Today I talk to Nick Coster. Nick founded Brainmates together with his wife Adrienne Tan more then 12 year ago. Brainmates is one of those companies who are not very big but very professional. Their special field is product management. We talk about the evolution of product management. How the role of product management evolves when the organisation scales up and the CEO can’t be the product manager anymore.

Nick describes the role of a product manager as the chief storyteller in a company. The product manager is the CEO for a product but normally doesn’t have the same authority as the CEO. He needs to take everyone on the journey and explain the challenges ahead of the product. Storytelling is the key to this way of leadership and visual storytelling is the lasting version of it as you can capture the visualisation of the story in photos and videos. Therefore I am very excited to announce that we will run the bikablo® Visual Storytelling class in Australia shortly before Christmas.

Many of my bikablo® visual facilitation students are in a role around requirements gathering or are working in a business analyst role. In this interview I put myself in the role of a business analyst and ask myself how could I become a great product manager. What does it take to become that person and what do I have to learn on the way.

Being on the product management journey alone can be quite challenging. It’s much better to go the way together and catch up with mates who are in a similar role as you. I would like to highlight the “Leading the Product Conference” run by Brainmates every year. The conference will be held this year on the 20th October in Melbourne and 25th in Sydney. Check it out and I hope to see you around in one of the next bikablo® visualisation trainings.