Archives for the 'Executives' Category
Grab Your Partner!
Problem: You have a great idea but need people with the right skills to help grow it into a real company. The McCombs Entrepreneurial Society has a post about PartnerUp, a new site that provides a solution (hat tip: VentureBeat) . Think of as LinkedIn meets Monster for startups. If you have [...]
Do You Have Great Customers or Power Pissers?
Great Customers are the one’s who want to be your best friend. They are hyper consumers of your product, the ultimate power users, they’re on your forums helping novice users and advocating for you. They might have become this way because your product inspired so much passion in them that they are now [...]
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 [...]
Margin Analysis
Financial analysis is a key skill for any great Product Manager, yet it is one of the least discussed, taught, or blogged about. Maybe it’s because finances are not sexy or “the accounting team will handle it.” If you are CEO of your product, you had better have a handle on your products’ [...]
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: Machine Tools (was: Don’t be a Tool)
Machine tools are tools used to build other tools, like a drill press or grinder. As a Product Manager, our tools are the internal applications and tools we use to support our data gathering, requirements tracking, and project management needs.
If you’re lucky enough to have budget for a nice set of tools for common PM [...]
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 [...]
Vox Mercati
How do you know when you’ve arrived as a Product Manager? When you’re in a planning meeting with your Executive team and one of them makes a statement about the Market, or what product you should make next, or what they think your customer base needs - and you stare them straight back in [...]
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, [...]
