4 Key Success Factors For Being A Service Product Manger

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If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!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 … Read more

What’s A Product Manager To Do When Your Product Is A Service?

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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

Let’s Go Visit The Customer, Product Manager…

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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

Product Manger You Have A Great Product – So Just Buy It Already!

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As product managers, we are ultimately the source of all knowledge about our products: why it was created, what it does today, and what it will be able to do tomorrow. That being said, we often become part of a sales team when the sales rep has the relationship with the customer, but doesn’t understand … Read more

Product Managers & RFPs: It’s A Love / Hate Thing

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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

Forget The iPhone: What Can Apple Teach Product Mangers?

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Ah, to be a product manager at Apple – working for a company with very good mojo, cool products that everyone wants, and probably a really good bonus program! What more could any of us want? If, for just a moment, we could push the product hype, the speculations about Steve Jobs’ health, etc. off … Read more

Product Manager What Does Your Business Card Say About You?

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So here’s a minor topic that might have some real significance for all product managers: what do you put on your business card? Yeah, yeah, I know that we’re living in the age of FaceBook and LinkedIn but business cards are still what we exchange when we meet people face-to-face. What this means is that … Read more

A Quick Note Of Thanks To The Folks At Alltop.com

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As those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed, this blog is now sporting a shiny new badge over there on the right-hand side from the good folks at Alltop.com. They have added us to their listings of blogs and so I wanted to thank them for doing so and, of course, let you … Read more

The Virtual Fence – Where Was The Product Manger?

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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

Netflix Teaches Product Managers A Lesson

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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