The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
drjim The secret to true product manager success is to get more people to buy your product. Giving it away for free sure seems like a great way to get this to happen – but you probably won’t keep your job for long. Maybe there’s another way. Could rediscovering the lost art of using free samples … Read more
What do product managers really spend their time doing? We like to talk about all of the things that a product manager should be spending their time doing – boldly defining new products and clearly laying out markets to go after. However, the day-to-day reality of being a product manager can be quite different. The … Read more
I’ve got a quick quiz for you: how many different types of toothpastes are being sold right now? According to survey company Spire LLC which tracks the shopping data for more than 30 million U.S. households, we are currently faced with 352 distinct types of sizes of toothpaste. The good news is that this number … Read more
Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out … Read more
Lessons in how to be a better product manager can come from the strangest places – including a Monster Truck event. I’m willing to confess, I dived deep into my redneck past over a recent weekend and took the family to the Monster Truck Jam event that was being held down at the local football … Read more
Oh do I have a tasty dilemma for you this time around! I’ve been working with one of my clients who is setting up a brand new product management department. He’s faced with a challenge that you’d think would be more common than it appears to be: just how should you evaluate the job that … Read more
Dang it! This was supposed to be a story about a product success, not a product failure. Pure Digital created the low-end highly portable video camera market a few years back and then got bought out for a half a billion U.S. dollars by the networking giant Cisco. Cisco is stuffed with smart, bright product … Read more
That there Internet is a powerful tool in the hands of your potential customers. You probably vary the price of your product over time – lowering it when you want to boost sales or when you have a new version that you are getting ready to introduce. Well guess what, your customers have figured out … Read more
Who is the customer for your product? Maybe a better question is how old is your target customer? It turns out that they may be much older than any of us have realized – America’s grandparents are becoming the dominate consumer force (and this relates to business to business transactions also). Is your product ready? … Read more
One of the reasons that we all became product managers is that we were attracted to the field because it is always changing. Part of this change is that new marketing techniques are always showing up. Product managers are always attracted to shiny new ways to reach our customers. However, should we be? What’s the … Read more