What is Product Management?

How can a product manager make effective decisions about the direction of their product? How do they adequately weigh up all the variables to select the best solution from the available options?  And how do they make sure that any investment will adequately consider future movements of both the market and the competition? The pressure Read more »

The product management job has no shortage of challenges, tactical or strategic. There are the ones you sign up for: validating problems in the market, identifying a differentiated value proposition, defining the roadmap, shepherding feature development. For most of us, those things are synonymous with the job itself. Then there are the challenges we don’t Read more »

There are few relationships as deep and passionate as that between a start-up founder and their product. Your product will dominate your thoughts all day and even through the night from time to time. You’ll ask yourself questions like how can I improve my product, how can I make people buy it, is it the Read more »

As mobile app technology evolves, it seems logical that our mobile analytics capabilities should evolve proportionally. Yet for the most part, any evolution in the mobile analytics realm is happening at a much more glacial pace. Now that’s not to discount improvements in areas such as data visualisation, product integrations, and real-time capabilities, which have Read more »

My first experience of managing a remote team was not a success: the team broke up quickly, and the company soon after. At first, I thought the issue was the personalities involved but as I’ve looked at more companies trying to set up offshore development offices, I’ve seen there are some common mistakes. I want Read more »

Getting to product/market fit is “the only thing that matters” to start-ups, according to Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The principle is that a product should “fit” the needs of a market for the company to scale and be successful. But how can this be achieved if some signs point towards your firm Read more »

As a product manager I’m sure you will have found that prototypes can be hugely useful for visualising requirements and revealing hidden risks. Lengthy, 50-page requirements are not reliable ways of conveying all the subtleties of a digital product. In my experience, readers quickly get bored and even worse, misinterpret what is written. But prototypes expand Read more »

Customer retention is like dating. You don’t interact with your significant other the same way on your first date as you do on your 50th or 200th date. Similarly, giving a customer a great experience on day one isn’t going to be the same as on day 50. In order to boost retention numbers and Read more »

There’s tight focus on finding and addressing customer pain points in product development. I believe there needs to be similar focus on their passion points. By passion points, I mean moments of profound or unexpected emotion: the joy that ensues results not simply from having a problem solved, but from a visceral, passionate reaction to Read more »

When communicating, you want to enable your audience to see possibilities and solutions and their part in them. No more so than when speaking with the engineers on your product team. If you want your team (not just your customers) to believe in your product and its promise, you have to share stories that invite Read more »