The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Oh man , do I have a story for you. How many times have we been in charge of a product when “higher powers” have come along with suggestions on how to make the product better? Or perhaps they suggest features that the product just must have before it goes out the door? These types … Read more
Hopefully we all know about the Ford Mustang. This is the sports car that just about every male (and quite a few females) lust after in the heart at just about the same time that they are getting their driver’s license for the first time. It has been around in various forms since the 1960’s … Read more
Happy New Year to everyone! As we stand together at the start of another business year, it’s important to realize that this time of year provides a product manager with a unique once-a-year opportunity to use this time of the business cycle to accomplish a few things that you just can’t get done at any … Read more
All too often when we think about the products or services that we are product managers for, we get hung up on the need to be able to touch something. Many of us like boxes with lights on them, CD jewel boxes that snap shut with CDs with nicely printed product labels on them, etc. … Read more
Keep in mind that job mapping is a process by which Product Managers can discover what product features your customers are really looking for. Job mapping is a process by which you break down into a series of smaller steps the task that your customer is trying to accomplish while using your product. By doing … Read more
A job map identifies what your customers are TRYING to get done at every step of a task while they are using your product. This differs from process mapping which simply defines only what the customer is actually doing at each step – a subtle, but important distinction. Product managers who take the time to … Read more
Q: How can you tell when a Product Manager drops the ball? A: When there is an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title “As Holidays Approach, Dell Lags In New Products” Man, talk about having your failures broadcast to the whole world! In the consumer space in which Dell sells some of … Read more
As a commenter to one of my posting on this blog reminded me the other day, we Product Managers are really the CEOs of our product. This means that our ultimate responsibility is to make the product a success. Depending on your product and depending on your customer, you may occasionally find yourself in the … Read more
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 just quickly adjust and that there would be no real difference between managing “hard” products … Read more
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