The Accidental Product Manager

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Schick product managers have a plan to win more customers Image Credit: Tom Fassbender So just exactly how much time do you spend each day thinking about shaving? If you are like the majority of people, probably very little. What’s even worse, from a shaving product manager’s point-of-view is that we probably spend even less time thinking about the equipment that we use to shave with.

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The Accidental Product Manager

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

The future is coming, will car product managers be ready? Image Credit: American Tobacco Campus If you are a product manager for a car, then you have a pretty well-defined life. Every couple of years, you work with your team to create an updated version of your product, work to get it manufactured, do the marketing, and then go do battle with all of the other car product manager.

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The Accidental Product Manager

NOVEMBER 20, 2023

There was a race to win the battle to dominate the at home test market Image Credit: CT Senate Republicans I think that we all realize that the Covid-19 pandemic affected just about everyone. Even after the vaccine was available, people could still get sick. The one thing that everyone wanted was a way to determine if they had Covid-19. Sure, they could go to the doctor and get tested, but what they really wanted to be able to do was to test themselves at home.

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The Accidental Product Manager

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

The NFT market is just at its beginning Image Credit: pinguino k Frankly, it would be fairly hard to not have heard about NFTs by now. Even if you are not 100% sure just exactly what an NFT is, you have probably heard about someone paying US$69M for an NFT called “The First 5,000 Days” Clearly there must be a market for these things and if there is a market, that means that product managers have to get involved.

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 30, 2023

The Metaverse has arrived, are you ready for it? Image Credit: Juska Wendland Ok, so I think that we all have to agree: the metaverse has arrived. For anyone who didn’t realize that Facebook has renamed themselves to “Meta”, the metaverse is going to be a big deal. If you enjoyed the book / movie “Ready Player One” you know what I’m talking about.

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 23, 2023

It’s time to try some new strategies at Peloton Image Credit: Tony Webster The Peloton product managers have had it pretty good for the last few years. When Peloton first showed up on the market, their brand of expensive at home exercise bikes really took off. People liked to be able to exercise at home while pretending to exercise with other people via video links to live classes.

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Delivering products to customers in cars is becoming more popular Image Credit: Michael Steeber As product managers our job is to create products that our potential customers will want. We don’t often spend a lot of time thinking about how we are going to deliver our products to our customers. However, perhaps we should. If it turned out that how we get our products to our customers had an impact on how much of our product we were able to sell, then all of sudden we’d get very interested i

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 2, 2023

Product managers adopt a lo-fi approach to advertising their products Image Credit: nefasth When we think about how we want to present our products to our potential customers, I think that we can all agree that we’d like to make the product look as attractive as possible. No matter if we are using words, pictures, or even video, our goal is to make the product look like something that our customers would desire to get their hands on.

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The Accidental Product Manager

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

Getting customers is hard, keeping them is even harder Image Credit: Stock Catalog There’s no question that streaming services are very hot right now. No matter if you are talking about Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, or any one of a number of other services, people seem to be signing up for these new services in droves. Sure would be good to be a product manager for one of them.

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The Accidental Product Manager

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

NASCAR product managers try to attract a new fan base Image Credit: roger blake So when I say “NASCAR” to you, what do you think of? Probably a bunch of good ‘ol boys flying confederate flags, drinking beer, and whooping as stock cars go whizzing by. In the past, this image would have been fairly accurate. However, times are changing.

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The Accidental Product Manager

AUGUST 28, 2023

Sometimes good ideas just don’t make it to market Image Credit: Vaping360 As product managers, the one thing that we’d all like to do is to be in charge of a very popular product. However, something that we often don’t consider is that if a product is popular, it’s going to get a lot of scrutiny. This scrutiny can make the life a product manager much more difficult if not downright impossible.

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The Accidental Product Manager

AUGUST 21, 2023

A treatment for Alzheimer’s was botched Image Credit: Diverse Stock Photos The one thing that every product manager would love to have would be a product that everyone needed. We could count on eventually selling it to everyone. Over at Biogen, their product managers thought that they just might have such a product. The life sciences company had developed what they thought might be a cure for the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease.

