Organizations eager to do a better job building and launching products that win in the market are smart to look to product management frameworks. Who wants to waste time reinventing the wheel when market opportunities require speed and stakeholders are obsessed with agility? The tested, refined, and re-refined product management best practices from the industry’s thought leaders have done all the hard work, so why not just “paste and go?” Not so fast! As we outlined in our previous post, training your product teams is an important step, but just that – a step – in transforming your group into ..read more

Getting a product management team up to speed is a big commitment and investment. Training is an essential part of their journey to high-performance, but multiple studies show us that overall retention of training material is very low – about 10%, according to most experts. Furthermore, if team members don’t get to put that new information into practice, they will struggle to retain even that small fraction. This isn’t the fault of the product managers or team leaders. The many high quality training courses available for product teams simply aren’t sufficient. Such training programs are the fo ..read more

Perhaps your VP of Products has decided to join a hot startup or you just realized that it’s time for your product management group to have its own seat at the leadership table. Regardless of the circumstance, you find yourself in need of a product management leader. You can picture who you want to step into this role: someone in sync with the company vision and goals an effective leader who will focus the product management team someone who can earn the respect of development a professional who really gets product management they know it is also a market facing role and won’t let the team g ..read more

As we discussed in our recent post How to Quantify the Return on Product Management, it’s essential for product management teams to focus on market-sensing activities. How do customers and prospects view your solutions relative to the competition? What are the most important factors in their decision? Who is involved? A golden opportunity to gain insight is right after a customer or prospect chooses to buy or not buy. But it’s not as simple as just asking a new customer why your company won, or asking the sales rep why you lost. To pan the gold out of the wins and losses happening every day ..read more

Do you ever feel like you have a target on your back? If you’re a product executive, especially with product management responsibility, you’ve felt the pressure to justify the existence of you and your team at some point. Sure, you can talk to the executive team about efforts underway to define the MVP, groom the product backlog and prioritize features for the next release. . But they want something more concrete from you – a clear connection between the investment in your team and the top line or the bottom line results. It may be tempting to jump to your product or product line P&L to ju ..read more

The software market is constantly evolving. Want proof? In the span of a single week technology website Network World reviews an average of more than 20 software and hardware products. For executives at software development companies, the challenge is one of balance — too many products and you get lost in the noise; too few, and you’re not taking best advantage of your market niche. Here’s a top-level guide to help ensure your product portfolio is in good health. Think Outside the Box Literally — go beyond the widgets and specs of the hardware and the architecture of the software to consider t ..read more

Product managers always feel the pressure to grow their business through innovation. When they can successfully create competitive differentiation, fill a gap in product technology or offer a more complete solution, they can drive business growth and gain market share. While innovation is key to business growth, so is time-to-market. That’s why smart product managers consider all their options for their innovation strategy. Should they develop the solution in-house? Buy it? or would it be best to partner with another company? Choosing the right strategy is difficult. Making the decision to bu ..read more

Many of us in the field of technology product management are so familiar with market segmentation principles that we take them for granted. In fact, I would bet that many of you respond to the topic with a big yawn. So, you might be surprised to learn that we have found that too many product managers don’t go far enough with segmentation to get the results they need to grow their business. We’ve all seen the analyst reports that estimate that a particular market size is huge and growing. Typically, these markets are defined in lofty and large terms that are perfectly fine for journalists and ..read more

“One’s first love is always perfect until one meets one’s second love.” Elizabeth Aston I was honored to participate in a podcast hosted by my friend Michael Hopkin. Michael has a blog site dedicated to Product Management (http://www.leadonpurposeblog.com/) and also runs a podcast called The Product Management Pulse. It was great fun and Michael is a great host. Mostly it got me to think, talk and reminisce about my first love—Product Management. Over the 30 minutes or so I was able to cover several of my favorite Product Management topics but in replaying it I realized I never got ..read more

This post was originally published on On Product Management. As much as we may focus on the role of Product Managers in building great products, it’s equally important to focus on the role Product Management plays with other groups in the company and top-line revenue overall. This was underscored recently when a friend told me about something that happened earlier this year at her company. A Classic Product Management Mistake She works in a company with a number of products and product lines. During a reorg last year, one of their product lines — an older mature one — was left without direct ..read more