The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
There is a saying that goes “Any publicity is good publicity”. It turns out that this is wrong. In fact, after having given birth to or adopting a product, a Product Manger can see the good name of their product vanish almost overnight if they aren’t careful. A good example of this, on a very … Read more
So here’s a minor topic that might have some real significance for all product managers: what do you put on your business card? Yeah, yeah, I know that we’re living in the age of FaceBook and LinkedIn but business cards are still what we exchange when we meet people face-to-face. What this means is that … Read more
One of the key differences between a product manager and a project manager is that a product manager truly needs to motivate others to do work for him/her. A project manager can get away with just reporting on the current status of a project, a product manager needs to make that product successful. High-commitment, high-performance … Read more
… leadership. Sorry in advance for this rant, but I’ve just about had it with product managers who spent their time whining and complaining that nobody listens to them. Pretty much across the board I’ve seem organizations where IT Product Managers get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield (on a good day!). In talking with these … Read more
If you’ve even come close to a business book in the last 5 years or so, you have probably discovered that “innovation” is what every IT organization is desperately trying to capture, grow, encourage, enhance, etc. Although this sounds like a great idea, and product management is one area that would directly benefit from this, … Read more
We’ve talked about why Product Mangers find it hard to get any respect. Now it’s time to talk about the why’s and how’s of what to do when you run into another department (or person) who acts like a brick wall. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are all pretty good at recognizing … Read more
How many of you have seen this: you’ve called a technical face to face meeting to resolve some key product issues. You’ve carefully coordinated the meeting time with everyone’s schedules and you’ve been sure to make sure that you’ve included folks from all impacted departments. Imagine your joy when you see that just about everyone … Read more
The difference between an effective product manager and an ineffective product manager often comes down to the little things. One big “little thing” is how you deal with meeting minutes. It was years ago when I was up to my neck in standards bodies work for the ATM protocol, a participant who was much wiser … Read more
Here in the comfortable 21st Century, product managers have many different ways to communicate with their boss/team/etc. However, just because you have a lot of ways to say something, does not mean that you are using the correct way to say it. Email is all of our favorite (ok, how about most used?) communication tool. … Read more