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The Accidental Product Manager

AUGUST 7, 2023

Virtual concerts have paved the way to know more about an artist’s fans Image Credit: jane1000 So I think that we can all agree on one thing: the pandemic changed just about everything. In the world of music performances the change was sudden and dramatic: all concerts were cancelled. Clearly, for the product managers who promote musicians this was a major setback.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JULY 31, 2023

Fast delivery is causing problems for product managers Image Credit: Hamilton Greene Selling products online has become a part of just about every business’s operation. This has opened up new markets for product managers to go after. However, it turns out that selling online comes with a number of rules that product managers may not realize when they first start selling online.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JULY 24, 2023

Change is coming and will grocery store product managers be ready? Image Credit: 1Flatworld So let’s face it, when the pandemic struck and everyone got locked into their homes, there simply was not a lot to do. What everyone ended up doing was watching a lot of Netflix and eating. Cooking at home which had been dropping off for the past few years experienced a resurgence as people sought ways to both fill their time and their bellies.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JUNE 26, 2023

The A380 plane was a bad idea that saw the light of day Image Credit: Photo by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash If you were looking for an exciting product manager job, then being a product manager at the European aircraft company Airbus would probably be a safe bet. Airbus is always locked in battle with the U.S. firm Boeing and both companies sell hundreds of their large airplanes to airlines around the world.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JUNE 19, 2023

A battle is brewing for your car’s dashboard screen Image Credit: may bird If you think about it, all of the screens in your life have already been claimed by someone. Your PC screen is owned by either Microsoft or Apple. Your phone screen is owned by either Google or Apple. The list goes on. Right now there is really only one screen that is still up for grabs.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JUNE 12, 2023

What needs to be done to get cruise customers to return? Image Credit: Mish Mish It’s not cheap to take a cruise. That’s why being a cruise line product manager can be a very good job. However, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic literally shut down the cruise industry – the boats didn’t leave port for over a year. Now that they have once again been granted permission to sail, how are their product managers going to go about finding ways to get their customers to come back and trave

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The Accidental Product Manager

MAY 22, 2023

Is making a product suggestion a good thing? Image Credit: Hash Milhan As any of us who have gone shopping online know, online retail sites often make product suggestions based on our browsing history. New research is suggesting that this may be a mistake. The reason is that it turns out that consumers dislike being observed while they are deliberating.

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The Accidental Product Manager

MAY 15, 2023

Can algorithms be too helpful? Image Credit: Being a product manager is a full-time job. There are a lot a parts to this job that we wish we could have someone help us with. The good news is that we are living in the 21st Century and that means that we can harness the power of algorithms to automate parts of our job. However, it can be all too easy for us to hand a job off to an algorithm and then walk away from it.

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The Accidental Product Manager

MAY 8, 2023

With deliveries, sometimes later is better Image Credit: Javi The good news is that your customer has ordered your product. The bad news is that they don’t have it yet. It’s going to take some time for you to get it from where you store it to their location. This means that your customer is going to have to put up with a delivery delay. As a product manager, how should you go about dealing with this delay?

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The Accidental Product Manager

APRIL 24, 2023

Las Vegas product managers had a problem when the pandemic hit Image Credit: Mathieu Lebreton Generally speaking, being a product manager who is in charge of getting people to go out to Las Vegas and spend their money is not all that hard of a job. Then the pandemic hit. The Las Vegas product managers all of sudden had a real problem on their hands – the product that they were selling was no longer something that people wanted.

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The Accidental Product Manager

APRIL 10, 2023

Roku product managers are creating an ad-supported streaming strategy Image Credit: Mike Mozart The product managers at the streaming hardware provider Roku had a bit of a problem on their hands. They were looking for ways to boost their revenue and they needed some new ideas. I’m not sure if you would call them lucky, but that pandemic thing came along and all of sudden they had a lot more customers for their product.

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The Accidental Product Manager

MARCH 27, 2023

Is free shipping really a good idea? Image Credit: Mike Mozart As a product manager, our goal is to get more people to buy our products. This can be a challenging thing to make happen! If you happen to be selling your products online, both you and your customers are very aware that your advertised price is not what they’ll end up paying – they also have to pay shipping costs.

