For a startup, where there’s typically just one product team, it’s not too hard for the leaders to keep in their heads a holistic view of the product. However, this quickly becomes much tougher as the company grows first to...
Over the last several months I have been working with some clients to revisit how they do product portfolio planning. Essentially the process they use to determine where to invest and how much. I’ve discussed the purpose and the common...
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...
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 oversight. But in a phrase,...
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, documentation, dependencies,...
In earlier articles I’ve written about the product discovery process – discovering a product that is valuable, usable and feasible. I’ve explained that this is the primary responsibility of the product manager, and that product discovery requires a collaboration between...
One question I get quite frequently is “Google is making boatloads of money, so how can we do product management like Google?” Or another common variant is “Apple creates fantastic products. How can we do product management like Apple?” You...
If a great product is the result of combining a real customer need with a solution that’s just now possible, then it’s easy to see why the relationship between the product manager and the engineering team is so critical. The...
Earlier I’ve written about how important it is to clearly distinguish the roles of product management and product marketing (see Product Management vs. Product Marketing). But many companies suffer from a related problem, which is when the roles of product...
Probably the single most common question I get from CEO’s is where to find great product managers? I tell them that often they’re already in their organization, hiding under a different title – maybe a software engineer, designer, or an...
In my last article (Product Management vs. Product Marketing) I discussed why product management is very different from product marketing, and how critical it is to have capable product managers. The note seemed to strike a chord in that a...
Even in small companies, getting decisions made is often time-consuming and frustrating. Every product company needs a mechanism to get the key stakeholders and decision makers together to make timely and informed product decisions. My favorite way to ensure this...
Recently I’ve written about reinventing the product spec, and the reasons to move from a heavy-weight PRD to a light-weight high-fidelity prototype as the basis for your product spec. But where do these ideas come from, and how do you...
It’s funny how often I’m asked whether I am a “strategy guy” or an “execution guy.” I completely understand the reason for the question, as I think it’s true that most people prefer one or the other; in fact, they...
The single most frequent question I get from product leaders in companies both large and small, is where should product management live? The choices are most often engineering or marketing. While if you have the right personalities, it can work...
