The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Congratulations – you are a Product Manager. Now how do you stay on top of your profession? We all know that the world keeps changing and the skills and talents that it takes to be a product manger keep changing with it. The challenge that we all face is how do you become a better … Read more
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
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
I was working with a client the other day who had a unique problem: they needed a vision for their product. Now, I’m pretty familiar with the whole “vision” thing as it applies to a company – it’s that thing that you put on the wall that nobody ever reads. However, this was the first … Read more
Right off the bat, I need to apologize for using “Web 2.0” in the title. It was a cheap trick to get you to read at least this far, but it sure seems to have worked. With all of that out of the way, hype aside, it sure does look like the Internet is changing … Read more
You walk into the casino and saunter over to the roulette wheel. Peeling off a wad of $100 bills, you plunk them down on black seven and then the wheel spins. When the ball comes to a rest, it is on, what else, black seven. You pick up your immense winnings and head for the … Read more
Just imagine if you were a movie studio executive back in the early 1980’s: what format should you release your new movie on for the home market – VHS or Beta? Both technologies were battling it out and it was very difficult to try to predict a winner. That was a long time ago (buy … 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