We have now assigned one or more specific problems to solve to each product team, but we’re not quite done providing the necessary context. When leaders ask a team to work on solving a problem, it’s important to be clear...
Keeping in mind the principles of empowerment that team objectives are designed to encourage, we are ready to have the product teams get to work. So let’s discuss the mechanics of assigning objectives to product teams. Assigning Objectives To Product...
NOTE: There is so much widespread confusion out there on OKR’s, it’s a very difficult topic to discuss because everyone brings their own very different experiences and perspective to the conversation. If your company is using OKR’s today and you...
After many years of being a very vocal advocate for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique, in the majority of companies I meet, I have stopped recommending the practice. That’s because, in so many companies, even though conceptually the...
As many of you know, most articles I write begin their life as a hope-to-be chapter in a future book. I use the blogging format, combined with the product community, to test out my thoughts on specific topics. The feedback...
To continue with our series on coaching, in this article I will be covering a different aspect of coaching, which has to do with ensuring the product manager has the necessary understanding of the broader business context in which her...
Our job in the product organization is to create products that can sustain a business. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products. Without these strong products, our marketing programs require customer acquisition costs that are too high;...
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 you...
Marty’s Note: Today we refer to this technique as the Customer Discovery Program, or sometimes Customer Development Program. But when this article was first published, in 2007, the technique was called a Charter Customer Program. Different names but same concept. ...
Many of my readers work in large companies, including Adobe, Amazon, AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, and Yahoo, and two of the most consistent themes from your questions and comments are: “how do I get things done in a...
If your company is like many, there’s some natural tension between marketing and product. One often controversial topic is the appropriate role in product creation of market research tools and techniques such as focus groups, customer surveys, site analytics, site...
Sometimes being a product manager can feel like being on Survivor, and worrying about your product team voting you out at the next product council. Product management is hard. Leading a product team is hard. You make countless decisions, and...
This week a friend called to ask my opinion of a product management leader – I’ll call him David – whom I’ve worked with in the past. The hiring manager is an exec at a large consumer internet services company....
Note: As a company moves from top-down, command and control models of leadership to pushing decisions down to empowered product teams, there are some important changes to how the product leaders and product teams need to interact with executives, and...
By now everyone that reads these articles is aware that our industry has entered yet another one of its down cycles. Most of the companies I know of and work with have had at least some level of staff reduction,...
