What should drive your decisions about the problems you solve as a product person? Should you focus all of your attention on matching and beating your competitors? Should you forget your competitors and just focus on your customers? Should you try and split the difference?...
As a product manager, you can have a big influence on how your organization innovates. Just remember that with great power comes great responsibility. The way you approach innovation, who you involve in those innovation efforts, and what aspects you apply innovation to can have...
On Guy’s Grocery Games chefs have to take innovative approaches to prepare meals as they tackle various cooking challenges. Guy Fieri fosters the chefs’ innovation by setting constraints in which they need to operate while still producing a tasty meal. There are, of course, more...
How do you make the most of your product career? You could ingratiate yourself to an all star product leader and ride their coattails to fame and fortune. You could spend every waking hour at the office and steal the occasional cat nap under your...
Is having a 10x something always better? People talk about 10x engineers who can produce 10 times more software than an “average” engineer. Ken Norton described 10x product management where your organization takes moonshots to get "order of magnitude" growth. But…. 10x engineers can often...
You may have heard that common saying regarding what happens to u and me when you assume. That saying has got it all wrong. In order to be effective as a product person, you have to make assumptions to start work on a product. What...
Darius Rucker perhaps said it best, “You gotta live and learn so you can learn to live”. If you want to be an effective product manager, you need to constantly reflect on your experiences and the experiences of others. Here are some ways that product...
You know you’re supposed to get out of the building. You know you’re supposed to talk to your customers. You also know that your supposed to exercise regularly and eat healthy. It’s one thing to know you’re supposed to do something, it’s another thing to...
While confirmation boxes in software may be a bit annoying, having that additional sanity check might be helpful when you’re building a new product. Just imagine, you’re rolling down the path of the next big thing, when suddenly a voice out of nowhere calls out...
It takes two to tango, and it takes three to make a dance party. When those initial people have passion and enthusiasm for dancing when no one else is, they encourage others to join in. That’s the same idea behind earlyvangelists. They are the first...