One of the challenges of building a great product management team is making sure you have the right combination of skills and experience. How do you make sure your team is the best and has the right set of skills ? Product teams are comprised of many product managers, all of whom have various levels of knowledge and abilities. One of the challenges product leaders face is having people who transferred internally from support or engineering into product management; they posses a good understanding of the domain and the product, yet they are not quite market-oriented. That raises the question ..read more

Product managers should be customer focused, yet most are internally focused-- and not by choice. You have probably faced these situations yourself, when you want to be more strategic, but like many product managers you are caught up in tackling the latest issue/ bug/ release planning. How did this come to be the de facto state of product management? The truth is all companies want to be customer focused, yet they do not clearly define what that means. Are you identifying market needs and testing your hypothesis along the way? Are you constantly testing your product against the market and p ..read more

Most of you are probably familiar with skills & expertise on LinkedIn. Among the many skills to choose from is product management. Being a product management professional, I have posted that on my profile and have been widely endorsed. But I was surprised to see that some of my colleagues who are recruiters, CFOs, VCs, sales people, etc. posted product management as one of their skills. That got me thinking, does one grasp what product management really is? I strongly believe that Product management is not a skill, but rather a profession and as such is comprised of many skills such ..read more

One evening while watching a movie, we decided to make popcorn to enhance our viewing experience. As we’ve done many times before, we placed a colored paper bag in the microwave with kernels, hit the start button and lo and behold-- the bag caught fire. As a person who plans ahead, I had a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. I attempted to use it when everything went haywire; I pulled the stopper off and pressed on the lever, and nothing happened. I kept pressing and pressing to no avail until my better half calmly grabbed a wet towel, placed it over the bag and quelled the flames. Not understa ..read more

June is when Masschallenge, matches mentors with startups, which made me think about the importance of mentoring. As you know, mentoring can have a profound impact on one’s career. I have been on both sides, as a mentor and as a mentee. As a mentor you are the sounding board, you are there to provide advice, critique, and help get your mentee to the next level; be it on the product side or on the professional side. As a mentee you need someone you trust to guide you through uncharted territories, someone who understands your needs and can help get you there. One might ask, why is mentoring ..read more

In my 15+ years in technology I have had the privilege of working as a product manager who reported to various department heads. In some cases I reported to engineering, in other cases to marketing, and more recently to the head of product management.  Why isn’t product management its own department in every company? What are the risks and challenges when product management reports to engineering or sales & marketing? When product management is part of engineering, ideas and products are driven by technology. The product manager ends up getting involved in designing the solution rat ..read more

I recently read a book titled “Do What You Are” (by Tieger and Barron-Tieger) and it made me think: what kind of personality makes a good product manager? Myers-Briggs define people by four dimensions of personality: · How we interact with the world and where we direct our energy  (E) Extroversion ------Introversion (I) · The kind of information we naturally notice                                         (S) Sensing----------------Intuition (N) · How we make decisions                                                                         (T) Thinking------------------Feeling (F) · Structure ..read more

​In aviation there is an acronym called the 5 C’s: Climb, circle, communicate, confess, comply.  All these are meant to assist a pilot who has lost orientation; they give you an opportunity to look at things from a different view - hence the climb and circle. However, if that isn’t sufficient, you need to admit you are lost and contact flight control where you communicate your situation, confess your mistakes and comply with their instructions. This has prompted me to create the 3 C’s of product management: Communication, consensus building and collaboration. These three are applicable i ..read more

A couple of years ago I led a Product Camp Boston discussion about start ups and product management. That got me thinking, is it more important to have product management in a small company or in a large one? Some of my entrepreneur friends claim that they are product managers. After all, they identified a need, did market research and built the product. But once VCs are involved, the founder has to manage them, so who manages the product? At large companies product management exists, but more often than not customer needs are compromised for reasons beyond the product manager’s contr ..read more

Many of my fellow product management practitioners are often placed in a difficult situation where customers request certain features for their products, but the product manager's hands are tied. It's not that they don't care about the voice of their customers, rather management's vision is different. On one hand, senior management makes promises to Wall St. or the investors, which appeases the company's shareholders, but neglects the opinion of the customers. How does a product manager ensure that s/he does not lose sight of the customers? 1. Look for common threads. Ask yourself: will the ..read more