Sachin Rekhi

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority. Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product.

Product Management 110

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 110

Pragmatic Marketing

JUNE 3, 2013

Agile developers want user stories; product managers want to bring back stories from the market about users. What we really need, however, is to understand user goals. User stories are one of the most misunderstood and misapplied artifacts when implementing Agile development. At first glance, they look like requirements—and it can be very easy for a team to sit in a room and crank out a bunch of them when under the gun to generate work for the next sprint.

User Testing 70

User Testing Customer Experience Customer Feedback Weak Development Team 70

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

When I think of business acumen, the show Shark Tank comes to mind. If you are not familiar with it, I really recommend you check it out. The premise is that hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their company to a panel of 5 successful business people (a.k.a Sharks) in hopes of getting investment for their company. It’s very interesting to see the […] The post Are You a Business-Savvy Product Manager?

Product Management 62

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 62

Tyner Blain

JULY 17, 2013

There is a lot of advice out there for how to write requirements. There is not as much discussion about why to write requirements. Spend some time thinking about why you write requirements before you make decisions about how to write your requirements. Why Write Requirements? Whether you communicate requirements through conversation, user stories with acceptance criteria, or traditional structured requirements and use cases, or diagrams and commentary, you are sharing them as a means to an end &

Product Research 73

Product Research User Testing Customer Experience Feedback Software 73

Advertisement

The product management job market in 2024 reflects the fast-growing and ever-evolving nature of the field. For product managers looking to future-proof their careers and take advantage of new opportunities, staying informed about the professional landscape is a smart move. In this comprehensive career guide from Regis College, you’ll learn about: The current job outlook for product managers in 2024 Six professional pathways and the average salaries for these roles in the U.S.

Product Management

All About Product Management

MAY 28, 2013

As a Product Manager I’m responsible for ensuring that stakeholders express their requests in terms of business problems as opposed to a pet feature, so that their real needs are met and do not get lost sight of when backlog items are aggregated into common themes as the product team figure out the best solution. Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Product Managers tend to spend a lot of ti

Customer Experience 59

Customer Experience Product Management Product Manager Management 59

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

DECEMBER 8, 2013

This blog is in memory of Dave Fulton, a dear colleague and a fellow BPMA member who passed away two years ago from Leukemia. Dave was a product manager whose blog was called “Fulton Ventures” One of his last blogs discussed the two most important words in product management: Why? and No! Why? This is a key question product managers should ask.

Product Management 56

Product Management Product Manager Product Research Management 56

Product Beautiful

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

If you are a ProductCamp leader, or are thinking about starting a ProductCamp in your area, this post is for you. There is a problem with how ProductCamps are organized and run today: they are very tribal. Knowledge is passed on a one-to-one basis, or by physically traveling to another city to watch how that camp performs. This is inefficient and error-prone, and leads to a “multiplicity” problem where we are making a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy and missing out on the chance to share

Travel 45

Travel Product Management Product Manager Management 45

SidsAvenue

DECEMBER 27, 2013

Understanding Indian Demographics India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years. The number of first time voter in General elections 2014 stands at whopping 149.36 million. Majority of the first-time voters consists of youth considering that 50% of Indians population is below 25 years of age.

Advertising 40

Advertising Transportation Customer Experience Messaging 40

TSIA

DECEMBER 18, 2013

SAP Services offers consulting, education, custom development, and support services to customers worldwide. At Technology Services World (TSW) Service Transformations held in Las Vegas this past October, Anand Eswaran, head of SAP Global Services, led a powerful keynote discussion that outlined the success factors in today’s economy, the impact of evolving Millennials’ (“Gen Y”) buying behavior, and what game-changing technologies such as cloud, big data, and mobile mean

Data Visualization 40

Data Visualization Education Consulting Technology 40

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.

Customer Experience

Product Manager in Heels

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Occasionally, we have guest speakers at Babson College, and sometimes we get a really good guest speaker! Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Friend from Bain Capital Ventures. He was extremely sincere and provided very useful feedback about what matters most to investors, and how he evaluates the pitches he receives. When evaluating a company to invest in, Scott listed several things that he focuses on: TEAM TEAM TEAM TEAM (do you get the point?

Differentiation 40

Differentiation Customer Experience User Testing Customer Feedback 40

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 25, 2013

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product. Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members.

Data Visualization 86

Data Visualization Product Management Product Manager Reporting Tools 86

Bryce York

JANUARY 23, 2013

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the software of the web isn’t ready for the influx of parallax backgrounds that are flooding the web. What I’m referring to here is the scrolling backgrounds all over the web that move at different speeds to the ‘foreground’ in order to create the perception of 3D layering. Example.

Reference 40

Reference User Experience Customer Experience Marketing 40

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

OCTOBER 19, 2013

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the people-related challenges of integrating UX into an Agile team. Once you create a cohesive team, it’s now time to polish the process. Are you ready? It is true that process for the sake of process won’t do you any good. But, if you’ve already adopted Agile as your development methodology, […] The post How to build a UX and development team that really delivers (Part 2/2) first appeared on Daniel Elizalde.

