The Accidental Product Manager
Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger
Imagine for a moment that you were a product manager working at Starbucks. The company is growing, everyone likes your product, you would be on top of the world. In fact, Starbucks has opened over 2,000 cafes in the U.S. over the past three years. The result of this rapid growth has been that you … Read more
So just in case you didn’t realize it, Apple makes a lot of money from both renting and selling movies. This is all part of their iTunes empire that has been around for a while and has become sort of the defecto go-to location for a lot of people when they are looking for new … Read more
I’m pretty sure that we all know and understand that product managers don’t work in sales. However, our career is very closely tied to the success of the product that we are responsible for. So, while we don’t have primary responsibility for selling our product, we are however quite motivated to make sure that the … Read more
There is an old phrase that goes something like this “Don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. As product managers who have to deal with sales people all of the time, this phrase really relates to us. It can be all too easy for a product manager to become fed up … Read more
So just exactly what does it take to successfully launch a product? In my product management consulting work, I’ve had a chance to work with a number of companies that had arrived at the product launch stage filled with nervous anticipation. They had already done a lot of work (and spend a lot of money) … Read more
Product managers are NOT sales professionals. We pride ourselves on being marketing professionals and we don’t think of ourselves as being a part of our company’s sales team no matter how closely we may work with them. However, we do play a key role in the success of our sales teams and this is because … Read more
The results of the first ever The Accidental Product Manager “where do you need the most help with product management” survey are now in! First off, let me take just a moment and thank everyone who took the time to (1) read my really long email, and (2) hit the “reply” button and sent me … Read more
Where is your product going to be in 6 months? What features will it have in a year? What is going to make your product different than everyone else’s in 5 years? If you can’t answer these questions, then perhaps you either don’t have a product roadmap or the one that you have isn’t doing … Read more
By now everyone knows who Starbucks is – they are the company that sells coffee, a lot of it, and makes a ton of cash doing it. What you may not know is that they have some very sharp product managers working for them and as they follow the product development definition they are always … Read more
So there sits your product. Sure, some people are buying it, but your product’s account manager and business development manager sure would like more people to buy it. What’s a product manager to do? Why not do what everyone else seems to be doing – have a promotion for your product? Hold on a minute, … Read more