IT Product manager

Why Product Mangers Need To Know That Cost Plus Pricing Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

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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

9 Ways To To Become An Information Product Manager

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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

How Product Managers Can Manage A Complex Sale

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As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the … Read more

Is Being A Product Manager At Coke The Real Thing?

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So I just happened to be leafing through an issue of Information Week and I ran across an article that was talking about how IT is run over at Coke. In a nutshell, the article was a glowing review of the changes that Jean-Michel Ares has been making. However, what really caught my eye was … Read more

How To Jump-Start A Stalled Product Manager

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Ugh! It’s the 4th quarter, the financial world seems to be going to hell-in-a-hand-basket, a global recession appears to either be here or be looming, Microsoft’s Vista is still a dog, and all of those political TV commercials have now officially become annoying. Being a product manager is a tough job on the best of … Read more

Product Manager Decision Time: Tell Users “Game Over”?

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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

How Product Managers Can Make Time Work For Them

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Dang – just where does the time seem to go? I don’t know about you but as of late I seem to be running out of time or just simply running behind more often than in the past. I’d like to blame the current turmoil in the financial markets; however, that’s not the problem. There … Read more

Let’s Go Visit The Customer, Product Manager…

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So much has been written about how important it is to get in front of your (potential) customer that I am almost hesitant to add to the pile. However, in reviewing what’s out there, nobody really seems to have spent the time to lay out step-by-step what a product manger needs to do before and … Read more

Product Managers & RFPs: It’s A Love / Hate Thing

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One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, … Read more

Product Manager What Does Your Business Card Say About You?

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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