Product Management

Dear Product Manager, here’s a possible lesson in business development…

If you are in the kind of industry where you create a product that requires multiple players in your value chain to adopt it at once to be valuable, the business development or sales/convincing process can…

Dear Product Manager, here’s how to be awesome.

Once in a while, I get the opportunity to speak with PMs around me. Here’s a deck I often talk around. Hopefully, you can extract some sense out of the half-formed thoughts.

Dear Product Manager, start from the experience, not the tech

Coming from an engineering background, I spent most of my first years as a bumbling PM championing the building of some core tech, then hope we can put an effective customer experience around it. Then I came across this…

Dear Product Manager, you can’t avoid doing rogue projects.

Sigh… Leading the team to do things you were explicitly told not to do.

If you’ve been a PM long enough, then you would have been at this crossroads before. You are absolutely convinced about…

Are you a pipe, a tap or the water corporation?

I think all businesses (and products) fit into one of these three buckets.

The water corporation.

A pipe.

A tap.

Dear Product Manager, a strong vision is the real core of the product

The paramount skill a PM needs is the ability to influence people. Talk people into jumping off a cliff on your behalf. To commit long hours to an idea or initiative that may or may not work. And when it…

Dear Product Manager, here’s a tip for getting buy-in for your product design proposal

Here’s a story from my life as an overzealous Product Manager.

Once upon a time, we had an idea for a product extension. This extension required for a…

Dear Product Manager, you don’t need more features

“Our product is going to kick ass because we have more features!”

“If you give me more features, I can increase revenue”

Dear Product Manager, it doesn’t end when you launch

I have been lucky to get a chance to be at the frontline of a few product launches. In all of them, for the products (or releases) that did well, I noticed a pattern.