Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
Product Managers have always been agile! It’s true. Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you by using the Agile Manifesto itself. The Manifesto has 4 elements. They are: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.
Sachin Rekhi
FEBRUARY 26, 2009
I'm often asked about my Y Combinator experience so I thought I would take the time to blog about it. I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders. We built Anywhere.FM , a web music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the web, and eventually sold it to imeem. So what is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is a new kind of seed stage venture firm.
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All About Product Management
JUNE 30, 2009
I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows: 1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers?
SidsAvenue
DECEMBER 19, 2009
I have been always pinged and disturbed by this single question “Why is there suffering in the world?” In our country and probably every developing country it is not difficult to find small children in rags begging on the roadside; women in torn out clothes carrying their infant and begging for the sake of the infant; physically men, women and sadly even children begging.
Speaker: Anne Steiner and David Laribee
As a concept, Developer Experience (DX) has gained significant attention in the tech industry. It emphasizes engineers’ efficiency and satisfaction during the product development process. As product managers, we need to understand how a good DX can contribute not only to the well-being of our development teams but also to the broader objectives of product success and customer satisfaction.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 8, 2009
Watch Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams. Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides. Get Notified of Webinars.
Product Management Today brings together the best content for product management professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Pragmatic Marketing
NOVEMBER 8, 2009
I can't count how many times in my career I've had to write a market requirements document (MRD) for a product that had already gone to market. It's sad, actually. Because when I've found myself asking fundamental questions like. Who are we selling this product to? How are we going to sell this product? What is the competitive landscape we're selling into?
Pragmatic Marketing
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
What is the role of product management in an agile environment? Is the role of product owner something different? Developers often see product managers as technical resources. Agile seems to have made this orientation worse, with product managers getting pulled into deeper, tactical activities. But spending so much time with internal teams means less time spent in the market as a resource for strategy and business thinking at the product level.
Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
Eighteen months ago, I was part of the founding team at a cutting-edge technology start-up. During the first few weeks, as I lined up and conducted dozens of prospect, industry, and expert interviews, the founder hired a talented senior engineering team, and the company was formed. Agile. Mostly by design, but partly because it just worked. While I didn’t have the challenge of undoing existing processes, since none yet existed, I did still have a learning curve.
Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
Background. Barbara Nelson said in The Politics of Agile , “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.” Indeed, many Product Managers were taken by surprise at the speed of Agile’s adoption. And with the introduction of a new Product Owner role and its perceived overlap with the traditional Product Manager function, Product Managers have expressed some anxiety about the future of their role.
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.
Pragmatic Marketing
SEPTEMBER 13, 2009
There are ten easily identifiable signs that can help forecast a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a checklist of deliverables created at the end of product development.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 31, 2009
“The product shall.”. Market requirements typically define the problems your product will address using a formal, stilted language known to all technology people. For some reason, the verb shall be “shall”—not “should” or “will” or “must” or “it’d be neat if.” Maybe it goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments: You Shall Honor Thy Father and Mother; You Shall Not Murder; You Shall Not Steal.
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 31, 2009
Product management is an interesting career. We don’t code; we’re not necessarily engineers. And yet, we must communicate with and understand our development team. Our products are built under the guiding hand of technology experts. Imagine their work as a cloud—they take input from our companies, do something, and we get new product to sell. Product managers hover really close to that development cloud, and sometimes we feel like we’re actually in it!
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 13, 2009
Agile product managers (and their Agile development teams) are told to prioritize backlogs based on ROI. In practice, this isn't possible. Prioritizing for Profit is a better approach. By defining a core set of attributes that include stakeholder preferences, corporate strategy, and specific ways to increase profitability, product managers can create backlogs that support the company's longer-term goals as well as short-term development needs.
Speaker: Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product, Statsig
Experimentation is often seen as an aspirational practice, especially at smaller, fast-moving companies who are strapped for time and resources. So, how can you get your team making decisions in a more data-driven way while continuing to remain lean and maintaining ship velocity? In this webinar, Margaret-Ann Seger, Head of Product at Statsig, will teach you how to build an experimentation culture from the ground-up, graduating from just getting started with data-driven development to operating
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 13, 2009
Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just delivery of software. In the Agile world, a new title is emerging -- the Product Owner -- which covers just a small subset of the Product Management role. While this makes sense for internal IT groups that have traditionally gone without Product Management, Agile product companies (that need to deliver customer revenue with their offerings) need full-fledged Product Managers to drive strategic activities
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 12, 2009
Sometimes it seems that agile development is an end run around effective product planning and market analysis. It also can undermine product positioning and roadmapping. Yet the benefits of a more responsive and productive product development team are too significant to ignore. Learn how the Splunk product management team is automating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework to feed continuous market-driven priorities into an agile development process, and then leveraging this automation for continuou
Pragmatic Marketing
JULY 1, 2009
How would you like to ship something every week? Agile software development methods can produce dramatic productivity improvements but can also create havoc for Sales and Marketing teams. Frequent product releases can often surpass the ability of organizations to absorb the changes in a manageable way. This can result in new product capabilities that should be emphasized being lost in the chaos of getting the product to market.
