Archives for the 'Tactics' Category
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’ [...]
Managing a Liscensed Product
Jeff Lash asked me to answer a question on his new site Ask a Good Product Manager. The question was from someone who had the title of Product Manager but was really in a no-win situation as the go between at a company wedged between a client and the software application company. It’s an interesting [...]
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: Quarterbacking Tradeshows
We’ve talked about tradeshows on before during one of Pragmatic’s BlogFests. Tradeshows can be nasty ankle biters because of the amount of pre-work required. Depending on the size of your organization, where Product Management falls, and how technical your Marcomm and Product Marketing teams are, you’ll have varying levels of involvement with tradeshows. [...]
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, [...]
Just Demo It!
Pragmatic Marketing asked me to participate in their first BlogFest on the topic of demoing at trade shows, which Steve Johnson kicked off with his article Why Demo at Trade Shows?
What is a trade show? Breaking down the word, a trade show is the place where you show your trade. If you [...]
