March, 2018

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Developing Your Team Purpose

Lead on Purpose

Guest post by John Izzo, PhD and Jeff Vanderwielen PhD Today’s product managers wear many hats and are required to be motivators, counsellors, mentors, and enforcers.

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Featured Product Management Consultant: Leslie Bixel

280 Group

Every few months or so, we will bring you a new interview with a featured 280 Group Consultant who discusses a number of Product Management issues. Our second featured interview in this series is with Leslie Bixel, a seasoned PM veteran who talks about how she broke into Product Management and her advice for individual Product Managers and organizations Be a great communicator.

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Trending Sources

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3 Simple Steps To Make Your Customer Stories 10x Better

The Secret PM Handbook

How To Accelerate Sales With Great Storytelling. In my articles about go to market , I always mention the importance of “customer stories.” These stories are a critical component of the knowledge that product management can provide to sales and marketing and sales engineers to help ensure sales success. But, if you’re like me, maybe you aren’t so comfortable with “storytelling.

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Putting $125M to work for you, our customers

Intercom, Inc.

We just raised $125M in a round led by Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins. Here’s what we’re going to do with it. 2018 is shaping up to be a massive year for the Intercom platform. Historically, we’ve spent proportionately way more on research and development than other software companies we track, and that won’t stop any time soon. This funding will go straight into building great new software at a pace you’ve yet to see from us.

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The Path to Product Excellence: Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Enhancing Communication

Speaker: David Bard, Principal at VP Product Coaching

In the fast-paced world of digital innovation, success is often accompanied by a multitude of challenges - like the pitfalls lurking at every turn, threatening to derail the most promising projects. But fret not, this webinar is your key to effective product development! Join us for an enlightening session to empower you to lead your team to greater heights.

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Be a Balanced Product Leader, Not a Feature Broker or Product Dictator

Roman Pichler

Feature Broker and Product Dictator. How do you best lead the stakeholders and development team as the person in charge of the product? One way to answer this question is to avoid unhelpful but common leadership styles. Two of these styles, feature broker and product dictator, are shown in the picture below. A feature broker is a product person who relies on others—the stakeholders, development team, management, users, or a customer—to come up with ideas and make product decisions.

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Are you a leader or a manager?

Lead on Purpose

Business owners and entrepreneurs are often asked this leader vs. manager question regarding their management style. For many, these two words are synonymous; both are important for motivating people to work towards a common goal.

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Technology Transformation – Adobe Lightroom

The Product Bistro

Introduction. One of the most challenging tasks in product management is a major architecture shift of a product. Primarily a software related issue (although there are architecture transitions in hardware that are thorny too), the point when an old architecture is holding you back, and market forces are driving the discussion in your market space, a clean rewrite is what is required.

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3 Simple Steps To Make Your Customer Stories 10x Better

The Secret PM Handbook

How To Accelerate Sales With Great Storytelling. In my articles about go to market , I always mention the importance of “customer stories.” These stories are a critical component of the knowledge that product management can provide to sales and marketing and sales engineers to help ensure sales success. But, if you’re like me, maybe you aren’t so comfortable with “storytelling.

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Start your marketing with why: Getting your story right

Intercom, Inc.

No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market. Companies like Amazon understand this well and are rightly famous for their “work backwards” philosophy. You start by writing the press release, to articulate how the world will see your product, and then work backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to achieve your goals

Marketing 223
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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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How Warby Parker Makes Every Point In Its Employee Lifecycle Extraordinary

First Round Review

Warby Parker is known for being a wonderful place to work. Here, Co-founder Dave Gilboa breaks down exactly how they've constructed this culture.

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Breaking into PM

bpma ProductHub

Wondering how to “crack the code” for a career in Product Management? Whether you’re a newbie in the job market or transitioning from a different role, here are some tips from seasoned Product Managers.

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How motivated leaders leave a legacy

Lead on Purpose

The most successful companies have motivated leaders that inspire motivation at all levels of the organization. They are motivated for a real purpose, not just for money or other short-term rewards.

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Women in Product Management: Tiffany Trent-Abram, VP Global Product Management at Transaction Network Services

280 Group

For our next installment of the Women in Product Management Series I interviewed Tiffany Trent-Abram, VP Global Product Management at Transaction Network Services. To read the entire series on Women in Product Management make sure to sign up for our newsletter. How does a summer internship with the State Treasurer’s Office take this Oklahoma Sooner on a career path into the payment processing industry?

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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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Stop Building for the Sake of Building

UserVoice

More is better, right? The more stuff your product can do, the more markets and personas you’re satisfying. The more capabilities you have, the fewer reasons for a prospect to say no. The more functionality, the longer people will spend using it. The more things it can do, the more people will pay for it. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves… That might hold true for a Swiss Army.

Marketing 127
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How to run a successful beta in 7 steps

Intercom, Inc.

Prior to joining Intercom as a Product Manager, I had never run a structured beta. When it came to finally running my first one, I was surprised to find very little information online that could help me. I’ve run a lot of successful betas now but I learned my craft through tribal Intercom knowledge, built up by other Product Managers over the years.