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The Accidental Product Manager

MARCH 13, 2023

Pay-TV product managers are losing customers Image Credit: Mike MacKenzie So here’s a question for you. When you go home at night and want to relax, what do you do? Most people plop down and click on the television. Now this is where things start to get interesting: who provides you with your television signal. Sure, you could pull four or five channels off the air using an antenna, but if you want the really good stuff you need to subscribe to a provider.

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The Accidental Product Manager

MARCH 6, 2023

The goal is to build a community of repeat customers Image Credit: Flazingo Photos Let’s face it: it’s pretty easy to set up shop online. All you really need is a website, a way to take orders, and the ability to ship purchased goods to your customers. The ease of doing this is one of the challenges that product managers are facing these days.

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The Accidental Product Manager

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Product managers start to equip their tires with AI Image Credit: Yamanaka Tamaki When was the last time that you thought about the tires that are on your car? I’m willing to bet that it probably hasn’t been since you had a problem with them. Either the “low pressure” bulb on your dashboard lit up or you had a flat tire. However, I think that we can all agree that no matter how plain or fancy your car is , the tires are a critical part of it.

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The Accidental Product Manager

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

Do online reviews of products really matter? Image Credit: Gayla Baer-Taylor In this digital age in which we are living, we create our product using our product development definition and then our customers can purchase our products and then go home and write a review of it. This review can be posted online. This means that what one of your customers says can be seen by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other potential customers.

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The Accidental Product Manager

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

The 0.99 trick works – most of the time Image Credit: Steve One of a product manager’s hardest tasks is to come up with a price for their product. Our goal here is to use our product development definition to pick a price that will maximize revenue for our company while at the same time not scaring away our customers. We’ll create a price and then we’ll watch and see what happens.

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The Accidental Product Manager

JANUARY 23, 2023

Burger product managers are battling for the same customers Image Credit: cyclonebill One of the biggest challenges that product managers face is when there is someone else offering a product that is very similar to ours. When we find ourselves in a situation like this, we need to get creative in how we go about attempting to attract customers to our product.

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The Accidental Product Manager

DECEMBER 19, 2022

Geico will start to use AI to speed up repairs Image Credit: Mike Mozart. As product managers one of the challenges that we face every day is finding ways that our company can run quicker, faster, and get more done. We need to always be taking a look at how we are delivering our products to our customers and find ways to make our internal operations run smoother.

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The Accidental Product Manager

DECEMBER 12, 2022

Product managers are taking a different approach to vaping Image Credit: Lindsay Fox. It’s currently a tough time to be a product manager for vaping products in the U.S. right now. Vaping products exploded on the scene a while back and have become very popular. However, there have been a number of serious health-related issues that have started to show up and all of sudden people are starting to view vaping as perhaps being a dangerous thing to do.

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The Accidental Product Manager

DECEMBER 5, 2022

A new machine is going to make it easier to make cocktails Image Credit: Thomas Hawk. If you enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning when you are at home, just exactly how do you go about making that cup of coffee? These days, if you are like most people, you probably pop one of those “K-cups” into your Keurig machine and then sit back and let the magic happen.

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The Accidental Product Manager

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Changes at Google will have an impact on product managers Image Credit: Mary Crandall. In order to be a successful product manager, we need to have data. In fact the more data that we can get our hands on, the better we are able to do our jobs. In the world of consumer products product managers have been having it pretty easy in the past few years. The powerful data collection abilities of Google have make large amounts of information about our customers available to us to purchase.

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The Accidental Product Manager

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

Robots are being seen as a solution to a throughput problem Image Credit: Jeremy Noble. Customers have become used to going online and placing orders for items that then magically show up at their door. Nowhere has this been more transforming than in the ordering of grocery items. Each consumer can pick out a wide range of different items that all have to be collected and placed into the correct order.

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Ace Hardware product managers want to move into the 21st Century Image Credit: Roadsidepictures. Let’s face it, being a product manager for a hardware store does not seem like it would really be a cutting edge job. Hardware stores have been around for a long time and we all know what they do: sell a lot of different things that we can use around the house.

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The Accidental Product Manager

OCTOBER 17, 2022

Product managers are starting to move away from using Amazon Image Credit: Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine. So if you were a product manager and you wanted to both advertise your product to your customers and make it easy for them to buy it from you, how would you go about doing that? If you are like most of us, you would probably use your product development definition to make sure that it got included in Amazon’s inventory.

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