LATEST POSTS

Who is “the Customer?” by Luke Taylor

BY Jayson Robinson on September 17, 2018

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. Read more »

When Innovation Programs Fail by Brant Cooper

BY Emily Tate on September 14, 2018

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 Read more »

Building Accessibility in to Your Products: Just Do It!

BY Emily Tate on September 10, 2018

Building accessible products is the right thing to do. In concept, this is not a difficult idea to agree with. As technology becomes more ingrained into everyday life, the ability to use digital products is a necessity; therefore, from an ethical perspective, ensuring that a diverse set of customers can use your product is a Read more »

10 Hacks of Customer-Centric Enterprise Product Managers

BY Peter Stadlinger on September 6, 2018

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 Read more »

Product Roadmaps in Five Easy Pieces

BY Scott Colfer on September 5, 2018

. . . 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 Read more »

Social Tech for Local Change: the Story of Spacehive by James Chant

BY Magda Coutts on September 4, 2018

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 Read more »

Dear CEO, Innovation Starts with a Good Product Manager

BY Bridget McMullan on August 23, 2018

I’ve worked for more than a decade in product management with Fortune 500 companies and startups, and I realize I’m seeing a scary pattern.  Product managers are only hired after the innovation or startup teams get concepts or funding approved.  This means that product managers are thrust into developing a product or service concept they Read more »

Let's Engage - Live Data Visualisation at MTP Engage Hamburg 2018

BY Arne Kittler on August 22, 2018

True to the “Engage” of our conference title we always look for formats that go beyond brilliant presentations and that give our attendees opportunities to interact with each other and grow their network within the product community. But we also wanted to try something new at this year’s MTP Engage conference in order to create Read more »

Product Design Politics by Michelle Chu

BY Tremis Skeete on August 21, 2018

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 Read more »

Managing Manufactured Products: Growth and Decline

BY Dustin Levy on August 20, 2018

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 Read more »