Misused or plain out wrong product practices that hurt your ability to create value
It’s no secret that product management is often a misunderstood and misused role. Many companies restrict PMs to narrow, stereotypical jobs, hindering their potential impact. Without strong role models, some PMs fall victim to these product management myths and perpetuate them to new hires. Here are six wrong ways to think about the product managers, […]
6 Product Manager Stereotypes To Avoid Read More »
Observing tech companies you may notice a broad, disturbing phenomenon: everyone’s hard at work “selling” their product ideas — stakeholders and engineers are selling to product managers, product managers are selling to management, and management is selling to everyone (just listen attentively in the next all-hands meeting). As a product manager I too had to
Don’t Let Hype Run Your Product Read More »
Many companies consider the Net Promoter Score their most important customer metric. In the first article in the series we saw how NPS, created 20 years ago, grew in popularity and turned into the default tool to measure customer-sentiment and to collect customer feedback. But many experts doubt that NPS is indeed the right tool
NPS – Helpful or Harmful? (part 2) Read More »
NPS has gained a status of one-metric-that-matters that it likely doesn’t deserve. Here’s some of the untold story of NPS.
Net Promoter Score – Helpful or Harmful? (part 1) Read More »
Like it or not, many of us are working in feature factories . We’re churning out feature after feature, trying to deliver on a roadmap. To some that’s just how it’s supposed to be, but for others Feature Factory became the banner term for all that’s wrong with traditional product development. Why are we
Moving from Feature Factories to Value Generators Read More »
I recently met a product team, let’s call it Team Red, who is developing a new product in an established, traditional industry. On the surface Team Red has it all: it is cross-functional, fully-staffed, well-funded, working towards clear business goals, and is empowered to make decisions. And yet as we sat down to talk, I
False Predictability Is Killing Product/Market Fit Read More »
Product Management has been around for a good 40 years, but many companies are still figuring out the basics, including the role of PMs, their reporting line, and relationship with other disciplines. Getting these things wrong can waste a lot of your product management resources and frustrate both the PMs and the people working with them. In
Three Common PM Role Antipatterns Read More »
Here’s a sentence that always fills me with dread: “We plan to adopt this new approach, just as soon as we launch these must-have features.” The must-have feature list (AKA catch-up features) has become my nemesis—it’s forever standing in the way of progress. Usually it’s a laundry list of things copied from leading competitors, from
Enough With Must-Have Features Read More »
There’s a common and highly destructive pattern I’m seeing time and again (and likely you have too). The leadership team falls in love with a big idea and turns it into a big project. This project becomes the top priority—apparently the future of the company depends on it. Other projects (including yesteryear’s top priorities) are
The Big Project Syndrome Read More »
An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping
Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead Read More »