The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
It is the time of year that a product manager’s thoughts turn to … searching for a new job? During the global recession, things were so bad for so long that most product managers were just trying to hold on to the jobs that they already had. Now that things appear to be slowly getting … Read more
Put yourself in the shoes of a Microsoft product manger for just a moment. You’ve got a bit of a challenge: you work for a very large and a very powerful company that has lost its cool. In every category where once you ruled supreme, you now have pesky competitors showing up who product are … Read more
2009 is dead, long live 2009. Ok, so it’s not quite dead yet; however, even as your sales teams are running around trying to close the year out on a high note you as a product manager need to start to set your sights on what you’re going to do to get ready for next … Read more
If you were going fishing, how much luck catching fish do you think that you would have if you didn’t use any bait on your hook? Sure, there are probably some either dumb or near-sighted fish that might still bite, but you’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around waiting. Is it possible … Read more
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
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
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
Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing for the Project Manager Planet site. Yeah, yeah – I know that we’re Product Mangers not Project Managers. However, Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job … Read more
As though the job of being a Product Manager was not hard enough, there’s also that added responsibility that you have to manage your career. With all of the turmoil of the past couple of years, it’s now more important than ever for Product Managers to find the time to tend to this task. Growing … Read more