Product

Product Managers Know To Say “No” To Best Practices

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Perhaps just for a moment we can consider the day-to-day activities of any product manageras being engaged in a sort of race. Collectively we are all running and trying to move out in front of the product managers at the firms that our company is competing with. In this type of analogy, the product manager … Read more

Go Directly To Jail – How Product Managers Can Become Criminals

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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

7 Product Pricing Mistakes That Product Managers Make

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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

Really, Really Complex Products: Is PLM Software The Solution?

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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

Many Happy Returns: How Product Managers Can Make Product Returns Work For Them

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Every product manager likes to think that once their customer has purchased their product, that’s the end of the story. The reality is just a bit different: for a whole bunch of reasons, our customers can change their mind about buying our product and decide to return it. What’s a product manager to do when … Read more

3 Big Secrets For Small (Niche) Products

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When a product manager finds himself / herself in charge of a product that is targeted towards a niche segment, they have to change how they mange the product. A lot of things that may not matter for a mainstream product matter a great deal when you have a smaller target market. Let’s take a … Read more

2 Guaranteed Ways To Make Your Niche Product A Success

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In this age of social media and short customer attention spans, product managers who are responsible for niche products are living in both the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand they have fantastic new ways of reaching out to their specific customers while on the other hand all of the … Read more

How Product Managers Can Raise Their Product’s Price & Sell More

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What do most product managers do whenever their product sales start to decline? No matter if it’s because customers have lost interest or if it’s because a new competitor has just shown up, we all tend to do the same thing:slash our prices. In the new competitive global marketplace this doesn’t work any more. It’s … Read more

Lessons From Starbucks’ Product Managers: How To Protect Your Product’s Rear

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So there you are product manager, sitting on the top of the world in charge of the #1 selling brand of coffee and you’re pulling in something like $4 a cup. Then all of a sudden: blam! The global economy falls off a cliff and suddenly there are a whole bunch of competitors who start … Read more

Product Manager Choices: The Right Way Or The Wrong Way?

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Into every product manager’s life will arrive opportunities to make decisions, really, really important decisions. When this time comes, will you chose to take your product the right way or the wrong way? Perhaps more importantly, will you allow your customer to make the wrong decision with your product? A Tale Of Two Airlines If … Read more