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Blog Articles
Viewing entries tagged with 'management'
Stakeholder Management
I'm not sure why I haven't written specifically on this topic before because it comes up as an issue with so many teams. For many product managers, managing stakeholders is probably the least favorite part of their job.
Lessons From Leaders
One thing I love to do when I visit with companies is collect their favorite quotes and mantras. It helps me to understand their culture and their values. We all deal with certain truths about building technology products, and I find that certain quotes resonate strongly with people and help them internalize important concepts or ideas. For this article, I thought I'd share my current list of favorites.
Product Marketing Contribution
Jane is supporting the launch of Product X, a new release her company is really excited about. She is on the marketing team. Armed with her launch checklist, she schedules a meeting with John, the product manager. At the meeting, John answers all of her questions, draws a market segmentation on the white board, and talks about the key features and why they are important. Jane takes lots of notes and asks John to review what she sends him.
Defining Good
I consistently get asked questions like the following: "Just look at Facebook/Amazon/Google (usually one of those three). Don't you think they have a terrible product? How could they possibly be so successful?"
Social Contract for Product Managers
If I were starting my career in product today, I would do anything I could to get into a very innovative program at Stanford called the Stanford Design School (aka "d.school"). I absolutely love the curriculum and the faculty. But this article is not really about this program.
Minimum Viable Product
One of the most important concepts in all of software is the notion of minimum viable product (often referred to as “MVP”). But if you’ve been around software products for a while, you know that term is used in many different ways, and while the term intuitively resonates with people, there’s often a lot of confusion about what this really means in practice.
Competition
One of the constants in our business is competition. Very occasionally you find a company that has established a monopoly position, but for the most part, if the market you’re serving is a real market with real customers with real needs, you either have competitors already, or you will very soon.
Product Evangelism
In my last article I wrote about the importance of product passion, and I said that one of the reasons this passion is necessary is for product evangelism.
The Two Core Competencies
Good product teams must be good at product discovery, which means they must get good at learning quickly. They need to be able to zero in on the appropriate target customer, identify the key problems to solve for those customers, and typically the most difficult part of all, apply technology and user experience design to come up with good solutions that will solve those problems.
Preparing For War
Recently Ben Horowitz posted yet another very thought-provoking article, this time on the different type of leadership that is needed for when things are going along fine (“the peacetime CEO”) versus when things get rough (“the wartime CEO”).