Product Management Skills

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 »

Shendi Wang is a Business Leader of Product Development and Innovation at Mastercard. In her ProductTank NYC presentation, she discusses her own personal experiences in product and how they have helped her to discover the types of products she wanted to create. Shendi’s experiences in product started at American Express, developing prepaid products in a Read more »

The role of product management is becoming more and more important inside media companies. The reason is twofold: media companies increasingly need a direct relationship with their audiences through new digital products, and they need to transform their cultures to adapt more quickly to the changing world around them. Over the last decade I’ve had Read more »

How can we design products that users love, while also building a sustainable business model through advertising? User experience and advertisements seem incompatible.  For publishers or social platforms, content and services are normally free to use — and in our age of information accessibility, users expect it to stay that way. Meanwhile, product managers are tasked with maximising Read more »

We tend to think of Chinese companies as imitators rather than innovators, but is this fair? App developers and designers may look at other apps for inspiration on new features, but most only look to well-known apps like Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Take Messenger for example. We got excited about its Snapchat-like Messenger Day, Venmo-like Payments, Read more »

Every product comes with a tumultuous ‘origin story’. Ours is still unfolding, but I’ve been reflecting on what building a product business within a service agency has brought to the tale. We decided, about 18 months ago, that our consultancy business model, though growing and successful, could benefit from diversification — specifically, from creating something with tangible intellectual property. Six Read more »

Product management teams often ask themselves if third-party integration is right for their software product roadmap. The thinking is that you should integrate with products such as Salesforce and Slack, because you never would want to try to build those sorts of products by yourselves. Because of this, look through product management job descriptions and you’ll 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 »