Product management evangelist and guitar player.
For a lot of businesses, taking the order is where marketing ends. For smart marketers, it’s the starting point for the next order and the referral. If you stop your marketing thinking at the transaction, you’ll find it harder and harder to build real marketing momentum.
There's "just enough", "good enough", and "beyond good enough". For me, Amazon gets it right by getting it delivered fast. John shows us that you can also go "beyond good enough" with packaging. And now I want to buy the book.
Rich Mironov introduced me to perhaps the best metaphor of all: the product manager is a parent of the product.
One acquaintance heard this story and completely screwed it up. She said, “Wow! That’s great! As a mom, I make their meals and wash the dishes. I make sure they do their homework and that I have extra poster board in the house in case they forget to plan for a project. I make their beds and do their laundry.”
And on she continued while I listened in horror. “That’s not a mother,” I thought. “That’s a maid!”
Let’s talk about parenting. Good parents provide discipline and focus. They save for college and advise their kids on which fields seem to be best for their temperament. Our job as parents is to turn undisciplined kids into self-reliant adults. We teach them our values, how to manage their schedules and their finances. We teach them how to make a bed and then we expect them to make it themselves, every time. We teach them how to make a meal, sew a button, hem a pair of slacks—so that when they’re in college or in their own apartments, they have these skills and don’t have to come back home every weekend.
Isn’t this the definition of a good product manager? Like a parent, the product manager provides focus, vision, explanations of what is expected. A good product manager helps create a functioning product that can enter the real world and not have to come back.
And if you choose to extend the metaphor, the same is true of product managers and our counterparts in other departments. We don’t want to do demos for sales people; we want sales people to do their own demos. We can make sure they have the education they need to do their own. Same for marketing, and support. And development.
Teach a man to fish. Give these groups explanations of the market, its problems, the positioning (vision) for the product, and then trust that these teams can take it from there.
Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.
Product Management is not about satisfying customer needs and wants. Product Management is about ensuring business goals are met and business success delivered.
Now don’t get me wrong. I certainly believe in addressing market needs and driving customer satisfaction. That is definitely a great way to achieve business goals. But keep in mind that addressing customer needs etc. are a MEANS of achieving an END, not an END unto themselves.
We don't want customers to define our products; we want customers to inspire our products. And why? Read Saeed's article for me.
As a Product Manager, I struggle with the following question all the time:
“Where do great ideas come from?”
The question is born out a basic need that all Product Managers have…how to build a killer product roadmap that wows customers, creates new revenue channels and renders the competition obsolete. However, knowing where to go to find inspiration and what tools you can use to help glean insight can be challenging. Recently, Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing and I hosted a webinar on The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation to address this question.
Scott expands on our recent webinar by exploring where product ideas originate. And what techniques are best for gathering those ideas.
Many product managers participate in design because, as they put it, “I’m less terrible at it than my developers.”
Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.
Some of these product managers may have been legitimately frustrated with problems caused above their pay grade (such as VPs who overschedule engineering and make threats if deadlines aren’t met; this leads to bugs, incidentals, and new priorities being ignored and it destroys morale). But product managers, at least some of you are the problem.
5 reasons that product managers might be the bad guys. Be sure that you're doing product management before you start doing somebody else's job.
I propose the 2 most important words for a product manager to live by — “Why” and “No”.
Good questions indeed.
Travel budgets are tight, we know that. And many of us are tied up with firefighting in the office. But if we’re not getting out of the office to develop market understanding and bringing it back into the company, then who is? And ultimately, what value are we as Product Management professionals delivering to our companies?
Have you talked to a client in the last year... without a sales objective? Why not?
I’ve had many conversations with people who want product managers to design solutions. They don’t always say it that way. They say, “product managers should deliver prototypes and detailed requirements.” They say, “I can’t program to these requirements,” which is true. “You need to be more detailed,” which is false.
After all, the developers can’t be expected to know the market, can they? They just need to know how to code. Really? In my experience, the best developers are ones who need crystal clarity on the problem and the market, and find an innovative solution to the problem.The problem for many teams is that development has understaffed in design skills. Development has hired programmers. And since the development team has inadequate design skills yet are expected to produce code, they require detailed specifications from product management—they expect designs.And many product managers participate in this because, as they put it, “I’m less terrible at it than my developers.”Need help selling the idea in your organization. Download one of our free ebooks. The Strategic Role of Product Management focuses on the strategic role. Living in an Agile World reexamines the role of product management in an agile environment.