UX 62

UX Development Agile Enterprise 62

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.

Product Management

Tyner Blain

JULY 9, 2013

There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” “You’re asking the wrong question. The right question is: is agile better?” How Agile Is NOT Cheaper. The fun thing about relative terms is that you have to do a comparison.

Agile 73

Agile Weak Development Team Feedback Software Customer Feedback 73

All About Product Management

MAY 22, 2013

I’ve spent the past year bringing a new product to market, as a consultant Head of Product for a start-up business unit that’s owned by a multi-national. I had the opportunity to pretty much start at the beginning: pulling together the vision, setting up a product council/steering group, talking to users about the initial concepts and shape the overall product direction.

Advertising 54

Advertising Presentation Vision Consulting 54

UserTesting

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

Today we’re proud to introduce a guest post from Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is a product strategist, Lean UX advocate, interaction designer, author , and all around good guy. Without further ado, let’s hand this post over to Jeff… Besides … The post 5 steps to kicking off your Lean UX team appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

UX 26

UX Blog 26

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

MARCH 27, 2013

Most of you are probably familiar with skills & expertise on LinkedIn. Among the many skills to choose from is product management. Being a product management professional, I have posted that on my profile and have been widely endorsed. But I was surprised to see that some of my colleagues who are recruiters, CFOs, VCs, sales people, etc. posted product management as one of their skills.

Product Management 40

Product Management Product Manager Finance Product Research 40

Advertisement

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.

Analytic Tools

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 31, 2013

I usually summarize the role of the product manager as the CEO of their product. But I had a great conversation with a fellow product manager a couple of weeks ago who was telling me what he loved most about being a product manager was being the quarterback of the team. That stuck with me and the more I thought about it I realized it was another great way to describe the role and the key attributes needed to be successful in it.

Product Management 85

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 85

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 17, 2013

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or. quite the opposite. When it works well, the team feels as if the best ideas, regardless of where they came from, get implemented.

Product Management 84

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 84

Sachin Rekhi

SEPTEMBER 15, 2013

One lesson entrepreneurs often learn the hard way is that even if they build a product that is better than the established players in the space, it doesn’t always result in them winning the market. I wanted to highlight the three most common reasons I see this occur and ways to mitigate these challenges. The Cost of Switching. It’s costly for users to switch from their existing solution to a new player’s product and I don’t mean just in terms of any dollars spent on actually switching.

Customer Experience 82

Customer Experience Strategy Product Strategy Marketing 82

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 18, 2013

In the ever evolving world of web and mobile products, it’s incredibly important to have a constant pulse on the sentiment, needs, and frustrations of your users. While traditional user research and usability studies are still an important part of the product development process, the web today affords real-time alternatives for getting daily insights into the minds of your users.

Customer Feedback 82

Customer Feedback User Testing Customer Experience Feedback Software 82

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.

Generative AI

Sachin Rekhi

SEPTEMBER 2, 2013

Most entrepreneurs assume that the marketing and audience building phase of their startup begins post product launch. Yet I’ve seen some startups successfully build their audience well before they reach this point. They’ve been able to do this by investing heavily in building out a blog with independent value separate from their product yet designed to attract the target audience that their product will eventually serve. 37signals , SEOmoz , and Mint.com are three such success stories. 37signals

Finance 80

Finance Product launches Blog Startups 80

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 3, 2013

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Product Research User Testing Framework 78

Sachin Rekhi

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

I’m often asked how I think about coming up with the product roadmap for an upcoming release. To help answer this, I thought I’d share how my team recently went about thinking through the roadmap for an upcoming product we’re working on. Analysis of existing usage metrics. When you’re innovating on top of an existing product, the best place to start is by conducting an in-depth analysis of the existing usage patterns of your product.

Roadmap 73

Roadmap Customer Feedback User Friction Feedback Software 73

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 12, 2013

It's customary in the design world to evaluate a designer's existing portfolio as part of the interview process to get a better understanding of their work and the process they leverage to develop their designs. I find it equally valuable to evaluate a product manager's existing portfolio of products as part of a product management interview. When evaluating a product manager's portfolio, I'm looking to assess how successfully the product manager has owned the vision, design, and execution of th

Product Management 73

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 73

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.

Agile

Sachin Rekhi

FEBRUARY 10, 2013

I thought I'd follow up my recent post on What is Product Management? with a summary of ten of the most informative and inspiring posts I've come across on the role from some of the greatest product leaders in the industry. I consider these must reads for any product manager looking to understand different perspectives on product and excel in their career in product management.

Product Management 70

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 70

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 22, 2013

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics. Collaboration. Many of the responsibilities of a product manager involve collaborating, communicating, and coordinating efforts across a team of engineers, designers, product managers, and more.

Analytic Tools 67

Analytic Tools Feedback Software Data Visualization Product Management 67

Sachin Rekhi

JANUARY 13, 2013

The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. This enables them to take smart risks by focusing on what they can dedicate the needed resources to win.

Startups 67

Startups Customer Experience Differentiation Branding 67