The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
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
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
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
The Wall Street Journal ran a story today about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection department deciding to put off their grand plans for building a futuristic “virtual fence” between the U.S. and Mexico. The fence is being built by Boeing and was originally designed to cost $20M but has become much more expensive over … Read more
Once upon a time, going to a Blockbuster Video store was a regular part of my weekend. Since I am such and engineer, running back to the store the next day to return the video that I had watched was also part of my weekend. However, I don’t do any of these things any more … 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
A good product manager needs to be able to wear many different hats and one of them is that of a Business Analyst. (Oh great I can hear you saying – yet another job for the overworked PM to take on). Before you throw your hands up in the air and run screaming from the … Read more
Requirements – don’t we all have a love ’em / hate ’em relationship with them? You can have the best product team in the world, an amazing entrepreneurial spirit, and yet if you screw up the first step in a product launch, the requirements, then you’re basically dead in the water. I’ll probably take some … Read more
Nobody ever said that being a product manager was going to be easy, and I think that we can all agree that it’s a tough job. There’s been a lot of talk about finding a way to certify product managersby making them go back to school; however, I think that at the heart of the … Read more