Product Management Skills

Mid last year, Janna, my co-founder at ProdPad, and I were having trouble understanding where ProdPad was taking us, so we sat down and came up with a narrative and storyboards for our product. Having this narrative for ProdPad has helped immensely and I only wish we had written it down earlier. Product managers need Read more »

How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new line of products, you know how precarious the effort can be. Some would advocate using the ‘Lean’ method Read more »

I’ve worked as a product manager since 2005. My first role was part of the core product team at BSkyB in strategic product development.  We were product owners of the concept through to delivery to market of all the new set-top boxes and in-home consumer devices such as routers and wireless bridges, as well as Read more »

Minimally Viable Feature approach (MVF) is creating enough of the feature to test the adoption and usefulness before expending lots of resources on fully building out the feature. In the case of ProdPad, we created the simplest form of the roadmap we could, with just enough functionality to be useful and yet provide users with Read more »

As a freelancer, one of the most common scenarios I’ve been asked about over the last few months is what to do when the hiring company believes they need a full-time person, but you’re only interested in part-time projects. While some may be interested in taking on that type of project (more security and potentially Read more »

How often do people feel fear when they are using your product? I’m not talking the fear of a haunted house, but the fear of failure, the fear of screwing something up, the fear of making a mistake. Fear when using a product is always there, manifesting itself in different ways. On Twitter it could be Read more »

 An interesting philosophical discussion was triggered on MindTheProduct’s Product Managers Skype chat when I questioned why someone had incomplete user stories in their development backlog. The majority of the answers can be boiled down to “because that is how it is done”. However, I feel there is another way, which offers several advantages over doing the grooming Read more »

Tom Chi is the Experience Lead for Special Projects at Google X, their in-house skunk labs that has brought us amazing products from augmented reality glasses in Project Glass to self driving cars. Tom has a rich background, having worked as a Designer, Product Manager, Developer, and Consultant, and at Mind the Product 2012 he Read more »

Many people think of user research as either something you do towards the end of the project as a check and balance before going live, or once the project has already gone live to make sure it’s working as it should. However, research doesn’t always have to focus on what you have created. It can Read more »

A friend of mine recently got in touch, asking for advice as he was going for a job interview for a Product Manager role. His biggest concern? He was a social media manager at the time, not a Product Manager. The role called for him to work more closely with a development team than he’s Read more »