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Building Awesome Product Teams by Martin Eriksson

Mind the Product

Summary: Build better product teams by hiring smart, diverse groups of people, getting out of the way, and focusing your teams on outcomes rather than outputs. It’s not About Products, it’s About People. A lot of people think that product managers need to be experts in technology, user experience and business strategy. However, normally product managers have arrived in their role through just one of these areas of work – and are picking up the others as they go along.

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Is MVP Dead?

bpma ProductHub

Is Minimum Viable Product Dead? – By Don Stoddard . Minimum Viable Product is a widely accepted concept; so why do so many people want to declare it dead? There are numerous articles now about MVP and why it no longer works. Much of the discussion centers around the misuse and confusion of the words “minimum” and “viable.” In many ways, MVP suffers from its own popularity associated with both good and bad products.

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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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The Most Basic Rule of Marketing Is So Easy to Forget

Product Management University

The most basic rule of marketing is so easy to forget. You’ve just purchased some new clothes or shoes online. As part of the transaction, you hand over your email address or mobile number knowing full well that three things are going to happen. You’ll get a receipt via email/text. Good! You’ll get shipping notifications and tracking information via email/text.

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Product Management Conferences: The Complete List (2018 Update)

Tim Herbig

Product Management Conferences are a valuable opportunity to get inspiration for your daily work through new input and build a robust network. Both are incredibly important to make progress in your career as a product manager. To help you cut through the noise of all the conferences out there, I put together this comprehensive overview of the most relevant conferences out there.… Continue Reading.

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Why Product Managers Should Learn to Love Deadlines

UserVoice

Introduction. Product managers and deadlines have a complicated relationship for a wide variety of reasons. We often hate them because of the constraints that they put on us, the pressure that they exert on our development teams, and the oversight (sometimes verging on micromanagement) that comes along with them. Yet we accept them as a necessary evil, an imposition of the real world on our blue sky thinking and planning that would change the world if only reality would back off for a few mome

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Understanding direct and indirect competition

Intercom, Inc.

Sometimes your customers really want to use your feature or product, but they also want something else that simply isn’t compatible with it. People really want to be slim and healthy, but they also really want soft drinks and fast food. McDonalds and Weight Watchers are selling wildly different products, but they’re competing for the same customers.

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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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Four Questions That Will Lead to Better Prioritization

Mind the Product

Making sure that you and your team are working on the most important thing at any point in time is part of the fun and headache of being a product manager or a product leader. Many times looking at the backlog list or strategic priorities will just cause your eyes to glaze over as you consider the actual time and effort that those lists represent. Rik Higham had it right when he said that prioritization is more about guesstimates than being a precision art.

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Know the World Your Product Lives in

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: Peyvand Mohseni (Mentee, Session 5, The Product Mentor) [Paired with Mentor, Jordan Bergtraum]. You have a product; you are passionate about it, you believe in it, you want it to succeed and you want your users to benefit from its awesomeness. You better know the world in which your product lives, what it can do today, what it will need to do tomorrow, how much it is in demand and what other products do very similar things.

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Marketing Basics, A Product Lifestyle Change and the Definition of Market-Driven

Product Management University

The B2B Product Manager Magazine March 2018 is now available. We headline our March issue by going back to one of those marketing basics that’s all too easy to forget. We also draw the analogy between a lifestyle change and the shift from a product success culture to a customer success culture. Enjoy our March issue. In This Issue: Blog: High-Octane Product Management.

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10 Reasons Your Product is Hurting Your Sales Team

The Product Coalition

Is your B2B product easy to sell and easy to renew? My relationship with sales is one that has been the source of greatest strength and greatest friction in my career. More than once I’ve reminded myself that sales people deserve empathy too. I realize not every product person has to navigate sales stakeholders. But if you’re working on a B2B product with a sales force, odds are you know what I mean.

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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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Why Product Managers Should Learn to Love Deadlines

UserVoice

Introduction. Product managers and deadlines have a complicated relationship for a wide variety of reasons. We often hate them because of the constraints that they put on us, the pressure that they exert on our development teams, and the oversight (sometimes verging on micromanagement) that comes along with them. Yet we accept them as a necessary evil, an imposition of the real world on our blue sky thinking.

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Stripe’s Will Larson on engineering and infrastructure management

Intercom, Inc.

As a startup scales, the importance of infrastructure engineers simply can’t be overstated. They’re the ones making sure your app is secure, that uptime looks good, and that the rest of your engineering org has the right tools to build features your users need and want. Will Larson has managed infrastructure teams for some of the biggest names in software.

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Manage Conflict by Building Your Product EQ

Mind the Product

I introduced a concept called Product EQ when speaking about managing conflict at work at a recent ProductTank London. It’s a term that focuses on the emotional intelligence / emotional quotient competencies that were introduced by Daniel Goleman and remain essential to our craft such as influencing, teamwork & collaboration, leadership, organizational awareness, and empathy.