The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Come on, admit it. You like cost plus pricing. It’s a product manger’s best friend. We all know how this story goes, you find yourself in charge of a new product and you spend all of your time working on nailing down what features it is going to have and when it will become available. … Read more
Happy New Year to everyone! As we stand together at the start of another business year, it’s important to realize that this time of year provides a product manager with a unique once-a-year opportunity to use this time of the business cycle to accomplish a few things that you just can’t get done at any … Read more
All too often when we think about the products or services that we are product managers for, we get hung up on the need to be able to touch something. Many of us like boxes with lights on them, CD jewel boxes that snap shut with CDs with nicely printed product labels on them, etc. … Read more
Just in case you have been living at your desk for the past couple of years and hadn’t noticed, Toyota launched a new line of cars a few years ago called Scion. Now we all know the Toyota brand – in fact many of you probably own a Camry because it’s the most popular car … Read more
Q: How can you tell when a Product Manager drops the ball? A: When there is an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title “As Holidays Approach, Dell Lags In New Products” Man, talk about having your failures broadcast to the whole world! In the consumer space in which Dell sells some of … Read more
So here’s a little story that caught my attention in the Wall Street Journal the other day. The article was entitled “Microsoft Tries Blackening Screens To Fight Software Piracy In China”. The gist of the article went on to say that Microsoft had distributed a Windows XP patch to users who have elected to get … Read more
It’s hard enough to be a product manager for a “real” product, just imagine how hard this job gets when your company decides to switch over and start to offer service products. You’d think that a flexible product manager could just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products … Read more
Pick up just about any Product Management book, thumb through it, and you’ll quickly come to realize that most thinking about how to be a successful product manger is based on real products. Things that you can touch and feel. Things that people somewhere in the world manufacture. Even if you are responsible for a … Read more
Ah, to be a product manager at Apple – working for a company with very good mojo, cool products that everyone wants, and probably a really good bonus program! What more could any of us want? If, for just a moment, we could push the product hype, the speculations about Steve Jobs’ health, etc. off … Read more
Did you ever have a lemonade stand as a kid? If not that, then you probably sold something else at some point in time. When I had my lemonade stand, most of the morning was spent dragging a table to the edge of the yard by the street, creating a hand painted sign that said … Read more