What is Product Management?

Josh McWilliam is a co-founder and Vice President of Product at College Factual. Their mission is to help every student realize their full potential through the best fit education their money can buy. While their focus is on students with the College Factual brand, they also have other brands like Ed.ai (for advisors), Educate.ai (for Read more »

Here’s a scenario nearly everyone finds themselves in at some point in this line of work: You’re psyched about a new product or feature in the works. You’ve got requirements, design vision, and even a development timeline. You’ve got feedback from potential buyers and they love it. You’re ready to roll, and then you’re asked, Read more »

Building products is amazing. You take an idea – sometimes big, sometimes small – and with your team you make it real. Or at least you make a version of it come to life and then send it out into the world. Every day I find this creatively inspiring. To craft a product from scratch Read more »

Product managers are meant to be many things – visionaries, decision makers, leaders and much more. But what about negotiators? Negotiation is rarely mentioned outside an interview for a product manager – yet, in reality, being a product manager is a role that demands good political judgement. It’s all about setting and managing expectations. Here Read more »

There’s a lot of variation in how companies document product requirements. Some are moving away from detailed, written product requirements documents (PRDs), while others are using shorter write-ups, user stories, or jobs-to-be-done formats. Some product teams are moving away from written PRDs to visual artifacts like mockups and prototypes. It’s a change in approach that’s driven by demands for more agility Read more »

  I love asking people this question. It is quite a shocker that most people can’t really answer it. Everyone talks and writes about the importance of customer development, but companies still don’t spend enough time really talking to their customers. It’s a bit like data: you won’t find a single founder who doesn’t say: Read more »

I always tell the participants of my workshops that as a Product Manager you should be voraciously curious about what’s happening in the field.  Read books, keep tabs on blogs, follow people on Twitter, listen to podcasts, be a massive consumer of ideas and then see what resonates most with you. Here are some of Read more »

The chatter at SXSW this year was all about the chatbot. Several sessions and a lot of side conversations were aimed at helping companies understand what chatbots are and how to use them. I got the sense that everyone wants to have one of these in their product right away. But while everyone talked about the Read more »

When I was doing my basic training in the military one of the things our instructors continually stressed was a sense of urgency. Nothing was to be rushed, but equally, nothing was to be done at a leisurely pace either. No need to take five minutes to shower when you are just as clean after Read more »

When you first start building a product you have a lot of decisions to make. You have to figure out what to build, what to build first, and know how to explain your decisions to both yourself and your team. As the ball starts rolling, keeping track of what to deliver and when as well Read more »