Pivotal PM Blog

You know the drill… a key customer wants you and their Account Manager to show up and present your latest roadmap, so they can see when they’ll be receiving their long-awaited products or enhancement requests.  Of course, you did that nine months ago, promising said enhancement requests would be delivered… um… last month.  Ahem.  “Yes, well, ...

Great product managers know when they should speak up and when they shouldn’t – a key leadership skill that comes with long experience.  But if you don’t have the long experience, how do you develop this skill? Verbal Leadership - The Right Time to Speak Up One of the ways that product managers make their leadership evident ...

In the circle of influence, what is your proximity to key executives or managers?  Do you have daily contact and/or rapport?  Or is your proximity infrequent, rare or non-existent?  If you struggle from a credibility gap, consider paying attention to the language that executives use.  Think of the executives who have influence over your product.  ...

Probably the best and the worst things about cross-functional teams are that they’re … cross functional. They’re great because you get all those functional experts working together to make your product more successful.  But the bad news is that each person on your team already has a full-time job, and making time to work on your ...

Now that you know the importance of a product information binder for your sales team and how to get started gathering the material, your next challenges are to distribute the information and get Sales to use it first, instead of calling you. Distributing the Information Most important – how does your sales team relate best to ...

Our April Input survey asked about your plans for your next role.  Your responses covered the spectrum, reflecting a “work hard, play hard” attitude.  Responses were distributed about equally between moving up and branching out, with a few focused on getting some serious down time.  But every respondent had a goal in mind – product managers are definitely ...

Is your popularity killing you? As a product manager, a great deal of your value resides in your customer, market and product knowledge, and so people should be seeking you out.  But if you find yourself fielding a lot of time-consuming and repetitive information  requests, consider the Product Info Binder.  This humble tool has the ...

From what we’ve seen, Product Managers are avid readers.  So here are the top 10 “must read” Harvard Business Review articles, and all of them applicable to product management.  They include classics from Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, Peter Druker, Kaplan & Norton, and Theoodore Levitt.  If you’re not a subscriber, you can buy individual articles via ...