Product Management Skills

You’ve got sprint planning coming up and, looking at your backlog, you see that there is nothing ready for the team to work on. I have talked to quite a few product people about this and no matter how experienced they were, all of them told me that this is a situation they’ve encountered at Read more »

I have a confession. I share it in the belief I am in the company of my brethren; I am an accidental product manager. Two years ago, I did not know a user story from a bedtime one. A notification from an alert. And a gherkin was still just a tasty pickle. But 24 months Read more »

Developing great products is hard. The most conservative estimates place new product failure rates at 50% or more.  Many of us can relate to working on an exhilarating project with talented colleagues, where the solution was architected brilliantly and even delivered on-time, only to see the product fall short of expectations in the marketplace. Mark Read more »

How do you get users to want to do what you want them to do? No matter how much effort you put into an amazing marketing site, a slick launch campaign or a frictionless user on-boarding flow, you may still end up tearing out your hair about low retention rates and falling user engagement. That’s Read more »

There’s a common misconception out there that user centered design means being led by the user. The clearest example is the oft-repeated fallacy that Apple isn’t a user centered organization because they never ask users what they want. In some instances, being user centered means ignoring or even going against explicit user wishes in order Read more »

Is your product disruptive or sustaining? There’s nothing wrong with being sustaining by the way – a disruptive company that is successful quickly becomes a sustaining company. The important thing is to understand where on this spectrum you lie because both need to think differently when it comes to everything from marketing to how to Read more »

Addiction or devotion? The complexity of our relationships between connected experiences, devices and people is increasing. In her talk at Mind the Product 2013, design ethnographer Kelly Goto presents underlying emotional indicators that reveal surprising attachments to brands, products, services and devices. She argues that we must move past addiction and into meaning — using Read more »

Pricing strategy is all about value. ‘Must-have’ capabilities are more expensive than ‘nice to have’.  So what’s the value to the client? A simple way to look at pricing is to use a three-by-three matrix (like a game of tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses). The vertical axis is the cost of doing it myself, while Read more »

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he pitched it as a broadcast device – that it was for putting on a stage in front of a musician or sermon in order to broadcast it to the world. He had no idea he’d invented a two-way communication device and revolutionized how we could communicate with Read more »

Modern product management is a relatively young discipline.  There remains a lot of room for a final definition of what product management is and how it can be best organized. At the same time, it is necessary to stake a claim as quickly as possible. Firstly, the career path for product managers needs properly establishing. Secondly, Read more »