Archives for the 'Development' Category
The Failures and Successes of Open Source Product Management
The Product Management problem isn’t just in Open Source, but recent events have opened opportunities for developers and PM’s to think about working more closely.
Why Product Management is Open Source’s Fatal Flaw
Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is great - I have released code under the GPL, LGPL, and similar licenses. There are mountains of FOSS available right now for download from sites like SourceForge and others that save businesses millions of dollars. More importantly, open source software offers feature sets and mixes that often [...]
Development: Leave Us the $Foo Alone!
Jeff Lash has a good post up about Delegating. There are some interactions you need to have - like regular tradeoff meetings with Development. As a general rule, programmers hate meetings. A lot of that has to do with the fact that prior to you, they had some “Marketing” airbag pull them [...]
To Startup or Not to Startup
A few months ago, John Milburn of Pragmatic Marketing approached me about writing an article for their magazine about my experiences building a product management organization in a startup. After a lot of collaboration and some good debate, we have an article in this issue of The Pragmatic Marketer entitled “To Startup or Not [...]
Core Teams and Tradeoffs
We all live in a World with tradeoffs. When you write a requirements document, is every requirement non-negotiable in order to ship the product? If so, you’ve traded off completeness for time or resources. If you’re like me, time is your biggest enemy, so even if the requirements outline the ideal solution [...]
Ankle Biters: Project Management
This is the first post in a new series I’m entitling Ankle Biters. Ankle Biters are the little tactical things that you need to do to keep the lights on, but aren’t strategic to Product Management and consume resources from the most important job, being the Vox Mercati. I’ll use this series to talk about [...]
Problems of Estimation
If you are PM at a startup you will often find yourself being the “go to” person for all G2M activities up to and including coordinating from requirements through First Customer Ship (FCS). Even though the Product Manager isn’t/shouldn’t become a Project Manager, you will often find yourself “owning” the date. Lots of [...]
Greasing the Wheels
You are a Product Manager, and you are in complete control. You write out requirements, and development builds the product. 100% of what development does is the result of your unique insights into the market. Only…it’s not working out that way is it?
Every company has limited development resources. In order to efficiently utilize those resources, [...]
Unintended Consequences
When developing requirements for a new product or service, it is common to create personas that define the user and buyer of your products. A “Joe” persona might define a 30-year old IT contractor who floats between multiple job locations and communicates heavily using SMS texting and needs mobile web access. The Apple iPhone might [...]
The Challenges of Overseas Manufacturing, Part III of III
This is the 3rd of a three part cross-post between Product Beautiful and Product Global about the challenges of using overseas manufacturing and design. To catch up, read Part I and Part II.
In our first two discussions about using overseas manufacturing and design resource, Aston Udall of Product Global and I talked about the [...]
