I didn't necessarily plan for a career in product management. I spent time in development. I spent time in sales, sales engineering, and customer training and implementation. These and my college courses somewhat, perhaps accidentally, prepared me for the job. I majored in marketing and minored in computer science at the ...
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I’ve seen many product demonstrations. Some good. Some not. In some cases, it’s clear that the person doing the demo hasn’t prepared and is just following a canned script. In others, you can tell that they put a lot of time into tailoring the demo specifically for the client, but ...
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Anyone who acquires deep expertise does so at the expense of breadth.—Andrew Hargadon, author, How Breakthroughs Happen In my experience, people have either breadth or depth. Some people have a little information about almost every topic. After all, most people only have so much room in their heads. Some people ...
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Guest post by Janna Bastow If there’s one topic that gets product managers talking, it’s the age-old question of whether product roadmaps should be made public or not. Depending on which product manager you talk to, you’re likely to get a passionate response on one end of the spectrum. As is ...
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Pricing is all about value. "Must have" capabilities are more expensive than "nice to have." So what's the value to the client? A simple way to look at pricing is to use a 3 by 3 matrix (like a tic-tac-toe game). The vertical axis is cost of doing it myself; ...
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She analyzes synergies, or synergizes analogies... or some such thing.—Edward Norton (as "Father Brian Finn"), Keeping the Faith. Alas, most of us have fairly rudimentary tools. Try to get some help from someone with data mining experience but let’s see what we can do without assistance. Nobody knows the data ...
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My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.—Peter Drucker, American management consultant and author Interviewing is both an art and a science. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Letting the client expand on an idea but also keeping to your agenda. ...
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Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.—Winston Churchill, British prime minister Every marketing person will tell you that customer interviews provide deep insights on the product, its promotion, your sales team effectiveness, and your company strategy. What they often fail to do is ...
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A reader asks: What should I know about moving from a developer role to product management? First, congratulations! You’re about to see the world in a whole new way. The great thing about product management is you work across all parts of the organization—development, marketing, sales, services, support, finance, and ...
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Back before we were all online all the time, I kept a notebook of all the living documents for my product. Nowadays I keep these documents in a shared folder but sometimes I miss the old notebook. It held my positioning, pricing, and personas; it had my business plan and ...
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