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 ...

In these Agile and Lean times, collaboration within teams and across departments is key.  But in our experience, every department speaks its own internal language, which can stand in the way of getting all the brilliant people in your organization to communicate – particularly the techies and non-techies, right? So grab your engineers and sign up ...

Tom Grant’s recent post “Product Managers Must Have The Opportunity to Be Leaders” got me thinking again about this concept of authority and Product Management. Tom wraps up his post with this thought: “Best practices for PM’s role in innovation, or any other job function, are great, as long as PMs have the authority, capability, and ...

If you could go to the pantry and gather ingredients for the perfect Product Manager, what would they be? Readers of last month’s newsletter gave us their secret recipe: Preheat oven to 98.6 degrees. Marinate the Determination in the Realism while you prepare the other ingredients. 1 C. Flexibility 1 lb. Determination 2 clusters Analytics 1 package Realism 1 pint Self Confidence, ...

Last month’s Input survey asked about Agile or Lean adoption in your product development or IT team, and we can see that many  organizations are still struggling with adoption.   About a third of the respondents are reaping the benefits of Agile or Lean for most or all initiatives.  As one respondent said, “At any instant [Lean] gives complete visibility of ...

Here’s a great video clip about how to get your cross-functional team really pulling together: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/03/17/VI2010031700340.html?hpid=artslot Requires registration (free).

We’ve heard lots of discussion on how to fit Product Owners into organizations.  The answer is often  “It depends” … but we don’t see much discussion of the primary driver of that decision.  It’s not your culture, not the org chart, or the existing skill sets. Or necessarily what your Agile consultant/coach recommends.  It depends ...

With an economy that’s shifting toward expansion, many of us will have opportunities to propose new business cases in the coming months.  If you’re working on one now, or will be soon, be sure to avoid these common mistakes that can cause your business case to fail: 1. Forgetting the customer’s problem and current solution –  When ...

A colleague recently voiced frustration that their divisional strategy is far from clear, yet they are accountable for following it and delivering results against it.  Does this problem sound familiar?  Here are a few good ways to cope: 1. Look for “breadcrumb trails” – Find a presentation from the last divisional or company meeting, or a recent email ...