The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
A recession, like the one that we’re living though right now, changes everything. Product mangers who had everything set up and working just right have been surprised to discover that all of a sudden customers are canceling orders and have stopped placing new orders. What’s a product manger to do? Martin Roth and Richard Ettenson … Read more
The economy dips even farther down each and every day if you are to believe what you read on the front page of just about every paper lately. Product Mangers are finding themselves in tighter and tighter situations – what can we do in these tough times to make our products successful. Would you believe … Read more
Just image this scenario: you’re sitting there at “mid-sized company, Inc.” when one day your boss walks up to you and says “we’ve just been bought by really-big-company, Inc.” Ok, you say to yourself, how much of a big deal to my successful product can this be? Well one thing that you may not have … Read more
The Dow Jones Average plunges 700 points in a day. Then it rises 500 points the next day. Your best customer just suddenly goes out of business one day (Enron, Lehman Brothers, Circuit City, etc.). Sure seems like no Product Manger could ever learn to deal with the worst economy in a generation… Wrong! Our … Read more
Come on, ‘fess up - you have just a little bit of a salesperson living inside of you. On those occasions that you get in front of a customer, you can hardly help yourself from launching into a “sales mode” and trying to convince the customer that they need your product. Now that the Web … Read more
One of my favorite lines from Steve Martin’s stand-up act goes like this “What’s up with those French? It seems like they have a different word for everything…” Perhaps many of us Product Managers have some French blood in us because it sure seems like we often get accused of willy-nilly making up new acronyms … Read more
Boy, oh boy do I have a story for you today. I’ve been working with one of my customers who has decided that they need to improve how they communicate with their customers. Having read all of the industry rags, they’ve decided that they need to set up a social networking site for their company … Read more
I don’t care if you’re the best Product Manger this world has ever known, you may still find yourself without a job sometime – especially in this economy. Yeah, yeah we all know that we should have been networking like crazy all along; however, the sad truth is that all too often we neglect this … Read more
As a product manager you know that you should be using shiny new Web 2.0 stuff to market your product. However, the sticky question is what exactly should you be using and, oh by the way, just how should you be using it? Traditional marketing has always been pretty much a one-way street – you … Read more
In these tough times, even Product Mangers may find themselves out on the street looking for a new job. Over at the Cranky Product Manager blog, there has been a fast moving discussion about what to do when you find yourself “between jobs”. One topic that has not been dealt with has been what Internet … Read more