As product managers, we are trained to look for ways to add value to customers such that they are willing to buy our products. Now, what does adding value actually mean?
Adding value, does not necessarily mean that customers have to necessarily see an uptick in their revenues after they buy your product. For example, your [...]
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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 [...]
Filed under: leadership, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »
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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Question all data you collect or are presented with.
First of all, make sure you are collecting the right data. If you don’t measure what matters, the data is garbage. I have written before on using the right metric.
Once you are sure that you have collected the right data, never trust your first analysis of the [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 2 Comments »
Lot of activity does not necessarily equate to progress. It sounds cliche but it is true. Just because one is busy does not mean one is making progress. Having focused goals and then making sure majority of the activities relates to those goals is paramount. Identify goals, create metrics to measure progess and then align [...]
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In one of my previous posts, I had talked about educating customers on all the different product enhancements you have made to solve their problems. But there is another problem that needs customer education.
The phone conversation goes:
Product Manager: “Mr. Customer, I am the product Manager from company X.”
Customer: “Product Manager? Who is that?”
This is not [...]
Filed under: marketing, product management | 2 Comments »
How often have your customers asked you for functionality that you already have in your product – functionality you have had in the product for a year or two? I have had this happen often enough in my career. There are two causes for this
1) You forgot to tell the customer
2) Your product is too [...]
Filed under: business, customer needs, marketing, product management | 3 Comments »
Here is a question I received the other day – “I am a business analyst now in product management team and my boss identified me as a candidate for Product management. I am excited about the opportunity, but don’t want to accept something just t0 fail. Can you please answer the below for me?
1. Challenges [...]
Filed under: business, customer needs, marketing, product management | 3 Comments »
As a product manager, there is nothing more valuable than having concrete information about the market – customers, competitors, partners – all folks that influence the “external” world outside your office building. No one inside your office is buying your product, but then why do we make a lot of product decisions depending on “I [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 4 Comments »
You have a great product, you have a large customer base. Awesome! But how tuned in are you to how your user base is using your product? How wired is your product? Web products can get you good deal of information such as page views, number of unique visitors, how they move through the funnel, [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management, product usability | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Filed under: business, career development, leadership, marketing, product management, recruiting | 8 Comments »
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, [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing, team communication | 4 Comments »
This morning, I had to get an oil change and I drove up to the local Jiffy Lube. They charge $35 for an oil change. When I pulled in, they pulled up my car record and based on the mileage, they told me about the Honda recommended maintenance I have to do. Replacement of automatic transmission [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, marketing | Leave a Comment »
Wondering about how to be successful – watch this video by Richard St. John delivered at Ted 2007.
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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked by many folks how to get started on Twitter. I have had to give them the Twitter 101 to help them get started and hence I think it is worthy of a post.
But before I recommend on how to get started on Twitter – let [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management, twitter | 13 Comments »
It is quite common for people to say that doing something is a piece of cake. It is very easy to say this especially if you are not the one doing it. I have personally heard this many times from my upper management – “oh, that should be so simple to do that you should [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management | Tagged: Add new tag, business, software development, time management | 3 Comments »
Last Wednesday, Mumbai experienced one of the worst terrorist attacks (if not the worst) seen by India since its independence in 1947. 200 people were killed and over 325 were injured in the 60 hour carnage carried out by Islamic terrorists, with nexus to Pakistan’s ISI. The country and the world remained glued to CNN [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, mumbai, twitter | 1 Comment »
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 »
