The Product Management View - Best Practices Archives

Taking Stock of the Competition

A product profile allows you to get to the basics of your product, and then see how it compares to your competition.

Posted by miranda on July 3, 2008 3:49 PM

Competitive Maps

This is the first, in what will hopefully be a series of postings related to Competitive topics. In my time here at Ryma, and other leading software vendors, I've come across a host of great information related to gathering and...

Posted by Peter Ganza on June 26, 2008 1:07 PM

Technology Does Not Eliminate the Need for Good Design

Design is essential, and should not be forgotten in the rush to implement the latest technology.

Posted by miranda on June 4, 2008 11:28 AM | 1 Comment

Developing a PM Process Roadmap

When creating your PM process roadmap, you need to make sure that things are ordered logically, and that the roadmap is clear to all team members.

Posted by miranda on April 30, 2008 9:06 AM

Using roadmaps to communicate strategy

A roadmap is often thought of as a timeline of releases and what features will be rolled out during each release. It tells me what new features we're going to add to my product in the next release or in...

Posted by Derick Workman on April 25, 2008 8:12 AM

Are You Marketing Your "Green-ness"?

Part of the product management process is marketing. And, as Stewart pointed out yesterday, Earth Day earlier this week had a lot of people thinking about going green. When you are developing a product, are you thinking about its effects...

Posted by miranda on April 24, 2008 10:58 AM

Are You Ready to Meet Challenges?

But whether we are heading for, in the midst of, or even on track to avoid, a recession, it is important to be prepared to meet challenges.

Posted by miranda on April 16, 2008 11:32 AM

Is Your Platform Attractive to Developers?

If you have managed to create a platform for your business that works well, it can be possible to turn it into a product. A platform as a product can be a great way to increase your influence, and to...

Posted by miranda on February 28, 2008 2:18 PM

Can't Solve the Problem? At Least Try to Help

Manufacturers of hardware, the nuts and bolts physical items that make a computer what it is, are often different from the software makers.

Posted by miranda on February 21, 2008 10:50 AM

Conjoint Analysis: Is it worth it?

After reading a well known book on Product Management, a customer of mine needed some help determining what method of prioritization they should use for prioritizing new ideas and product concepts: Conjoint Analysis, the “Limited Method”, or the “Infinite...

Posted by Byron Workman on January 18, 2008 9:02 AM

What visibility does a VP of Product Management want?

Last week I was discussing this with a few product managers and their VP. They asked me what I thought, and I said it all depends on the goals and strategies that are top priority. If your main goal is...

Posted by Derick Workman on January 18, 2008 8:20 AM | 1 Comment

How do your actions effect others?

Companies have all different levels of maturity in product management, and in other groups. There are many ways of categorizing the groups; firefighting, reactive, passive, anticipating, innovating, forecasting, etc. I came across some common sense insight the other day while...

Posted by Byron Workman on January 11, 2008 10:20 AM

Is Idea Gathering Innovation?

I've been talking to a lot of people lately about Innovation and Ideation. Most of the time they were only referring to the process of gathering ideas. While this is one of the vital pieces to innovation, it's not all...

Posted by Derick Workman on January 3, 2008 10:44 AM

How can I excute on my product strategy?

I'm sure many of us have sat through 2-3 day strategy planning sessions where corporate tells us what their strategy is moving forward. We then go back and create our own product strategies to try to achieve the corporate goals....

Posted by Derick Workman on December 19, 2007 10:02 AM

Can there be too many ideas?

I was recently reading an article from the Harvard Business Review (www.hbrreprints.org) called "The Innovation Value Chain". I found it very interesting that when discussing problems with ideation most people think we need new ways to get ideas. I always...

Posted by Derick Workman on December 18, 2007 9:34 AM | 2 Comments

A few random thoughts and a PRD

First of all... we have 96 archived webinars. That is massive library of resources for Product Management. Check it out.

Posted by Stewart Rogers on November 12, 2007 1:15 PM

Futureproofing 101

Do you employ a fortune teller to help you gauge future product requests? If not, you're probably the closest thing to it. We've all experienced the pain of dealing with something that seems like a trivial product-wide requirement having a...

Posted by Bob Schmonsees on September 26, 2007 11:28 AM

Can your sales force pass the three minute challenge?

by new Blogger, Bob Schmonsees.

