The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Just who are you hoping that will buy your product? Sane, rational people who you’d be more than willing to invite over to your place for dinner? Or perhapsstark raving mad folkswhom you’d probably cross to the other side of the street were you to encounter them in public? I’m guessing that you’d probably pick … Read more
Being a product manager is a tough job, you wouldn’t think that we’d need to worry about going to jail – but we do. I’m a big advocate of product managers acting as though we are the CEO’s of our products. Our careers both live and die along with the market success of our products … Read more
Every product manager dreams of his / her product turning into the next iPhone, or Google search engine, or some other runaway successlike that. However, as we all too well know, the odds of that ever happening are actually pretty slim. However, maybe there’s another way to become successful and famous. Maybe the key to … Read more
Product Managers have long struggled with the idea of getting an MBA. Sure, it seems like a good idea, but who has the time or the energy to haul yourself off to some college campus several times a week to attend classes. There are those “online” universities that let you get an MBA online, but … Read more
If you asked a product manager what the scariest part of their job is, I think that you’d get a lot of them telling you”pricing”. It’s sorta a black hole – you make a guess, cross your fingers, and then hope that enough customers buy your product at a given price and that you’re not … Read more
As product managers we spend a lot of time creating ways to tell customers all about our fantastic product. Too bad that often the brochures, white papers, direct mail, and case studies often fall on deaf ears. It turns out that we’re actually doing a couple of things wrong: we’re not listening to our customers … Read more
Product managers are responsible for making a lot of decisions about our products while they are being developed; however,one of the most important decisionshas to be if we are going to team with another company to develop a product. It’s the classic “Batman” (he’s got a sidekick names Robin) vs “The Lone Ranger” type of … Read more
Imagine for a moment that you were inthe business of building walls. Every day you’d get up go build part of a wall and then go home. What if every day when you returned, all of the work that you had done the previous day had been undone? How would you ever get that wall … Read more
It’s time for true confessions: you play one of those silly Facebook games don’t you? Pick your poison:Farmville, Fishville, Mafi Wars, etc.The company that makes these games, Zynga, currently boasts that they have over 100M users (and that’s just after 2 years). What can they teach the rest of us product managers? Can A Product … Read more
There are a lot of products out there that need product managers. However, there is a special class of products that needs a special type of product manager – the really, really complex product. These things have too many parts and subsystems for any one person to keep straight. Maybe it’s time to bring in … Read more