The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
So I’m just a little bit off the beaten path with this discussion, but I’ve recently had to sit through so many bad presentations that I’m feeling an overwhelming need to try to make the world a better place for Powerpoint slides to live in. We all live and die by Powerpoint. I can’t begin … Read more
Yeah, yeah I know that everyone says that they hate Powerpoint – “death by Powerpoint” and all of that. However, the reality of modern Product Manger life is that we end up using Powerpoint to communicate a lot of information about our products and the current status of our projects. Thank goodness you took all … Read more
So here we stand together at the start of a new year filled with hopes and dreams that this year will be better than last. Now if we could just do something about that email problem that we’ve all been dealing with… I don’t know about you, but depending on what part of the product … Read more
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
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
Ok, so how many times has this occurred: someone asks you what you do for a living and you tell them that you are a Product Manager and they fire back at you “Oh, so you manage projects?”. Grrr, it’s really no fair – the two disciplines really have nothing in common. Well, wait a … Read more
One of the key differences between a product manager and a project manager is that a product manager truly needs to motivate others to do work for him/her. A project manager can get away with just reporting on the current status of a project, a product manager needs to make that product successful. High-commitment, high-performance … Read more
Who would have ever guessed that a big chunk of the art of product management would revolve around your ability to make good guesses? We like to call it estimating; however, at the end of the day it’s really guessing. The cruel fact of life is that he/she who does the best (most accurate) job … Read more
The late George Carlin became famous thanks to a skit that he did titled “The 7 Words That You Can’t Say On Television”. I’m thinking that he missed a word — RISK. Why should this be added to the list you say? Simple — nobody dares to say it out loud! A couple of university … Read more