying a team’s capacity to solve hard problems on their own. The Latin origin for facilitate is facilis, meaning “easy to do.” Through facilitation, we make it easy for teams to achieve their goals.
I’m facilitating a (remote) workshop on facilitation (yes, very meta) next Thursday, 4-6pm ET / 1-3pm PST. It’s $50. And it’ll be worth your while.
Facilitation gets groups unstuck. It aligns teams that aren’t aligned. It creates space for tough, yet necessary conversations.
Leadership teams arrive at good strategy through good facilitation. Product teams ship remarkable products through good facilitation. It’s the most important skill a product manager can have.
More from The Overlap #9:
No one cares about how well you can dig into SQL if you can't go in a room with a bunch of folks and come out with progress. Why the FUCK do we act like we care more about SQL than facilitation skills when product people are together and or hiring?Facilitation is the most valuable skill a PM could have. When people say “PMs need to be able to lead without authority”, facilitation is the vehicle that drives us to do this.
I’m no master at facilitation! I’m indebted to colleagues I’ve worked with who are much better facilitators than I am. I just want to share what I’ve learned and create a space for others to get better.
The workshop is through Index: XXIX’s2 mixed-use community space. A huge thank you to Elie Andersen and XXIX for hosting this.
The Overlap will return to our regularly scheduled programming on 6/30/21!
XXIX (twenty-nine) is the sister studio of my studio, Manhattan Hydraulics. Manhattan Hydraulics (product design), XXIX (web/brand design), and Sanctuary Computer (development) are all under one umbrella company.
Want to up your facilitation game?
Ah, I missed this! Any chance there's a recording I could watch, or if there are more workshops that you are hosting in the future?