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 ...

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 ...

Welcome to 2010!  For most of us, January brings a flurry of activity preparing for the annual Sales Kickoff.  Your Sales team is an important “window” into what’s going on in your market place.  Here are three of our favorite ways to make sure the window stays open and the right information flows both ways. 

A regularly scheduled product retrospective is an important part of the product manager’s job. As we close out the calendar year, it’s a good time to complete this work. What’s the best way to to it?  Some take a “rear-view-only” pragmatic approach: report on release delivery, revenue and units sold. Here are our best tips for a more ...

In the U.S. it’s the week when we amateur chefs roll up our collective sleeves and apply our best project-, product-, and program management skills toward orchestrating the ultimate Thanksgiving feast!  And if you ever wished for a master planning spreadsheet to help with the preparation, your wish is about to come true! With Pivotal PM’s ...

One of the things we teach in our 2-day Product Management Intensive workshop is how to get out of the trenches and get a 30,000 foot view once in awhile. Working with clients and coaching our students just reinforces for me how important this is, and how hard.  After all, one of the things that many ...

How long has it been since you shook your head in dismay at an executive decision that seemed to ignore the facts? Research shows there are two key ways that the brain interferes with good decision-making. Find out what they are, and how product managers can combat their effects.