While product managers may not be the CEO of the product, you may be the switchboard operator of the product. You frequently take on the responsibility of making sure the right people get the right information about your product at the right time and get...
When you work with managers and executives, you want to share a steady stream of the right information rather than a firehose of all that's possible. Keeping that balance right is the difference between quenching the executive's thirst and drenching them needlessly. What you should know...
You may be tempted to think that working effectively with engineers is all about backlogs and user stories and being able to read code. Those things are helpful, but it’s also extremely important to build credibility, trust, and empathy with your engineers. It turns out...
As a product manager you constantly need to balance desirability, feasibility, and viability. Your team helps you maintain that balance. The UX designers on your team focus on desirability, which is great if you don’t have a UX background. But when your background is UX...
Agile development helps teams speed up their product development activities. That’s great unless they don’t have the proper guidance to make sure they are quickly building the right things. That’s where product managers come into the picture. Here are some ideas on how you can...
You need to let people know about your product. Should you stick to only talking about the features the product currently has? Should you wax poetically about your vision of the features that your product will have soon? Should you under-promise and over-deliver? The proper...
You want to know as much about your customers as you can, and your sales team is often a great source of that knowledge. Unfortunately, there are some risks that come with sales being so involved in the product development process, including that they might...
To share or not to share (your roadmap with customers), that is the question. On one hand, you want to keep your customers informed and excited about what you’ve got planned for your product. On the other hand, you don’t want to run the risk...
You want to talk to potential customers so you can get a better understanding of their needs and gain intelligence to influence your decisions moving forward. Sales calls offer a great opportunity to talk to potential customers. Except that your search for information that helps...
When you want to create or update the roadmap for your product, there are several tools you can choose from. But your choice of tool is not necessarily the only key to an effective product roadmap. You should consider who you involve when you create...