Pragmatic Marketing
JUNE 30, 2009
Your developers have gone agile. They want a backlog and user stories. Executives want a roadmap with a longer view. How do you connect strategy with execution? What happens to the roadmap and requirements when you go agile? Attend this session to find out what product managers need to provide to their agile development teams. Watch Agile, Roadmaps, and Requirements: Are they mutually exclusive?
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Pragmatic Marketing
JANUARY 29, 2009
In May 2008, I authored an article that discussed the day-to-day challenges facing the Product Manager in the Agile world. In that article, I remarked that the debate surrounding the role of the Scrum Master and Product Owner was worthy of a paper all of their own. A colleague of mine called my bluff the other day by asking me “ What’s the issue with Scrum Masters and Product Owners?
Sachin Rekhi
DECEMBER 31, 2009
It has been exactly a year since I started this blog, as it was one of my new year's resolutions for 2009. So how did I do? Well, I'd say it went as well as a typical new year's resolution: highly motivated at the beginning with great progress in the first half of the year, then the consistency started to lapse, with eventual abandonment towards the last quarter of the year.
Sachin Rekhi
AUGUST 24, 2009
Despite my post last week on the Shortcomings of Google App Engine and my decision to move away from it as a viable platform for upcoming projects, I have been impressed with the overall architecture and design of their experimental Task Queue API. Google throughout its years has been a leader in interface design and that has been reflected not only in the UI of the products they have built, but the countless API interfaces they have published.
Sachin Rekhi
AUGUST 17, 2009
As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Google App Engine. I love the vision and truly believe its the first real platform-as-a-service as opposed to the other dominant cloud platform Amazon AWS. While AWS has significantly moved the industry forward with on-demand virtualized instances and cloud storage, it has not developed a fully scalable runtime environment comparable to Google App Engine.
Advertiser: Data Robot
The buzz around generative AI shows no sign of abating in the foreseeable future. Enterprise interest in the technology is high, and the market is expected to gain momentum as organizations move from prototypes to actual project deployments. Ultimately, the market will demand an extensive ecosystem, and tools will need to streamline data and model utilization and management across multiple environments.
Sachin Rekhi
JUNE 22, 2009
Several months ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture Clara Shih gave at the Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. Clara has spent the last several years at Salesforce leading their social networking product strategy as well as developed Faceconnector , the first business app on Facebook that made it easy to integrate Facebook profile data into Salesforce CRM tools.
Sachin Rekhi
MAY 13, 2009
In a departure from my usual focus on startups, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my most recent experience in jury duty. I was selected as one of twelve jurors for a murder trial against a defendant who was accused of beating up his girlfriend and throwing her out of her apartment window in San Francisco in 2005. After an intense 2 week trial and jury deliberation, we today found the defendant guilty.
Sachin Rekhi
APRIL 14, 2009
Andrew Chen asked me to write a guest post on his blog about some of my experiences monetizing music at imeem. I wanted to share it here as well. Introduction. In its search to find the most effective way to monetize user’s time spent listening to music, imeem has become one of the early innovators in the nascent online audio advertising space. From the process of designing, testing, and iterating on imeem’s unique audio ad product, I wanted to highlight 5 key lessons learned that are applicable
Sachin Rekhi
MARCH 30, 2009
As today marks my first day as an Entrepreneur -in- Residence at Trinity Ventures , I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how to formalize my process for starting a new venture. Every startup goes through phases including brainstorming ideas, selecting evaluation criteria, performing due diligence on top ideas, picking a winner, deciding on a corporate structure , putting together the team, evaluating funding options, and more.
Speaker: Robert Webber, Author and Innovation Leader
Agile was a grassroots engineering movement that caught most software leaders unprepared. The Agile community was confident that management would recognize the benefits of Agile and adopt its servant-leadership style. Unfortunately, management in larger organizations maintained the directing and controlling management style that had been reinforced throughout their careers, violating the Agile tenet of trusted, self-motivated Agile teams.
Sachin Rekhi
MARCH 24, 2009
Winners from the Mochis Award Show @ Flash Gaming Summit. On Sunday I had the opportunity to attend Flash Gaming Summit , the first annual conference dedicated to flash game development organized by my fiancee Ada Chen from Mochi Media. What's often most exciting for me about events like these is hearing different metrics tidbits from the speakers who are knee deep in the space.
Sachin Rekhi
MARCH 13, 2009
As more and more offer providers enter the incentivized CPA and direct payments space, there is a clear need for a way to easily test different offer providers and optimize between them. At imeem , I was responsible for evaluating, signing up, testing, and optimizing the various offer and direct payment providers that were leveraged as part of the imeem points virtual economy.
Sachin Rekhi
MARCH 9, 2009
While I am a big believer that entrepreneurs should spend the majority of their time focusing on getting a quality product to market, one piece of overhead that should never be overlooked is incorporating or forming an LLC prior to product launch. To some this is obvious. Of course you setup your corporate structure before anything else. But to hackers and hobby programmers this may not be their first instinct.
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