Product Management Archives - Page 2 of 4

3 Vital Techniques to Work Better with Stakeholders

Working with stakeholders can be tough. Whether it’s sales, marketing, PR, legal, or finance, these folks tend to have strong opinions about the product, and they are often more senior or more influential than you. They certainly are better at negotiation, escalation, and corporate politics. Your company is probably not offering good tools to deal with […]

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Product Discovery In Reality

Product Discovery

These days everyone seems to be talking about transformation, product-based development, and discovery. And yet, I find that many people support these concepts in principle, but can’t truly believe they can work in their companies. They see them as theory, something very futuristic, hard to do, and abstract. I disagree, but instead of giving you

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Why Customer Value Is The Most Important Thing

Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

In a famous essay Martin Eriksson defined product management as “the intersection between the functions of business, technology and user experience.” While it’s flattering to imagine ourselves as the center of things, it’s also a strange way to define a role. Why do we need a function in an organization that is a composite of

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Your Roadmap Isn’t Really a Road Map

PM Role and Skills, Roadmaps and Planning

Roadmaps are a hotly debated topic these days. I regularly meet CPOs who try to ban this staple of product management altogether. This often worries and confuses the rest of the company. What’s wrong with roadmaps? Why can’t we just go on planning as we did since the 1970s? In this highly entertaining talk, Gojko

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ICE Scores – All You Need to Know

Frameworks and Tools, Prioritization

UPDATE: An expanded version of this article is available as a free eBook: ICE Prioritization Done Right ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) is a popular idea prioritization method that has lately been getting some bad press. Some people openly warn against it as the worst thing you can do to your product. In this article I’ll explain

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Self-Test: Analyze Your Company Culture

Frameworks and Tools, Product Operating Model

When I talk to product teams and company leaders, one challenge comes up more than anything else: the mindset of the company. It seems that even in the 21st century many people feel that their companies are too top-down, sales-driven, output-focused, and traditional. This is a far-reaching problem. I see it in old businesses looking

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Tech-Centric is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven

Product Operating Model

(Update: this article used to be called “Product-led is Just as Bad as Sales-Driven”. This conflicted with the term “product-led growth” [PLG] which threw people off. I replaced all the uses of product-led to make it clear I’m not talking about PLG). A common complaint I hear from product folk is that management is too

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Breaking The Walls Between Business and Agile Teams

Frameworks and Tools, PM Role and Skills, Product Operating Model

Managers and product managers are often frustrated by the apparent lack of care the development team is showing for the needs of the business. The team is forever busy with engineering and design projects (some visible and some well hidden), while business-critical projects are dragging on at a snail’s pace. When a long-awaited product or

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5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs

Anti-Patterns, Goals and OKRs, Product Operating Model

UPDATE: I published a free eBook that covers OKRs best practices and pitfalls in-depth: OKRs Done Right. Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to them. John

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10 Ways to Build More Value Into Your Product

PM Role and Skills

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. — Albert Einstein Value for user (as opposed to value of a user) is a critically important product concept. It’s at the bottom of product/market fit, growth, revenue and basically much more. Few things help products more than injecting them with lots and lots of value.

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