The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Times are tough. Your product, your baby, is struggling. New competitors are showing up in your market with lower cost alternatives. Try as you might, your sales teams are just not having any luck convincing your customers to shell out the extra bucks for your Cadillac product. What’s a product manger to do? Lots of … Read more
In order to have a successful product, you need to convince people to buy your product in the first place. We like to call this marketing. The problem is that lots of money can be spent on marketing with no real apparent return on the investment. Let’s take a look at what product managers should … Read more
Where did you learn your marketing skills? At school? On the job? Never learned it? I’ve got some bad news for you: a lot of what you know may no longer be correct. A lot of what serves as conventional wisdom in the world of marketing is based on the way that things used to … Read more
I can remember being something like 9 or 10 years old when I first learned about the Bermuda Triangle. I’m not sure where I first got my facts, but I’m willing to bet good money that it was that classic TV show with Leonard Nimoy called “In Search Of…” I didn’t sleep for something like … Read more
In the world of a product manager, we spend our time worrying about defining, creating, and selling a product. All too often we view our job as being done once a customer has purchased our product – the next time we deal with them will be to get new requirements or to have them buy … Read more
How cool is it that we get to live in this all-digital, all-electronic 21st Century? Given all of the tools that a product manger has available to him/her, we should be having no problems getting information on our products out to existing / prospective customers, right? Wrong! Our customers are overloaded and so we’ve got … Read more
Who has to deal with irrational customers – isn’t “irrational” just another word for “crazy”? If you’ve ever had to set a price for your product, then you know what I’m talking about. No matter what price you pick (or how you pick it) people are always going to be telling you that it’s the … Read more
Gosh – doesn’t the whole concept of subliminal advertising just sound naughty to you? I mean, I’ve always sorts lumped this type of advertising together with hypnotism and sorta figured that they were slightly immoral. You know, it can’t be right to get people to do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise, right? Let’s assume … 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
A job map identifies what your customers are TRYING to get done at every step of a task while they are using your product. This differs from process mapping which simply defines only what the customer is actually doing at each step – a subtle, but important distinction. Product managers who take the time to … Read more