Management says it wants your company's sales force to sell solutions, and it's looking at you to create the messaging and the sales tools that will help sales people make this transformation. So now what?

Posted by Bob Holt on June 11, 2007 10:41 AM

Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey

For those of you not reading the Pragmatic Marketing blog, or their magazine or their newsletter... here is a link to their annual survey. Help them collect role, responsibility and salary information for your community of product management professionals.

Posted by Stewart Rogers on October 24, 2006 8:36 AM

Your Product Framework

I really like Adam's post, The Party of Four. His premise is that there are 4 building blocks you need for your product.

Posted by Stewart Rogers on September 22, 2006 10:25 AM

Past Webinar - Making Your Webinars More Effective with Ken Molay

Ken Molay, President, Webinar Success, takes you through specific steps necessary to create, present, and benefit from online web seminars. You will learn the six-step webinar lifecycle, with detailed tasks to accomplish in each stage. Learn what questions you need to ask

Posted by Robin Lowry on September 6, 2006 12:00 PM

Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann

Some of you may remember the past webinar by Luke (click here for the archive). Luke is the founder of Enthiosys and the author of "Journey of the Software Professional: A Sociology of Software Development", "Beyond Software Architecture: Creating...

Posted by Stewart Rogers on August 31, 2006 10:02 AM

Past Webinar - Product Management in the Context of the Corporate Life Cycle with Kev Coleman

Kev Coleman, VP Product Management, Experion Systems, Inc. - Discussions of product management are often abstracted from the developmental stage of the business in which product management activity takes place. The success criteria for product management...

Posted by Robin Lowry on August 30, 2006 12:00 PM | 1 Comment

Past Webinar - Five Marketing Mistakes Every Manager Makes (and How to Avoid Them) with Kevin Epstein

Kevin Epstein, VP Marketing, Scalent Systems and Author of Marketing Made Easy - Every marketer makes mistakes. As a manager with a limited budget and resources, and only a few chances to make your product a success, the goal is simply to avoid making too many.

Posted by Robin Lowry on August 23, 2006 12:00 PM

Too Complex - A True Demo Disaster Story

Thanks again to Peter E. Cohan from The Second Derivative (and a past speaker in our webinar series) for this excellent article. In this article, he tells the true story of how a demo directly resulted in the loss of $245,000 from an order. It's also a stunning example of why not to show all those neat, cool features ...

Posted by Robin Lowry on June 19, 2006 10:17 AM

Death by Corporate Overview - Presenting the Corporate Overview in Demo Meetings

Peter E. Cohan, Principal of The Second Derivative (and a past speaker in our Webinar series), generously offered this posting to The Product Management View - thanks Peter!
In this article, he gives us some excellent advice to the question "How much of our company's corporate overview presentation should we include in a demo meeting?" Spot-on observations and excellent insights on what we all must remember to focus on when we're in front of a potential customer. Definitely worth a read.

Posted by Peter Ganza on June 12, 2006 2:29 PM

Past Webinar - Surprisingly Compelling Software Demos with Peter Cohan

Peter Cohan, principal of The Second Derivative - "Do The Last Thing First" - the recipe for a Great Demo! Here's how to put the "Wow!" into your demos and make them effective, crisp, and compelling - engage audiences in the first six minutes of a demonstration.

Posted by Robin Lowry on May 31, 2006 12:00 PM

Release Notes

We had a question from the community and I thought I would post it to the rest of you.

What is the most effective format for release notes?

Any help with Release Note best practices?

Posted by Stewart Rogers on May 26, 2006 3:17 PM | 3 Comments

The Three Cs of Successful Positioning by Lawson Abinanti

Here is the first of 5 entries from Lawson Abinanti... Enjoy! Effective positioning of B2B software products is written in the key of C. Actually, three C's. Because positioning requires a thorough understanding of your Customers, your Competition and your...

Posted by Stewart Rogers on May 12, 2006 11:47 AM

Interesting Product Management Related Articles

I complain that I don't read enough books but I can barely keep up with my Blog reading. If it wasn't for an airplane ride every few weeks, I'd never get through any of them. Now that I have spent a good while reading them, I will offer a few of my favourite posts from the last couple weeks.

