The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The job of product management often takes on a program management flavor when it comes to keeping track of how the development of a new product is coming along. It’s probably important that I come right out and say that … Read more
Once a product has been funded and staffed, there is very little that will cause it to be halted or the original decisions that caused the product to be funded to be revisited. This is probably a good explanation as to why so many products are so poorly received by their intended audience when they … Read more
How many of you have seen this: you’ve called a technical face to face meeting to resolve some key product issues. You’ve carefully coordinated the meeting time with everyone’s schedules and you’ve been sure to make sure that you’ve included folks from all impacted departments. Imagine your joy when you see that just about everyone … Read more
Let’s look at the respect pyramid that, although unofficial, exists in nearly every organization. If we start at the top, then we find the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who are the people who really know what’s going on both in the company and with the technology. These are the people who make sure that the … Read more
While reading the Wall Street Journal last week, I happened upon a very small article that mentioned that Alcoa, the large metal processing company, had declared a force majeure on alumina (also known as aluminum oxide which is used in aluminum production) deliveries from its operation in Western Australia. This somewhat boring legal term caught … Read more
At the end of the day, the whole purpose of any product is for it to be a success. In the commercial side of the house, this means that it needs to be bought by customers and therefore more often than not, you need sales people. What strange creatures they are indeed! In order for … Read more
The difference between an effective product manager and an ineffective product manager often comes down to the little things. One big “little thing” is how you deal with meeting minutes. It was years ago when I was up to my neck in standards bodies work for the ATM protocol, a participant who was much wiser … Read more
Here in the comfortable 21st Century, product managers have many different ways to communicate with their boss/team/etc. However, just because you have a lot of ways to say something, does not mean that you are using the correct way to say it. Email is all of our favorite (ok, how about most used?) communication tool. … Read more
So what makes one product manger any better than another? I’ve spent a lot of time both working as a product manager and working with other product mangers and I think that I’ve got this figured out. I think that we can all agree what a good product manger looks like: they have successful products … Read more
We all have our own set of up close and personal product disaster stories. Just like when we’re out driving and end up having to wait in traffic because there was an accident up ahead, we always hope that they won’t have cleared it completely out of the way by the time that we get … Read more