December, 2015

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Hi Fly: A Lean Airline Story

Melissa Perri

This past year I took six trips to London. Five of those round trip flights were on Norwegian Air. I HATE Norwegian Air. Without fail, every one of my Norwegian Air flights were delayed at least 2.5 hours. But on one trip back from London, I got a surprising test message. I had never heard of this HiFly airline before. I was incredibly skeptical but I needed to get home.

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2015 Year In Review – Hardcore Product Management

The Secret PM Handbook

Looking back over 2015 on this blog, I see quite a lot of meaty content! The topics have been hardcore product management-related. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing it. Summarizing (with links to the key posts), we went deep on: The business value of product management , and how valuable it can be for you to improve your effectiveness as a product manager.

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The Secret Ingredient To Getting Product Innovation Done: “Internalvangelists”

Street Smart Product Manager

So you’ve probably heard of “earlyvangelists” (No? Read this post by Steve Blank, who coined the term.) In Lean Startup circles, we hear a lot about finding these special breed of customers. Why? Because they’re the ones willing to make the initial bet on the startup, because they’ve bought into the startup’s vision and potential.

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Optimize For Passion/Skill/Opportunity Fit

Sachin Rekhi

I've noticed that those that ultimately find satisfaction from their careers end up optimized for passion/skill/opportunity fit. They've been lucky enough to find the intersection of work they are passionate about, work they are skilled at, and work that has ample market opportunity. For those early in their careers or who have not yet found such satisfaction, I wanted to share how optimizing for passion/skill/opportunity fit can help you to ultimately find your dream job.

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Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

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Product Management Technologies; Five Essentials for Strategic Product Management; Planning Assumptions for 2016

Good Product Manager

We’ve been busy at SiriusDecisions with a lot of new research and resources for b-to-b product management leaders and product managers: The ABCs of Product Management Technologies. In my first post for the new SiriusDecisions Marketplace, I cover The ABCs of Product Management Technologies. This is a great overview of the landscape of tools and applications available for product managers, where I cover the four main areas of product management technology we are following at SiriusDecisions

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20 Questions Every Product Manager Should Ask Their Users—Not Their Team

UserTesting

A lot of product managers fall into the trap of never getting out of the building. They’re so busy managing projects and meeting with designers and engineers that they don’t have time to talk to real users. That means they … The post 20 Questions Every Product Manager Should Ask Their Users—Not Their Team appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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Interview With Hubert Palan, CEO of ProductBoard – Podcast Season 2, Episode 2

The Secret PM Handbook

Here is the second episode of our new podcast season of All The Responsibility, None Of The Authority, crossposted from alltheresponsibility.com. I will be crossposting the new episodes from the new site to this feed as they are published (I’m a little behind now but will catch up!). Introducing Hubert Palan. Nils first met Hubert Palan in November 2014 at the Product Management Summit in San Francisco.

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Benefits (and Caveats) of a Simple Estimation Process

Folding Burritos

We’re all aware that we pretty much suck at estimating how long it will take to build a given piece of software. There are many reasons we fail at this. However, the core of the issue is simple. In general terms, if we want to know how much time some task will take, we need to be pretty sure about What to do, How to do it and to Have done it multiple times.

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The Hunt for Product/Market Fit

Sachin Rekhi

The hunt for finding product/market fit in an early-stage startup is an elusive one, often fraught with chaos, and certainly never easy. I've led the hunt for product/market fit in 3 startups that I co-founded and also had the opportunity to do so for 3 new products launched at established tech giants LinkedIn and Microsoft. Most recently, in advising 5 early-stage startups, I have been helping other founders through their respective hunts.

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7 Pitfalls for Apache Cassandra in Production

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed database that boasts an architecture that delivers high scalability, near 100% availability, and powerful read-and-write performance required for many data-heavy use cases. However, many developers and administrators who are new to this NoSQL database often encounter several challenges that can impact its performance.

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Product Management Technologies; Five Essentials for Strategic Product Management; Planning Assumptions for 2016

Good Product Manager

We’ve been busy at SiriusDecisions with a lot of new research and resources for b-to-b product management leaders and product managers: The ABCs of Product Management Technologies. In my first post for the new SiriusDecisions Marketplace, I cover The ABCs of Product Management Technologies. This is a great overview of the landscape of tools and applications available for product managers, where I cover the four main areas of product management technology we are following at SiriusDecisions

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Preparing Your Support Organization to Deliver Customer Outcomes

TSIA

Providing customer outcomes should be a top priority for today’s support organizations. It’s no longer enough to keep a technical asset up and running, but there is now the added expectation to help customers solve their business challenges and deliver measurable ROI. To meet changing customer demands, it is our responsibility as support services organizations to make sure our personnel fully understand their new role in today’s world and equip them with the tools and training

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The 15 Most-Loved UserTesting Articles from 2015

UserTesting

It’s been another great year here at the UserTesting blog, and we’ve been honored to have you join us! In celebration of everything we’ve learned together, we’d like to share our top content from 2015. If you haven’t had a … The post The 15 Most-Loved UserTesting Articles from 2015 appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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Interview With Hubert Palan, CEO of ProductBoard, Part 2 – Podcast Season 2, Episode 2

The Secret PM Handbook

This second part of our interview with Hubert Palan is the third episode of our new podcast season of All The Responsibility, None Of The Authority, crossposted from alltheresponsibility.com. I will be crossposting the new episodes from the new site to this feed as they are published (I’m a little behind now but will catch up!). This is part two of our interview with Hubert Palan, found and CEO of ProductBoard, and long time product management leader and executive.

