by Marty Cagan | Jun 13, 2009
Continuing with the series on product portfolio planning, earlier I enumerated the purpose and objectives of the product portfolio planning process, but in this article I wanted to discuss the common complaints from executives and product leadership alike about the...
by Marty Cagan | Jun 1, 2009
How does your CEO know that every product manager’s efforts are aligned with his business strategy? How does your CEO clearly communicate to your product managers the business priorities? How does your CEO know which product managers are making good decisions and...
by Marty Cagan | May 19, 2009
I have never seen a technology product company that didn’t have more ideas they wanted to pursue, than capacity for pursuing them. So constrained resources is a reality of our world. Sadly, this keeps many companies from pursuing some truly promising products. Product...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 25, 2009
I am in the midst of a series of articles on product planning, but I’ve received several e-mails asking where this fits into the overall product organization, and the product discovery and product development processes, so I thought I’d make sure before proceeding...
by Marty Cagan | Apr 10, 2009
In keeping with my recent theme of product planning, I’d like to focus in this article on an important distinction and source of frustration in many companies, and that has to do with the differences between business strategy and product strategy. Many companies...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 20, 2009
In my last article I began a series on the product planning process. I wanted to start by emphasizing that the most critical aspect to product planning is to have an effective mechanism for separating the good ideas from the bad (see The Seven Deadly Sins of Product...
by Marty Cagan | Mar 9, 2009
Product planning is a big topic that many product organizations struggle with. It spans a range of activities including business strategy, product strategy, product roadmaps, portfolio management, opportunity assessments, project planning and tracking, and project...
by Marty Cagan | Feb 25, 2009
In my last article on Inspiring Product Leaders (see www.svpg.com/inspiring-product-leaders) I wrote about executives that are deeply involved in the company’s products, and I talked about how these are my favorite types of leaders for tech companies. Several of...
by Marty Cagan | Feb 10, 2009
Last week Silicon Valley and the Internet industry lost one of its pioneers. For those that knew him, Mike Homer was unique and unforgettable. I worked for him for a time at Netscape, where he was the one of the principals there, initially running the marketing...
by Marty Cagan | Feb 2, 2009
Last week I ran into two different software technology companies (neither in Silicon Valley) that had just recently brought in Six Sigma consultants. This caught me by surprise because it¹s been a very long time since I heard of a technology company even considering...
by Marty Cagan | Jan 7, 2009
I can¹t tell you how many times product managers have shown me their sophisticated spreadsheets and algorithms for prioritizing their long laundry list of feature requests (weighting various factors like cost, complexity, risk, customer impact, projected sales impact,...
by Marty Cagan | Jan 7, 2009
Readers of my articles know that I believe that the single most important thing that a product manager does is to get his ideas in front of real target users. This is where real learning happens, and this is where you can discover a product that customers love....
by Marty Cagan | Dec 15, 2008
This time of year always gets me thinking about the nature of great products. Recently I was forwarded an article on Apple and the caption of a photo of an iPhone had this great line “Pleasure is Not the Absence of Pain.” This resonated with me because I...
by Marty Cagan | Dec 7, 2008
One consequence of having been around this industry for a while is that I¹ve seen several cycles. Sometimes the downsides are fairly minor and barely touch tech companies, and at other times nearly everyone has lay-offs, cost-cutting, consolidations, or worse. While...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 27, 2008
In certain companies, mostly those that have an IT heritage (see https://svpg.com/moving-from-it-to-product-organization), there may be an additional role somewhere in the product organization either in product management or in the product development organization ...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 17, 2008
Many of you probably saw that eBay recently had a lay-off, and given the condition of the economy they are not likely to be the only one doing so. What I wanted to talk about in this article was what to do if you find yourself in the same boat. Others talk about...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 13, 2008
In some companies, mostly larger companies with multiple business units, there is an additional role in the product mix. This role typically comes about when you have a matrix organization where a common product organization is responsible for serving the needs of...
by Marty Cagan | Oct 6, 2008
Occasionally a company starts its life as one type of business but then finds that they need to change into another type of business. The most common such transition I see is to start by building products for very large companies (enterprises), but then decide you...
by Marty Cagan | Sep 23, 2008
I picked up this phrase “left of the line” from my friends at the e-commerce site kbb.com. At the highest level, creating software products involves figuring out what to build, and then building it. This line distinguishes those two fundamental activities. Note that...
by Marty Cagan | Sep 8, 2008
In a very real sense, every product manager is in the risk management business. Every investment decision we make represents a risk. Should we go for a big project that can potentially redefine our position, or maybe a handful of medium-sized efforts, or continue...
