Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy

From time to time, when I talk to other software product managers about their biggest challenge, they often say that managing internal stakeholder expectations is their biggest challenge. Yes, of course. After all, product management is like herding cats. Sales goes and makes promises to customers without asking the product group,…

A company has success with its enterprise product. But the company wants to accelerate sales and increase the number of customers. Someone says – how about small businesses? Of course, that is a large market. Why did we not think of them? We already have the enterprise product in the…

Events force actions – this has been such a guiding principle for me that it has allowed me to get clarity when there is none, has kept me focused when I have been distracted by too many things to do, has helped me achieve something because the deadline is looming.…

Product Camp Boston is this Saturday – May 22 at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center. If you are a product manager in the greater Boston area, have you registered yet? If not, what are you waiting for? If I get selected by attendees,  I intend to run a…

Growth in business puts scalability and performance demands on the software product that the company provides. These demands could take the form of site accessibility (number of concurrent users) and also number of exceptions that need to be handled by the system. Issues caused by increase in the load experienced…

In my software product management career, I have worked with remote software development teams in India, China, Australia, Ukraine and the UK. In many of these cases, we were working with outsourcing partners. I have been wanting to write a post reflecting on what actions ensured success and what resulted in failures.…

It is our job as product managers to find out why our customers “buy”. Buying is a very emotional behavior especially when it comes to consumers. When selling B2B products, the purchase cycle typically follows a chain of events – RFP to demos to pilots to implementation to release to…

Note: I had written this as a guest blog post last year on Subrata Majumdar’s blog called Confessions of a Digital Immigrant, that I am publishing here. Is a software product manager needed during early stages of a startup? If yes, what should be his/her role,  given that everyone tends…

All products ship with one label – your brand label – IBM, Microsoft Office, HP Pavilion, whatever your company’s brand name is. That is all what your customer gets to see. No product/feature ships with the name of the person who came up with the idea. So it “was my…

This week, I started my new job as Director of Product Management at Gazelle.com (aka Second Rotation Inc.) What do we do at Gazelle? We allow consumers to get cash for their used electronic gadgets such as cell phones, GPS, laptops, camcorders, MP3 players and even ebook readers. You can…

The results of the Massachusetts senatorial election this week to elect the replacement for the senate seat held by Ted Kennedy shocked the entire nation. A Republican named Scott Brown who not many people had heard about about as recently as a month back won the seat convincingly in a…

This is a continuation of my previous blog post of Software product manager’s first 30 days at a new job ….. Now that you are already settled into your new job and the first 45 days have gone by. You have done everything that was listed on the 30 day checklist.…

Happy New Year! I wish you all a prosperous 2010. So you found a new software product management job or you are moving into a software product manager’s role in your current company. Congratulations! Now what do you do in the first 30 days to make sure you start off…

As a software product manager, you are more than likely called to make the decision whether a product/service is ready for prime time.  Often it is a challenge because there is a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders to release it. There is a fine line between what I call…

As a software product manager, I spend a lot of time working with my development team in making sure that they are well aware of the customer pain points and the requirements of the solution we are trying to build. I have heard from time to time from my colleagues…

You are a software product manager trying to start a software company on your own. Or you work for a startup or a small software company and don’t have much money to spend. But you still need to design a good user experience, do early usability testing with your prospects,…

I am big about making “data driven” decisions. I have written in the past as to how wiring your product can help you make data driven decisions. You cannot make the right decisions unless you know what is happening in the market, in your product. Data can be collected in…

As a software product manager, we have to be cheer leaders for our team. We have to make sure our sales team, marketers, developers, the QA team are all staying pumped up about the products that we have asked them to sell/market/develop/test. But optimism that is not well grounded in…

In the video presentation soon after Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said “Obsess more about your customers than your competition.”  I could not agree more with him. Here are 5 symptoms that you, as a software product manager, are worrying more about your competition and not…

Here are 7 things I have learnt about product pricing. #1 If price is your ONLY product differentiator, you are selling a commodity. And if your competitor is much larger than you, you may not have a prayer – they can run you out of town by giving the product…

Couple of weeks back, I was invited to write a guest blog post on On Product Management. My post was titled Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life. I hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, please leave comments either on the post there or here.

Involve them in exactly ONE customer interaction whether it is a customer visit or a customer phone call! Not more, not less, exactly ONE and you as a software product manager would have done them the greatest disservice. There is no better way for you to taint your team’s perspective…

What an amazing Wimbledon Men’s final it turned out to be between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. An epic battle of 4+ hours, 77 aces, 77 games, the fifth set alone lasting 90 minutes. Roddick brought his A+ game to try to beat his arch nemesis Federer who had beaten…

Are you a product manager who lives around New York City or will be in NYC during the weekend of July 18? Do you want to learn about product management from other product managers who are walking in your shoes everyday? Look no further, ProductCamp is coming to town on…

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…

You bike the 180 mile PMC challenge from Sturbridge, MA to Provincetown, one pedal at a time … You walk the 20 mile Walk for hunger one step at a time … You run the Boston Marathon one mile at a time … You process the 100 emails in your…

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,…

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…