The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
As product managers, we are ultimately the source of all knowledge about our products: why it was created, what it does today, and what it will be able to do tomorrow. That being said, we often become part of a sales team when the sales rep has the relationship with the customer, but doesn’t understand … Read more
One of the unique things about being a product manager is that we wear many hats during a given day. The sales hat is one that we can find ourselves wearing a lot if our product is new, technical, or just basically foreign to our sales teams. As we find ourselves in unfamiliar sales territory, … Read more
Ah, to be a product manager at Apple – working for a company with very good mojo, cool products that everyone wants, and probably a really good bonus program! What more could any of us want? If, for just a moment, we could push the product hype, the speculations about Steve Jobs’ health, etc. off … Read more
So here’s a minor topic that might have some real significance for all product managers: what do you put on your business card? Yeah, yeah, I know that we’re living in the age of FaceBook and LinkedIn but business cards are still what we exchange when we meet people face-to-face. What this means is that … Read more
The Wall Street Journal ran a story today about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection department deciding to put off their grand plans for building a futuristic “virtual fence” between the U.S. and Mexico. The fence is being built by Boeing and was originally designed to cost $20M but has become much more expensive over … Read more
Once upon a time, going to a Blockbuster Video store was a regular part of my weekend. Since I am such and engineer, running back to the store the next day to return the video that I had watched was also part of my weekend. However, I don’t do any of these things any more … Read more
Did you ever have a lemonade stand as a kid? If not that, then you probably sold something else at some point in time. When I had my lemonade stand, most of the morning was spent dragging a table to the edge of the yard by the street, creating a hand painted sign that said … Read more
— Raymond Corey, Harvard Business School Have I ever told you just how much I love pricing? In the world of product management, there are so many talented people that I always felt both jealous and just a little overwhelmed. I mean there are product managers who have an amazing depth of product knowledge, there … Read more
I had a chance to talk with one of my friends the other day who is a product manager working in the telcom space. Carol is basically happy with her job, but she’s tired of always gathering requirements and she is already starting to think about the next step in her career – becoming a … Read more
Requirements – don’t we all have a love ’em / hate ’em relationship with them? You can have the best product team in the world, an amazing entrepreneurial spirit, and yet if you screw up the first step in a product launch, the requirements, then you’re basically dead in the water. I’ll probably take some … Read more