Have you ever heard of the phrase 'measuring what matters'? It's a concept that can transform how you set and achieve your goals. In this blog post, we'll dive into the importance of measuring what matters and how it can help you succeed. 

Maximising Success With OKRs: Achieving Outcomes That Matter

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In the previous couple of blog posts I have gone through a couple of sections of the Scrum Guide. But there are other things to know outside of the guide that will be helpful in being an effective Product Owner.

Product Owner PSPO I: Other Things To Know

Product Owner PSPO I: Scrum Artifacts

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Scrum Meetings (or Scrum Ceremonies) are meetings that you're going to hold regularly to work within the Scrum Framework. The following are the typical Scrum Meetings that you will organise

Product Owner PSPO I: Scrum Events

When starting a new product management role (whether you are new or have some experience under your belt), the first few days are critical as you will spend your time building your reputation within the company, getting to know the company's goals and values, and ultimately getting to know the product(s) you will be working with.

First 90 Days As A Product Owner/Manager

When it comes to products you own, it is essential to look at your product, company and business model as a whole. All Product Managers are working on developing new products and features to ensure the success of the products

Measuring Product Performance

Product Management Philosophies and Frameworks

In this post, we are going to look at aligning key product and customer metrics alongside marketing metrics. This will help Product Managers know what the Product Marketing Manager is looking for, and what they are invested in, to better communicate with them.

Managing Product Marketing

Product managers and finance managers partner closely to complete product forecasting. One of the first questions on the income statement is, how many units will be sold?

Product Forecasting & Pricing: An Introduction

Looking at a product roadmap should make your audience see what your product vision is and the strategy on how you want to get there by listing out high‑level initiatives that you will be implementing.

Product Roadmaps: Creating and Updating

When gathering requirements for your product, you need to have the right mode of communication to get the requirements, and you have to ask the right questions. Each stakeholder might need a different approach.

Product Roadmaps: Gathering Requirements

Product Managers are constantly pressured to come up with creative ideas for products and roll them out fast to get ahead of the competition. Some end up implementing products on a whim just to answer a competitor's new product

Product Roadmaps: An Introduction

Product Proposal

Once an organisation has finalised its strategy and vision, implemented a sales function, and has a thorough understanding of the product's finance, a new product development process, or NPD for short

New Product Development (NPD)

To define a product strategy, Product Managers use strategy frameworks to understand the external business environment. A common qualitative framework is the PESTEL analysis, used to analyse and monitor macro‑environmental factors.

PESTEL & SWOT Analysis

The company vision is a high-level view of what your business hopes to achieve. It is important that every employee knows the direction of the company, what the company aspires to be, and what their vision of success is.

Contributing to Strategy and Vision

The key elements of a product strategy are a set of crucial topics that combine together to create a necessary understanding and thoughtful response to the question - what are the relevant growth opportunities for our business and how do we address them?

The Key Elements of Product Strategy

Product Strategy

Product discovery is a process between Product Managers, Software Engineers and UX Designers that consists of several phases. In one phase you spend time learning about what the product should be and who the customers are.

Product Discovery and Vision

Product Teams should be diverse, with individuals that have different areas of expertise, different backgrounds, and work in different functions but are all part of one team that works together to solve the problems the product is facing.

Product Teams and Processes

As I go through many courses on Product Management (as this is now an important part of my role) I am going to be writing up my notes on what I learn over the courses. The explanations may be over simplified but they can be used to provide a basic understanding of the roles and processes associated with product management. 

Introduction to Product Management

Power BI - DAX - Common Expressions

We discussed how the DAX engine is optimised for working with columns, not rows. However, there are many situations where that isn't going to be enough. For those situations, we need something called an iterator.

Power BI - DAX - Iterators

Filtering, whether implicit or explicit, is integral to analytical reporting. This is because so much analytical reporting is about slicing and dicing. It's about making comparisons. 

Power BI - DAX - Filtering

When dealing with financial reports, it's often critical to be able to look at specific time periods such as years, quarters, and months. It's also important to be able to compare periods of time such as year-on-year, year-to-date, month-to-date, etc. 

Power BI - Dates, Time and Time Intelligence

Let's say you have a sales data model. You can use a parameter to experiment with different discount rates to see the effect on the gross profit margin. 

Power BI - DAX - Multiplier Parameter Example

The ability to use DAX is an important skill to have for building great Power BI models. It stands for Data Analysis Expressions, and it's the key to the analytical capabilities available in Power BI.

Power BI - DAX - An Introduction

Relationships between tables are the key to successful data models in Power BI. There may be a lot of tables you are using, and if you have not yet defined relationships, then you need to check to see if relationships exist.

Understanding Relationships in Power BI

Whenever you import data into Power BI, you often need to transform the data in some way. There are many options available in the Power Query Editor, but there's just a handful that you'll use regularly. One of the first things you should consider when working on your Power BI model is

Exploring Techniques in Power BI

My major project of 2024 was building a website where I can track and analyse my reading activity. 

The front-end of the website uses Vue.Js 3 along with Pinia for state management, Vue-Router for routing, Vue ChartJs for the charts in the analytics and a mixture of Shadcn components and Tailwind for styling.

The backend uses Supabase to store user and book information, and the book data initially comes from the ISBNDB API.

The design for the website is basic but user friendly so as to make it easy for users to be able to find and add books to bookshelves or lists, track and analyse their reading activity, and leave notes when required. Users are able to:

Search for a book using the ISBNDB API and view the book details (author, publisher, no. pages and book cover)

Add a book to their 'Want To Read' bookshelf, or add the book to a custom list

Progress through the reading journey from 'Currently Reading' to 'Read' or 'Did Not Finish'

As a user progresses through the book, they are able to add notes and update what page they are currently on until they have finally finished the book. They can then rate the book out of 5 stars.

