Product Management Skills

Both in life and at work, we tend to come up with solutions before defining the problem they solve. From “I need to stop eating chocolate” to “let’s add Facebook Login to our online checkout”, we can’t help it. It’s natural – solutions and features are easy to imagine and talk about with other people. Read more »

New product development is a risky business for companies – the failure rate for product launches hovers around 40%. A quick look at Product Hunt demonstrates there is a flourishing market for new products, all of them competing for our time and money. Companies that have previously found success with one product must invest in the next Read more »

In 2013, before Shared Parental Leave was a thing in the UK, I decided that I wanted to change my work-life balance from full-time to a four-day working week with one day of childcare. Here’s how it made me a better product manager. Read more »

Sailesh Panchal, CTO at digital payments firm Orwell Group, is an unusual soul. He’s earned the gravitas he emanates from decades in software architecture and technology leadership.  However, what makes him stand out is a background in dance and acting, an Equity Card [the hard-won actor’s union card], and appearances in film and TV. This Read more »

It pays to be ruthlessly simple about your value proposition. While humans are emotional beings, the reality is they’re more likely to come to your product or service to achieve a clear transactional benefit. Acquire and convert more users by perfecting the most direct path to realizing that benefit. Here we look at a case Read more »

Jim Kalbach is a respected author, speaker, and instructor in information architecture and UX strategy and currently Head of Customer Success at online whiteboard business Mural. His latest book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation and in this talk from ProductTank New York he discusses the roles Read more »

We’ve all been aware of the benefits of organizing your team with a small, cross-functional core team structure since the early 1990s when Wheelwright and Clark published their seminal research in “Revolutionizing Product Development”. My colleagues and I used to joke that your entire core team should be able to fit inside a minivan. Today, Read more »

Making sure that you and your team are working on the most important thing at any point in time is part of the fun and headache of being a product manager or a product leader.  Many times looking at the backlog list or strategic priorities will just cause your eyes to glaze over as you Read more »

As both a keen sailor and product manager, I have come to realise that there are some interesting lessons to be learnt from sailing that could also be usefully applied to product management. Both disciplines are a blend of art and science, both have built-in constraints, and both require continuous learning because their environments are Read more »

Manufactured products can seem like a daunting area to tackle if you’re not used to hardware and manufacturing processes. In this series of posts, I’m going to examine a hypothetical scenario where you’ve been given product management responsibility for transforming a line of pedometers into a line of advanced fitness trackers and health monitors for Read more »