Posted by Stewart Rogers on April 14, 2006 4:32 PM | 2 Comments

Past Webinar - Gaining Competitive Advantage through Better User Experience with Bernhard Kappe

Bernhard Kappe, CEO, Pathfinder Associates
In the race to add features more quickly than their competitors, many vendors are leaving their customers behind. From a customer perspective, applications are getting

Posted by Peter Ganza on April 12, 2006 12:00 PM

The C.E.Ohhhhhhhh

It amazes me that in this day and age of communication and technology that we, as PM's, are still stuck in our own world, far far away from executives and the C.E.O. The title of this entry speaks to the...

Posted by Peter Ganza on April 12, 2006 10:42 AM | 2 Comments

Another "Fun" Post

As an extension to Adam's post "Specification Packages", Harry Nieboer discusses here the structure of a product positioning statement that can be found in the Vision document.

Technorati Tags: product management, product marketing

Posted by Stewart Rogers on March 31, 2006 8:19 AM

The Easiest Job in The World

A friend of mine said to me the other day that the easiest job in the world must be product manager for a company that makes razors.

Posted by Bob Holt on March 30, 2006 8:00 AM

How to Eat an Elephant

Recently my five-year-old daughter came to me distressed by the Herculean task that stood before her - a page of pre-school arithmetic. When I saw how daunted she was by the job at hand I remembered something my dad told me when I was small - there is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time...

Posted by Bob Holt on March 23, 2006 9:07 AM

Becoming market driven.. a trend

Interesting post on the InformationWeek Industries blog written by Marianne Kolbasuk McGee. IBM conducted a survey with 765 CEOs and business leaders of small, midsized, and large companies. [link]

The output of this survey indicates that innovation is the driving force behind the CEOs expected growth. Given that product management is typically challenged with product innovation, your challenge will be to figure out where this will come from. The study found that 76% of CEOs ranked business partner and customer collaboration as top sources for new ideas. Internal R&D, which ranked eighth as a source for new ideas, was cited by only 14% of CEOs.

Who can argue with that?
Enjoy!

Posted by Stewart Rogers on March 3, 2006 11:51 AM

What is a requirement?

There is an interesting discussion going on here. Roger provides the IEEE definitions of what a requirement is and also provides a related link to a fairly spirited debate on a related topic. Interesting question isn't it - what is...

Posted by Stewart Rogers on March 1, 2006 11:29 AM

To Product Manage or Product Market, That is the Question

Dennis Glavin is an experienced product manager having held leadership positions at Stamps.com, Motorola, and Jobster. He goes beyond job descriptions created by Human Resources, and examines the core differences between Product Management and Product Marketing Management. In his article, he summarizes the results of his discussions with others in the industry, and shares his (and their) insights on the matter.

Posted by Peter Ganza on March 1, 2006 11:00 AM | 3 Comments

Beta Program Best Practices

Brian Lawley, President of the 280 Group and the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, discusses how beta programs are critical to the success of a product - yet because of a lack of resources or focus, these beta programs are not well-planned or worse, are executed at the last minute. He directs readers to a new whitepaper, as well as the Beta Program Toolkit to help product managers learn best practices and run more effective beta programs. Invaluable information for product managers.

Posted by Peter Ganza on March 1, 2006 9:30 AM

Use Cases vs User Scenarios

Finally, documented clarity around the difference between use cases and user scenarios. Let me summarize the difference. A use case is a step-by-step account of system behaviour associated with one or more actors. A user scenario is concrete description of...

Posted by Stewart Rogers on February 20, 2006 5:38 PM | 11 Comments

The Wisdom of Crowds in Product Management

Dennis Glavin is an experienced product manager having held leadership positions at Stamps.com, Motorola, and Jobster. He has done us all a wonderful favor of summarizing "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. He illustrates two perspectives of how it works and how it could fail and offers 10 tips to lead us towards a successful execution of decision markets. Enjoy!

Posted by Stewart Rogers on February 17, 2006 5:19 PM

Capturing the Voice of the Customer

Capturing the voice of your customer is one of the most important things you can do for product evolution. Using this research is essential and ensures you will define a product and service roadmap for a successful market presence.

Posted by Stewart Rogers on February 14, 2006 4:34 PM

To Prag or not to Prag

Is the product direction not driven by what sales tells me they can sell? Apparently not! Taking the Pragmatic Marketing course shortly thereafter was an eye-opening experience, and one which I wanted to test.

Posted by Peter Ganza on February 13, 2006 4:37 PM

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