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
Keep in mind that job mapping is a process by which Product Managers can discover what product features your customers are really looking for. Job mapping is a process by which you break down into a series of smaller steps the task that your customer is trying to accomplish while using your product. By doing … 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
Last time we talked about “job mapping” how a customer “hires” your product to perform some task. If you can do this well, then you will be able to create an understanding of what aspects of your product the customer likes and is using as well as which ones he/she does not like and is … Read more
Being a Product Manager is hard work, being a successful product manager is even harder. Wouldn’t we all like to have a secret weapon that would allow us to cut through all of the roadblocks that others seem to be constantly throwing up all around us? Just imagine if there was some way to get … Read more
As the CEO of your product, at the end of the day you are the one who is responsible for it being a success. Not the sales team, not the developers, not the CEO. You. This is one of the HUGE differences between a project manger and a product manger. Project managers can complete their … 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