Product Management Skills
LATEST POSTS
Launching a Multi-Sided Marketplace? Why Design Sprints are Essential
More and more enterprise businesses have embraced multi-sided marketplaces to extend existing business models and explore new territories for growth. For example, in 2009, Walmart launched its own Marketplace to connect third-party merchants with Walmart customers partly to catch up with Amazon’s already established third-party marketplace. General Motors launched Maven, a peer-to-peer marketplace that connects owners […]
Relationship Goals: How to Resolve the Tension Between Product Management and Sales
Product managers have a unique view on what’s happening across the business, provided the relationships are working well. They work at the intersection of the User Experience, Business, and Technical teams, and have the opportunity to tap into the collective knowledge of these teams, in addition to their own interactions with the market. Being in this […]
How to get Things Done: Raise Your Organizational Awareness
Organizational Awareness: The Leader’s Sixth Sense In our product management community, we rightly place a great deal of attention on the people who are going to use our products. We are constantly answering that seemingly basic (yet challenging) question: What problem are we trying to solve for customers? We test our ideas again and again. […]
Who is “the Customer?” by Luke Taylor
TL;DR: Land and expand is a great tactic, but there are pitfalls, explains Luke Taylor, formerly Head of Product Management at Huddle. You have more than one customer and both are equally important for different reasons. Don’t hate the central decision maker – they can be your best friend, or destroy your chance of success. […]
When Innovation Programs Fail by Brant Cooper
When Brant Cooper typically speaks to innovation practitioners, he usually tells them to “stop innovating”. He says this because they typically fail to define what they mean by the word innovation. At #mtpcon San Francisco, he helped product practitioners to understand what innovation is, why innovation programs fail, and how we can help to change […]
10 Hacks of Customer-Centric Enterprise Product Managers
Over the years I’ve worked alongside a number of enterprise product managers in many companies. Those who have stood out to me as particularly customer-centric have had two qualities in common. The first quality is about laying foundations and the second is about finishing touches. I’m a product manager at Adobe, a company with a long product management tradition and which has produced […]
Product Roadmaps in Five Easy Pieces
. . . so my investor said that I need a product manager to do our product roadmap?” When I worked as a product management consultant clients would often talk about “needing a product roadmap ASAP”. So I’d dig a little deeper to find out what they really needed, and it was often a return […]
Social Tech for Local Change: the Story of Spacehive by James Chant
TL;DR: James Chant, formerly Head of Product at Spacehive, talks to ProductTank London about a social entrepreneurial marketplace, how this ecosystem can driven by the network effect and fed by non-product functions, and what influence “social tech for good” can have on a wider society. What is Spacehive? Spacehive is a UK-based crowdfunding platform where […]
Product Design Politics by Michelle Chu
Michelle Chu began her career in publishing as a sales assistant at Backpacker, before working in advertising, layouts, and packaging design. She then moved to digital products and eventually to her current role as Senior Product Manager and Head of Design at Alpha. Start-up Alpha is a user insights platform for use as a tool […]
Managing Manufactured Products: Growth and Decline
Post-launch, the product manager will be responsible for managing the product lifecycle through its growth, maturity and decline phases. In this final post in my series on managing manufactured products I examine the specific touch points that exist between the operations, engineering, and finance functions when managing the lifecycle of manufactured products. You can read […]