Posts in Team Building
Why does the PE firm care about your product roadmap?

In part 3 of a 3 part series on Product Strategy, Jim and Cici continue the discussion of how product strategy ties into value creation, and how specifically as a PE firm, we monitor our portfolio companies’ product strategy through taking a detailed look at their product roadmaps. We discuss how we conduct Product Strategy Reviews – the objectives, who’s in the room, and what we actually cover. We talk about why we’re focused on outcome-driven product roadmaps, how we work with our portfolio companies to prioritize what actually gets built and why that’s so critical when we’re allocating scarce resources to create value.

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How we link Product Strategy to Value Creation

In part 2 of a 3 part series on Product Strategy, Jim is joined by Cici to discuss the private equity investor's perspective on how and why products get built. Living in a world of limited resources, we discuss the framework that we use to help shape the discussions with our portfolio companies about prioritizing their products and features. We talk about market segments versus markets, the Ansoff matrix and Geoffrey Moore's famous "Bowling Alley" strategy.

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How we use talent reviews, the 9box, and succession planning

As part of our continuing People Operations series, ParkerGale Principals Jimmy and Paul dive into the 9box, a talent management framework commonly used to assess an organization’s breadth and depth of talent. Jimmy and Paul cover why this matters, how to effectively review an organization’s entire talent base, and why it pays for investors to be involved in the process.

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Tom Obermaier Interview

Continuing our on-going series of interviews with ParkerGale portfolio company CEOs, Jimmy interviews Tom Obermaier, CEO of Rippe and Kingston. We talk baseball, growing up in New York, leadership lessons from President Washington, rising to Chief Risk Officer at Citi Bank at the time of the financial crisis, and his evolution as a CEO at RDC and Rippe.

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Things to Avoid in Selecting an Executive Job with Dave Kellogg

Buckle your seatbelts for a fast-paced conversation with Dave Kellogg. We reconnected recently and met up up in Chicago at ParkerGale’s “intergalactic headquarters” for a pretty broad-ranging conversation about a recent blog post that Dave wrote (Things to Avoid in Selecting an Executive Job at a Startup) along with a lot of interaction about differences between PE-land and VC-land. Come have a listen -- where else are you going to hear the phrase "Axe Battle of Differentiation"?

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