As the user progresses through their journey with a book they are able to see a timeline of their reading activity.

A view of all of their books by reading status

For all stats by year, there is a comparison indicator for the previous year, and the graphs are able to show data overtime (past 12 months, past 6 months).

Users can also update their account details such as:

The project makes full use of skills I have learned in state management, CRUD, and user-friendly design through the courses I have taken as a hobbyist developer.

Over time this website will evolve and progress to a better application and will include an admin section.

Vue.js 3 • ISBNDB • Typescript • Pinia • Vue-Router • Vue ChartJs • Supabase • Tailwind • Shadcn-Vue • Playwright

Book tracking project - a major project using Vue.js 3, ISBNDB, Pinia, Vue-Router, Vue ChartJs and Supabase to track and analyse reading

Going Reading

Shutter Social is a Vue.js 3 social media project that I created to have a website I could use to test using Playwright. I wanted a website with multiple types of users where some functionality is limited either to the specific user who is signed in (for example, the ability only to edit and delete the post created by that user) as well as admin features like viewing data on the content on the social media site.

It was also a chance for me to try learning a new language. I have been using React for a couple of projects, and I wanted to see Vue's positives and negatives and whether it would be a language I would want to continue using in the future.

Along with using Vue, I am using Pinia for state management, Supabase as my database/API, Vuetify for some components and Tailwind for styling. This was my first time using this complete stack, and working with them all was a great experience. 

The user flow is very much like Instagram. Users have the ability to:

Provide some content associated with the post

See a timeline containing their posts and the posts of the users they follow

Leave hashtags in their posts to see other posts containing that hashtag

Leave @ mentions to mention other users associated with that post

The only functionality missing that you generally see on social media sites is the ability to leave comments. I purposefully left out the comments part because I personally find the comments section of social media sites to be the worst part. 

Vue.js 3 • Pinia • Supabase • Tailwind • Vuetify  • Playwright

A social media site I created using VueJs to practice testing using Playwright

Shutter Social

The Curious Paper Co. website is a full-stack MERN e-commerce website. The front end has a main homepage containing links to some product collections. There is a 'Products' page with product categories. Within each categorisation, several product cards include an image, title, price and status (available/sold out). Each product has its own product page containing images, description, price, etc. Users can then add products to the cart, checkout using PayPal, and track their orders.

There is also an 'Admin' section where administrators can add and edit products, add, delete and edit users, and change the status for orders to shipped. There is a dashboard containing information on sales using Google Charts. 

The project was created using an array of Udemy courses and YouTube videos, which helped increase my knowledge of React. Whilst I still seek further knowledge and experience to learn about topics such as state management, this project was a great introduction to React for beginners.

I sought inspiration from other online stationary websites to style the website in a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing way. However, the website is not mobile-responsive, but I may look at pursuing this in the future.

The website is hosted on Render.com on a free service, so it can take a while to wake up and run.

MongoDB • Mongoose • Express • React • Node • Google Charts • PayPal • Saas

This is my first MERN stack e-commerce project using PayPal as the payment method.  Google Charts has been added in to provide sales analysis in the Admin view.

The Curious Paper Co.

One of my major projects has been building this very website! It has been built using Next.js, Sanity as the CMS, Typescript, elements of React and Saas for styling. The primary purpose of the website is to write about what I learn as I progress as a Product Manager and Data Analyst. I strive for knowledge, eager to learn as much as possible at work and in my spare time, and I need a place to document everything. But as web development is a hobby of mine, I am using this website to document my progress when I have the time to take on projects. 

The blog cards have two formats; text and image. This is to add variety to how my blog cards are displayed by applying different styles based on how I feel about the post. Pagination has also been enabled, although this is in the front end. 

The blog posts themselves contain text, images and code blocks. The portfolio section includes information on each project I undertake, such as how I built it, what I learned, what I could do better next time, etc. The website is also mobile responsive.

I built this website using Next.js to take advantage of the 'preview mode' that Sanity offers, meaning I can preview my drafts before they are published.

Over time this website will evolve, and I, too, with it. 

Next.js • Sanity CMS • React • Typescript • Saas

My website - my first major project using Next.js, Sanity, React, Saas and Google Analytics.

Graeme Elliott Website

The Cambridge Gig Guide project was my first full-stack web development project. I wanted to build a centralised website that displays all of the gigs in Cambridge (where I used to live and work), instead of having to sign up to countless mailing lists or visiting each venue's website to find out what's going on.

Using online resources such as Colt Steele's Web Development course on Udemy, as well as a couple of other YouTube videos, I managed to create a complex website from scratch. 

It makes use of all of the basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills I learned at the start of my self studies back in 2018, as well as incorporating some new features such as image storage on Cloudinary and sending and receiving emails via Nodemailer and SendGrid. 

There are three user cases for the website: General visitors, Promoters/Venue staff and Admin.

General visitors don't need any access to the site beyond what is made publicly available. This includes looking at the index page for news, newly released/announced gigs and and what gigs are coming up over the coming weeks. They will also be able to look at all of the gigs filtered by month, and look at gigs by venue too.

Promoters and venue staff will be able to input their own gigs using a form. They will also be able to edit and delete gigs where appropriate.

Administrators need to have full control of the site. Not only being able to input, edit and delete gigs, but also have control of the registration of new promoters/venue staff.

There is also a contact form so users can get in contact with the administrators. Password reset functionality will also be included so that promoters/venue staff/admin can reset their passwords via a token emailed to them.

MongoDB • Mongoose • Express • Node • Passport JS • EJS • Cloudinary • Nodemailer • SendGrid

About Me

Projects