The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
drjim Just shut-up and buy my product! In fact, while you are at it, buy a lot of my product. If only we could really tell our potential customers this then life would be so much simpler. However, try this little verbal outburst just once and then you’ll have a chance to sit back and spend … Read more
[poll id=”8″] The question this past week was “Do people read and take actions based on your emails?“ The take-away from your responses to this week’s question is two-fold: first, people are reading your emails (that’s the good part), secondly it sure looks like it’s a mixed bag as to your emails having the impact … Read more
I don’t care if your product turns lead into gold, if your salespeople don’t go out there and do a good job of selling your product then you won’t be a product manager for long. I’ll agree that you are not running the sales department, in fact you are probably not even part of the … Read more
Shopping for groceries is a pain. Being forced to do a grocery store’s job for them is a bigger pain. The U.K. supermarket chain Asda (owned and operated by Wal-Mart) is #2 in their market and they want to be #1. Their product managers have come up with a truly horrible plan to get there. … Read more
[poll id=”7″] The question this past week was “For your product, who gets to deal with angry customers?” I suspect that there won’t be too much surprise to learn that the Customer Service team is on the front line when it comes to dealing with angry customers. However, the Sales and Product Management teams were … Read more
Would you sleep with your customer if they offered you a million dollars to do it? That was the question that was asked in the blockbuster movie “Indecent Proposal” with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson. Sure Demi Moore wasn’t a product manager, but the situation was similar to the one that we often … Read more
It’s expensive to create, market, deliver, and support a product. Having customers who make your life more difficult and the whole process more expensive does not help matters. Since we’re bright, smart product managers it sure seems as though when we spot an opportunity to change something about our product that will benefit everyone we … Read more
[poll id=”6″] The question this past week was “What part of being a product manger do you dislike the most?“ Talk about clustering! Only two of the possible answers got votes this week and they were neck-and-neck for most of the week. In the end, my personal favorite won out: pricing is the most disliked … Read more
Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in tow, they start instantly clambering for me to allow them to get a soda. On those occasions that they have worn me down enough that I’ll do almost anything to get them to shut-up, I’ll give in and let them. What they proceed to do … Read more
I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? In product management the career ladder generally goes: product manager, director, executive director, VP of marketing, Sr. … Read more