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Platform Product Management Beyond Features: Introducing B-MAP for Platform Ecosystem Success

Traditional PM struggles with the complexities of platform ecosystems. B-MAP framework tackles this challenge. B-MAP goes beyond features, focusing on building, managing, adapting, and partnering to foster a thriving platform ecosystem.

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Product For Legacy Companies

svpg

NOTE: This article is from the foreword to the new 2nd Edition of The Art of Scalability by Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher. I’m reprinting it here because quite a few people have written me asking how to get their old-style company to start behaving more like a modern technology-powered business. Perhaps your company began as a brick-and-mortar retailer, or an airline, or a financial services company.

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The State of Customer Development

Sachin Rekhi

A decade ago Steve Blank authored the book The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win to share with the world his philosophy for building winning products: customer development. He espoused that the reason so many startups failed was they were too focused on product development without an equal focus on customer development.

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What are the keys to rapid prototyping in a corporate environment?

DISQO

Alpha’s own, Nis Frome, recently delivered a presentation to The Product Mentor group about the importance of mastering rapid prototyping for product managers within large organizations. He provided a framework for user research and examined a number of case studies. I’ve recapped the key takeaways below, although for the pro tips and extensive references, you can watch the full video and review his slides.

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5 Tips for Selecting a Professional Services Automation Platform

TSIA

Ten years ago when you asked a professional services (PS) executive what tool they used to manage PS resources, projects, and billables, the answer was almost always the same: spreadsheets. Professional services automation, or PSA, was just being introduced a decade ago, and while it took a few years for PS organizations to realize the benefits of automation, today questions about selecting PSA platforms have become my most frequent inquiry topic from TSIA members.

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Driving Business Impact for PMs

Speaker: Jon Harmer, Product Manager for Google Cloud

Move from feature factory to customer outcomes and drive impact in your business! This session will provide you with a comprehensive set of tools to help you develop impactful products by shifting from output-based thinking to outcome-based thinking. You will deepen your understanding of your customers and their needs as well as identifying and de-risking the different kinds of hypotheses built into your roadmap.

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Research Opportunities Throughout Your Product’s Development Cycle

UserTesting

When we hear about companies not conducting user research and ask them why, a common response is that they don’t have a live site or app to test yet. We love hearing this because we get the opportunity to show … The post Research Opportunities Throughout Your Product’s Development Cycle appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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The Secret Knowledge of Education Services

TSIA

At TSIA, we talk a great deal about data. We have frameworks , case studies, and lots of conversations with our members about how to leverage big data assets. During these conversations, I walk our members through a succession of questions, starting with their goals, current plans, and progressing through to their data assets and analytic capabilities.

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Technology Services: What Lies Ahead in 2016

TSIA

If there was any doubt that the technology industry is undergoing a major transformation, this year has produced even more compelling evidence that we are nearing the end of the first great era of tech. There are no tea leaves involved here; the story is playing out in the publicly reported financial data from traditional technology companies. Collectively, tech company revenues have declined steeply in 2015 , with tens of billions of dollars coming off the table quarter after quarter.

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Professional Services for XaaS: Is it Different?

TSIA

It’s commonly thought that professional services for X-as-a-Service (XaaS) is different from professional services (PS) inside of traditional companies. But just how true is that statement?

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Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.

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Industrial Equipment: Moving from Products to Services

TSIA

Manufacturers of industrial equipment, components, and instruments have, on average, a service revenue share of 30%, which has been stable over the last two years. This has been shown by the results of TSIA's Industrial 30 index, which analyzes the quarterly reports of 30 industrial manufacturers reporting their service revenues. We’ve found that the service revenue share was stable during five quarters of revenue growth, and it is still stable after two quarters of shrinking revenues

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Challenging Traditional Sales Roles

TSIA

The long-running, oft-worshipped, and rarely questioned organizational business structure of Sales and Post-Sales is sick and overdue for some tough medicine. For years, there have been ample talks and thousands of articles written about the dysfunction of Sales and Marketing, but an even bigger argument can be made that the graver threat to a company is what isn’t working between the two major organizations, Sales and Post-Sales, that (sadly) often meet only at that line in the contract w

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[SlideShare] Measuring the Health of XaaS Subscription Renewals

TSIA

When it comes to getting customers to renew their subscription with your XaaS offer , does your current renewal engagement model consist of managed handoffs between your internal teams, or is it total chaos? In the recent TSIA SRG Cloud Benchmark Study, we aimed to find out how top companies in the technology services industry are structuring their subscription renewal process, as well as get a detailed look at which metrics they’re using to track their success.

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7 Steps to Building a Managed Services Business

TSIA

At TSIA, we work with hundreds of tech companies of all sizes and market segments to help them stay on top of emerging industry trends. According to a 2014 poll of our members, over 70% of them have either launched or are developing a managed services business. However, as these tech leaders start to embrace managed services, they learn very quickly how daunting and different these business models are from hardware, software, and traditional services such as professional, support, and field serv

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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The Education Services Adoption Playbook

TSIA

One of the inquiries that TSIA is getting more and more frequently from its Education Services (ES) membership is, “How can education services help drive adoption?” To answer this question, let’s start with a definition of adoption. Adoption, in its simplest form, is getting a customer to use the product more, whether it’s a technology product, education product, or both.

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Focus on Retaining Great Employees

TSIA

Employee attrition is a key field service metric with growing importance. This is due to a number of factors, such as talent wars starting to heat up as field service engineers near retirement age , significant commitment to training, and positive hiring trends due to both growth and replacements.

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Welcome New Members! November Edition

TSIA

At TSIA, we are dedicated to helping services organizations both large and small grow and advance in the technology industry. We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome our newest members from November, as well as acknowledge companies already a part of the TSIA community who have recently expanded their membership to include additional service disciplines TSIA has to offer.