In every company, product managers have more things to do than you have time for. So how do you decide which products to fund? which projects to work on? and more importantly what NOT to work on? After all, if you have more things to do than you have time for, there is nothing worse [...]
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As product managers, our work lives revolve around working with cross functional groups. Leading by influence and not much authority, our jobs are to motivate people to get things done for the benefit of the paying customer. Sounds easy right? But when different groups have their own goals and priorities, a product manager’s job often [...]
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Here are 5 suggestions that I recommend product managers adopt during the New Year.
1) Be “market” and not “marketing” driven – Talk to as many customers as possible in understanding their business, why they use your company’s products, what they like about it and what they don’t like about it. Plan to talk to at [...]
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I was asked by Jeff Lash to answer a question for his blog on what questions a product manager could ask during a job interview to better understand the role of product management in the company. Here are my recommendations -
1) Why are you hiring a product manager? – This is an important question to [...]
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THANK YOU!
We all are busy, we have all those emails to read, all those meetings to attend, all those conference calls we have to be on. We don’t have time. But, keep in mind that we have the same 24 hours that Albert Einstein had, Madam Curie had, Mahatma Gandhi had, Martin Luther King had, [...]
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Wondering about how to be successful – watch this video by Richard St. John delivered at Ted 2007.
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One of the wrong arguments you hear from businesses is “… but we are a B2B company and not a consumer company – so it cannot work for us”. But they forget that customer interactions in a B2B company are still between people. You are dealing with a purchasing manager, human resources manager, sales manager, [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing | Tagged: business, humanize, marketing | 2 Comments »
Here are couple more ways how you could manage products in an economic downturn. This assumes that you have enough cash in the bank to stay in business in the midst of slow sales.
1) Can your product help customers do things in a new way: Can your product help the customer do the task in [...]
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We as product managers spend a lot of time figuring out positioning statements for our products to ensure that the product brand will stick. But how about our own personal brand? Have you ever thought about your own state? After all are you not a product? – what about your own personal brand? How are [...]
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This post has nothing to do with product management. Andrew Baron, founder of RocketBoom reported yesterday that his father Frederick Baron, is dying of multiple myeloma, a particularly nasty form of cancer. Last week doctors gave him days to live – as of this morning he’s still fighting.Sad story indeed and my heart goes out [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing, product management, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »
If you as a product manager would like to build a user community that will self sustain, here are some tips based on my experience building the foundations of a user community on 3D ContentCentral website that currently has close to 450,000 registered members.
1) What is in it for them? – Have a dead simple [...]
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As product managers, we have to work with a lot of departments – engineering, qa, order admin, finance, shipping etc as part of creating the product and then putting that product into the market.
Doing all of this, involves choreographing and managing a lot of activities, so that the final dance that results meets the customer [...]
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By now, many of you are well aware of two new products that came out this summer (and if you have not, you were probably enjoying the summer a lot more than I was) – a new browser from Google called Google Chrome and a new search engine from a startup called Cuil
I was excited [...]
Filed under: business, customer needs, leadership, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »
Yes, companies should not be “customer” focused first, I strongly challenge them to be “employee” focused instead and then the customer focus will come.
I have been a great proponent of being customer driven, listening to customer’s unmet needs and then creating products that serve those needs. But when it comes to focus for companies, I [...]
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Thank you Manny Ramirez for the last 7 years – but Red Sox nation will be just fine without you. When you become more than the team, it is time for you to move on. You were a great asset but there is a point a great asset becomes a liability – you crossed the [...]
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Recently, I attended a webinar. The slides were full of text and the presenter read word by word – you very well know what I said – Text on a Powerpoint slide is your greatest competition. When I gave feedback about this to the presenter via email, the response from him indicated to me that [...]
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Good managers mostly hire good people and sometimes hire the wrong people whereas bad managers always hire the wrong people. This is the conclusion I have come to in my 15 year career. What do I define as a bad hiring manager? – one who does not have good managerial skills, feels insecure and hence [...]
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Has definition of leadership changed over the years – over the century? Countless books have been written on the concept of leadership – Amazon returns 263,761 results when you search for leadership – The 21 indispensable qualities of a leader, 21 irrefutable laws of leadership, leadership and the one minute manager and then another 263,718 [...]
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I have been a big proponent of online communities and social media – I have written at least two blog posts on this. So when the latest Business Week arrived with the main section titled “Consumer vigilantes” I could not put it down. The most interesting article among many dealing with social media was titled [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, leadership, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | 1 Comment »
Imagine that you have to make a business case to your upper management for a product/project you want to get funded. There are two ways a product manager can ask for this:
1) I need $$$$$ and XXXXX number of people to do this project?
2) I have this idea that I have vetted with customers and [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing, product management | Tagged: business, marketing, product manager, product management, resources, productmanager, productmanagement | Leave a Comment »
