I had the privilege of speaking at Woods Creek Consulting’s Sales Executive Peer Group earlier this month, and the topic was “Price Increases”.   I’m always excited to work with this group – where else can I talk with a dozen VPs of Sales for an hour and learn about their concerns?  And pricing is certainly a ...

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.  ...

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 ...

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’re in charge of hiring Product Managers in your organization, here’s a problem that you’ve puzzled over before or you’ll have again soon:  do you hire experienced product managers and teach them your business, or do you hire subject matter experts (SMEs) and teach them product management?  Here are the two key factors to ...

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 ...