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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...