Product Management Skills

Do you start with a “No”?  Defining your process for feedback will save time and improve feedback quality. My seven-year-old son has the gift of positioning, a trait he comes by honestly as his mother is a sales professional.  He knows that, given the opportunity to present his case the likelihood of approval increases.  Lately, Read more »

Ever since the shift towards agile practices, product teams have hung on to a set of core attributes, which range from cross-functional, to customer-centric, all the way up to iterative and independent. But there’s one aspect which should vanish from this list of must-haves: co-located. In this first of two posts, I look at how you Read more »

As product managers, our job is to determine what matters most to our customers. At any given time, there could be 100 really great ideas that need implementing, but realistically we can only complete two or three per month. We have to ask ourselves: which three do we build? How deep do we go? And Read more »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: What’s your favourite product, and why? Or how about: You have to launch a new product for X. How do you determine the total and addressable markets, and what steps do you take to fill that need? How do you determine pricing? I hate these questions. I hate Read more »

In this talk, Alan Chiu pulls from his experience in product management and as a seed-stage venture capitalist to showcase a variety of case studies on companies who have perfected product/market fit. It’s probably not surprising to hear that there is no silver bullet when it comes to market fit. To help startups approach this Read more »

Today, attention is our new currency. With endless distractions, how does anyone get anything done? For product managers leading the execution of a product, working with an inattentive, context-switching development team is a struggle. This is why developing strong influencing skills is crucial for product managers. While many articles provide advice on ways to influence, they Read more »

We can and should learn product management lessons from a diverse range of environments. It’s absolutely worth looking to the likes of Google’s Sundar Pichai, but it’s also worth looking to less celebrated entrepreneurs, outside of the multinational mega-corporations, to learn about lean front-line product management. It quickly becomes clear that certain product management principles Read more »

Making stuff is awesome. Developing new product ideas with smart people is genuinely rewarding. And while the outcome of putting a finished product into the world is fun, technologist Tom Coates says the experience of making things can be even more enjoyable. In his closing keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Tom takes us through where ideas Read more »

Team issues can have a negative impact on a project and your people long term. There are a bunch of ways they might manifest themselves – and I’ve written them down as I’ve heard them over a decade of building digital products in cross-functional teams. I’m not touching on the upfront issues like bad sales Read more »

Having “no company strategy” is one of the biggest issues facing product managers, according to a recent survey of over 600 product people. After all, how can you set a reasonable direction for your product when you don’t know where your company is headed? It’s an issue that confronted me recently, when I started work with Read more »