Product Management Skills
LATEST POSTS
New Product Development: an Introduction to Gate Systems
New product development is a risky business for companies – the failure rate for product launches hovers around 40%. A quick look at Product Hunt demonstrates there is a flourishing market for new products, all of them competing for our time and money. Companies that have previously found success with one product must invest in the next […]
How Going Part-Time Made me a Better Product Manager
In 2013, before Shared Parental Leave was a thing in the UK, I decided that I wanted to change my work-life balance from full-time to a four-day working week with one day of childcare. Part-time product manager roles are rare, but luckily I worked for an employer who was open to the idea. So after a successful […]
Oh the Drama! What Product Managers can Learn From Actors
Sailesh Panchal, CTO at digital payments firm Orwell Group, is an unusual soul. He’s earned the gravitas he emanates from decades in software architecture and technology leadership. However, what makes him stand out is a background in dance and acting, an Equity Card [the hard-won actor’s union card], and appearances in film and TV. This […]
How to Simplify Your Value Proposition: A Case Study
It pays to be ruthlessly simple about your value proposition. While humans are emotional beings, the reality is they’re more likely to come to your product or service to achieve a clear transactional benefit. Acquire and convert more users by perfecting the most direct path to realizing that benefit. Here we look at a case […]
Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach
Jim Kalbach is a respected author, speaker, and instructor in information architecture and UX strategy and currently Head of Customer Success at online whiteboard business Mural. His latest book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation and in this talk from ProductTank New York he discusses the roles […]
Pizzas, Minivans, and the Innovation Core Team
We’ve all been aware of the benefits of organizing your team with a small, cross-functional core team structure since the early 1990s when Wheelwright and Clark published their seminal research in “Revolutionizing Product Development”. My colleagues and I used to joke that your entire core team should be able to fit inside a minivan. Today, […]
Four Questions That Will Lead to Better Prioritization
Making sure that you and your team are working on the most important thing at any point in time is part of the fun and headache of being a product manager or a product leader. Many times looking at the backlog list or strategic priorities will just cause your eyes to glaze over as you […]
What Product Managers Can Learn From Sailors
As both a keen sailor and product manager, I have come to realise that there are some interesting lessons to be learnt from sailing that could also be usefully applied to product management. Both disciplines are a blend of art and science, both have built-in constraints, and both require continuous learning because their environments are […]
Let's get Physical: Product Management for Manufactured Products
Manufactured products can seem like a daunting area to tackle if you’re not used to hardware and manufacturing processes. In this series of posts, I’m going to examine a hypothetical scenario where you’ve been given product management responsibility for transforming a line of pedometers into a line of advanced fitness trackers and health monitors for […]
Want Better Product Managers? Throw Them In at the Deep End
I recently read a write-up of what looked like a very interesting roundtable discussion with product leaders in London. The last of the four topics particularly caught my eye: “how do you increase the commercial acumen of product managers?”. The article suggested that “product people (especially those in Europe) are weak commercially”, which “can lead to […]