The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
So here’s a question for you: do you “tweet”? By that question, of course, I mean do you use the social networking tool Twitter? During the course of an average day do you micro-blog and send out messages to your “followers” that are no more than 140 characters in length? It turns out that a … Read more
I think that we do need to hand it to the Pepsi product managers – at least on paper they did everything that they really should have done. They conducted countless taste tests and tinkered with their Diet Pepsi product development definition all in a quest to give their customers what they wanted. However, in … Read more
Over at Pepsi the product managers are facing a bit of a problem. In the U.S. the amount of cola that is being drunk is currently at a three decade low point. What appears to be happening is that their customers are changing their drinking preferences and are now starting to select bottled water and … Read more
So, as a man I generally have very little interaction with women’s bras on a daily basis. However, if I was a product manager over at Victoria’s Secret, bras would make up a big part of my day. The reason for this is because the sales of bras makes up roughly 35% of their total … Read more
Once upon a time, the Keurig company, you know them – they are the ones who make that single sever coffee machine that uses those little plastic pouches, decided that they wanted to expand into new markets. Their product managers looked around and what they discovered is that the rest of us drink a great … Read more
If you have a talk with a product manager and you ask them what the most challenging part of their job’s product development definition is, more often than not you’ll get the answer “pricing”. As product managers we’d like to maximize the amount of money that the company gets each time it sells our product. … Read more
Once upon a time, being a product manager at HP was a great job to have. The company prided itself on its innovations and it was always trying to bring new products to market. However, time has passed and HP fell on hard times. Eventually the leadership at HP decided that they were trying to … Read more
You would think that if you became the product manager of something as big as an automobile, you’d be set for life. I mean, if the company is going to go to the effort of rolling out a new car model, then you’d think that they would be so committed to it that your job … Read more
When I talk with product managers, over and over again I hear that the one task that they all fear the most is setting a price for their product. I’m not 100% sure why this is such a big deal. I guess the obvious answer is that a lot of us feel that if we … Read more
Just exactly how much time do you spend every day thinking about that mattress that you sleep on. Scientists say that we’ll spend roughly 1/3 of our lives sleeping, so you’d think that the mattress that we sleep on would be a very big deal. However, if you are like most of us, you don’t … Read more