Improving Product Management in 2016; Product Management Podcast

Improving Product Management in 2016: Strategy vs. Technique

For many people, the new year is a time to make personal or professional resolutions. Those who are athletically-minded often look to improve performance in a specific sport. In most sports there are two basic ways to improve — better technique or better strategy.

This metaphor carries over to product management — improving the performance of a product management team can come through improving their techniques (such as grooming a backlog) or through improving their strategic sensibilities (such as taking a strategic approach to business planning). Certainly improving technique will have an impact on product management performance, but often product management leaders focus on upskilling on technique and neglect the strategic elements. In my new SiriusDecisions blog post Improving Product Management in 2016: Strategy vs. Technique I talk about the key strategic behaviors for product managers, the importance of focusing on them, and how to quickly assess this as an area of focus for 2016.

We also have a related research brief you can download — Foundational Behaviors of Strategic Product Management — and this Wednesday, January 13, my colleague Lisa Singer and I will be covering these behaviors in more detail in our webcast on Strategic Product Management, including covering specific examples of what product managers should demonstrate within each behavior.

Interview on ReadyProductRadio

I was recently interviewed by Allan Neil on his new(ish) product management podcast ReadyProductRadio. We had a good discussion that touched on some trending topics like how product managers can work effectively in agile, product management and product marketing, and the relationship between product management and user experience.

You can download the MP3 for listening as well.

In the interview, I mention a handful of links and resources. Those are all compiled on the episode summary page, though I’ve included them below as well:

What’s Hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 6000+ others who follow me at @jefflash: