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? MORE
How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how to revise them for some exercises I’ve been doing with product teams. Whole Product Game Background. MORE
Understanding your users is critical to developing good products. A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost. A contextualized understanding is valuable but less so, and costly but less so. MORE
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. MORE
There I was, sitting in a packed movie theatre. I waited two years for this sequel and I’ve got enough popcorn and diet soda to last me a full three hours. Fifteen minutes into the movie, the hero and villain are facing off for the first time when a lady bursts into the theater. Trying […]. MORE
Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magically have a more successful product. What makes agile powerful is also makes it dangerous. Triage and Urgency. MORE
You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost fallacy to intentionality. Hanlon’s Razor. MORE
How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests , or do you engage them as an incredibly potent market-sensing capability? Conversation Starter. MORE
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr. Levitt’s work. MORE
How the past can provide context for your future plans. For our recent book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty (O’Reilly), my co-authors C. Todd Lombardo, Evan Ryan, and I interviewed over 80 practicing product people. MORE
Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products. The problem is that just saying the words is not enough to help someone shift their thinking. MORE
Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection. MORE
Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds. Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more than picking one thing. MORE
Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering. A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenue is half of what drives the business (and valuation). The other half is the rate of growth of that recurring revenue. MORE
The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery. MORE
In my previous post , I described a way to think about our internal product communications, and how that can help us optimize our time and make us more effective as Product Managers. MORE
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability, viability, and feasibility. While laudable, these objectives are too abstract to be actionable. MORE
280 Group CEO and Founder, Brian Lawley, is once again joined by the prominent author, consultant and trainer, Greg Cohen. Greg works for 280 Group and has authored best-selling books such as Agile Excellence for Product Managers, Lean Product Management, and Strategy Excellence for Product Managers. MORE
One day, I was musing about the job of product manager, and what differentiates a good product manager from an okay one, and an analogy sprung to mind. Think about a golf swing. There is the addressing of the ball, the back swing, the forward swing, and ultimately the follow though. When you are teaching […]. product management essentials MORE
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” ” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? No one really tells us. Different Perspectives of Good Enough. MORE
Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building whatever you’re building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future? MORE
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context. MORE
Come Prepared. Make sure you carry out the necessary prep work prior to the sprint planning meeting. Be clear on what you want the sprint to achieve, ensure that the product backlog is appropriately refined (or groomed) , and have its high-priority items ready. MORE
You’ve got some shiny new segmentation data about prospective customers; how much they earn, where they are located, how old they are. How does that help you make decisions about your product? MORE
Product owners and product managers. Two roles, often done by one person. Together, the product people need to take an organization’s strategy, figure out the appropriate product strategy, and convert that into actionable work for the delivery teams to create the right product. MORE
Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it. MORE
If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or developing persona. MORE
Last month, Mike Smart of Egress Solutions and I gave a webinar for Pragmatic Marketing on product roadmapping when working in agile environments. We had a great turnout of over 1500 people in the session – with not nearly enough time to answer all of the questions. MORE
Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” ” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enforce focus from the top down. MORE
Your passion is your greatest asset, learn how to share it Continue reading → Knowledge Purpose ambitions courage creativity entrepreneur experience grit passion MORE
Seth Godin on Making Software Seth Godin spoke at Business of Software Conference USA last year to share some of the many lessons that he has learned in his 33 years in the software industry. You can watch the talk or read a transcript here. This year, Business of Software Conference USA is in Boston,… Product Marketing Community Product Management Resources Feedback research Usability Design Communication Innovation Product Strategy B2B B2C Software MORE
Why a Product Strategy Process Matters. An effective product strategy process should ensure that a valid product strategy and an actionable product roadmap are always available—that a shared and valid approach to achieving product success is available at anytime, as the picture below illustrates. MORE
“Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong. A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information into insight. MORE
Co-opting product management into sales. My good friend Geoffrey Anderson ( @ganders2112 ) recently wrote about a situation we product managers sometimes find ourselves in. When sales are not going well, company leadership might ask product management come in to help hit the numbers. MORE
Product owners are likely to find themselves alone in the organizational wilderness. Their organizations expect them to connect the towers of long-term strategic planning with the frontiers of great new products. Iterative and incremental development of solutions can bring these two worlds together. MORE
By Bruce McCarthy – I was completely wrong about the Business of Software conference. Friend and Co-Founder of Sense and Respond Press, Josh Seiden, told me it was great, but when I went the first time last year I think I was expecting an event for the CFOs and financial analysts of large companies all… Product Marketing MORE
Tyner Blain
MAY 24, 2017
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 11, 2017
The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery.
Tyner Blain
SEPTEMBER 10, 2017
Understanding your users is critical to developing good products. A “complete” understanding is sometimes required, and always comes at a cost. A contextualized understanding is valuable but less so, and costly but less so.
Tyner Blain
JULY 10, 2017
You know you’re a product manager when this image causes more than a chuckle. A few random thoughts inspired by this Rorschach test of product management concepts from sunk cost fallacy to intentionality. Hanlon’s Razor.
Advertisement
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Tyner Blain
OCTOBER 6, 2016
Being “outside-in”, “outcome-based”, and “market-driven” is particularly important for creating successful products. The problem is that just saying the words is not enough to help someone shift their thinking.
Tyner Blain
JULY 22, 2016
Defining and building a good minimum viable product is much harder than it sounds. Finding that “one thing” you can do, which people want, is really about a lot more than picking one thing.
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Tyner Blain
JANUARY 8, 2017
Assumptions are interesting things – we all make them all the time, and we rarely acknowledge that we’re doing it.
Tyner Blain
APRIL 7, 2015
Last month, Mike Smart of Egress Solutions and I gave a webinar for Pragmatic Marketing on product roadmapping when working in agile environments. We had a great turnout of over 1500 people in the session – with not nearly enough time to answer all of the questions.
Tyner Blain
DECEMBER 10, 2014
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” ” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? No one really tells us. Different Perspectives of Good Enough.
Tyner Blain
DECEMBER 3, 2014
Your product roadmap is a view of what you are building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future. Or is your roadmap a view of why you are building whatever you’re building right now, in the near future, and in the more distant future?
Advertisement
Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your embedded analytics. Brought to you by Logi Analytics.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 3, 2016
How do you work with professional services, consulting, field engineers, etc. to make your product better? Do you just treat their inputs as yet another channel for feature requests , or do you engage them as an incredibly potent market-sensing capability? Conversation Starter.
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Tyner Blain
APRIL 6, 2016
If you ask someone if they require encryption on their device, first of all, you will likely get one of two answers – yes or no – useful for segmenting your market or developing persona.
Tyner Blain
APRIL 29, 2015
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability, viability, and feasibility. While laudable, these objectives are too abstract to be actionable.
Tyner Blain
MARCH 30, 2016
Product owners are likely to find themselves alone in the organizational wilderness. Their organizations expect them to connect the towers of long-term strategic planning with the frontiers of great new products. Iterative and incremental development of solutions can bring these two worlds together.
Tyner Blain
FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Software as a Service is not a one and done transactional offering. A product or business built on SaaS is built on the subscription model – recurring revenue is half of what drives the business (and valuation). The other half is the rate of growth of that recurring revenue.
Advertisement
Many application teams leave embedded analytics to languish until something—an unhappy customer, plummeting revenue, a spike in customer churn—demands change. But by then, it may be too late. In this White Paper, Logi Analytics has identified 5 tell-tale signs your project is moving from “nice to have” to “needed yesterday.". Brought to you by Logi Analytics.
Tyner Blain
NOVEMBER 12, 2014
“Agile” is something most teams do wrong*, without realizing they’re doing it wrong. A good 2×2 matrix acts as a lens, helping to convert information into insight.
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?
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.
Tyner Blain
JUNE 12, 2014
Agile is not magical. Changing from a waterfall process to an agile process changes how your team works, and helps eliminate inefficiencies. Adopting an agile process does not let you magically have a more successful product. What makes agile powerful is also makes it dangerous. Triage and Urgency.
Advertisement
Every time an application team gets caught up in the “build vs buy” debate, it stalls projects and delays time to revenue. There is a third option. Partnering with an analytics development platform gives you the freedom to customize a solution without the risks and long-term costs of building your own. Learn when and why it makes sense to build, buy, or take a combined approach to embedded BI. Brought to you by Logi Analytics.
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 1, 2014
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr. Levitt’s work.
Tyner Blain
JANUARY 5, 2015
Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” ” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enforce focus from the top down.
Tyner Blain
FEBRUARY 11, 2015
You’ve got some shiny new segmentation data about prospective customers; how much they earn, where they are located, how old they are. How does that help you make decisions about your product?
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 7, 2013
Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection.
Advertisement
Why do some embedded analytics projects succeed while others fail? We surveyed 500+ application teams embedding analytics to find out which analytics features actually move the needle. Read the 6th annual State of Embedded Analytics Report to discover new best practices. Brought to you by Logi Analytics.
Tyner Blain
AUGUST 1, 2013
How can Theodore Levitt’s classic Whole Product approach help with defining a product roadmap? I’ve been revisiting his concepts and their use recently, thinking about how to revise them for some exercises I’ve been doing with product teams. Whole Product Game Background.
Roman Pichler
OCTOBER 2, 2018
Why a Product Strategy Process Matters. An effective product strategy process should ensure that a valid product strategy and an actionable product roadmap are always available—that a shared and valid approach to achieving product success is available at anytime, as the picture below illustrates.
bpma ProductHub
SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
By Bruce McCarthy – I was completely wrong about the Business of Software conference. Friend and Co-Founder of Sense and Respond Press, Josh Seiden, told me it was great, but when I went the first time last year I think I was expecting an event for the CFOs and financial analysts of large companies all… Product Marketing
Lead on Purpose
NOVEMBER 20, 2017
Your passion is your greatest asset, learn how to share it Continue reading → Knowledge Purpose ambitions courage creativity entrepreneur experience grit passion
Speaker: Eric Feinstein, Professional Services Manager, Looker
For a long time, Product Managers have found it challenging to design interfaces inside their products that users could use for reporting. It seems like PMs and engineers have grown to hate embedded reporting. Fortunately, there are new technical approaches that are making this a significantly different picture, although there are still lots of interesting design challenges. Eric Feinstein, Professional Services Manager at Looker, has done workshops with lots of product managers who are looking to add effective reporting. He will use the example of a product manager of a learning management software system and how she would go through the process of defining reporting for users of the product. He will discuss working through personas, data types, reporting needs analysis and ultimately how this comes together to form a roadmap for reporting functionality and interface.
The Secret PM Handbook
OCTOBER 9, 2018
Co-opting product management into sales. My good friend Geoffrey Anderson ( @ganders2112 ) recently wrote about a situation we product managers sometimes find ourselves in. When sales are not going well, company leadership might ask product management come in to help hit the numbers.
Roman Pichler
SEPTEMBER 4, 2018
Come Prepared. Make sure you carry out the necessary prep work prior to the sprint planning meeting. Be clear on what you want the sprint to achieve, ensure that the product backlog is appropriately refined (or groomed) , and have its high-priority items ready.
bpma ProductHub
SEPTEMBER 14, 2018
Seth Godin on Making Software Seth Godin spoke at Business of Software Conference USA last year to share some of the many lessons that he has learned in his 33 years in the software industry. You can watch the talk or read a transcript here. This year, Business of Software Conference USA is in Boston,… Product Marketing Community Product Management Resources Feedback research Usability Design Communication Innovation Product Strategy B2B B2C Software
bpma ProductHub
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
How the past can provide context for your future plans. For our recent book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty (O’Reilly), my co-authors C. Todd Lombardo, Evan Ryan, and I interviewed over 80 practicing product people.
Speaker: Eric Feinstein, Professional Services Manager, Looker
For a long time, Product Managers have found it challenging to design interfaces inside their products that users could use for reporting. It seems like PMs and engineers have grown to hate embedded reporting. Fortunately, there are new technical approaches that are making this a significantly different picture, although there are still lots of interesting design challenges. Eric Feinstein, Professional Services Manager at Looker, has done workshops with lots of product managers who are looking to add effective reporting. He will use the example of a product manager of a learning management software system and how she would go through the process of defining reporting for users of the product. He will discuss working through personas, data types, reporting needs analysis and ultimately how this comes together to form a roadmap for reporting functionality and interface.
The Product Bistro
OCTOBER 16, 2018
One day, I was musing about the job of product manager, and what differentiates a good product manager from an okay one, and an analogy sprung to mind. Think about a golf swing. There is the addressing of the ball, the back swing, the forward swing, and ultimately the follow though. When you are teaching […]. product management essentials
Folding Burritos
FEBRUARY 13, 2018
In my previous post , I described a way to think about our internal product communications, and how that can help us optimize our time and make us more effective as Product Managers.
280 Group
OCTOBER 24, 2017
280 Group CEO and Founder, Brian Lawley, is once again joined by the prominent author, consultant and trainer, Greg Cohen. Greg works for 280 Group and has authored best-selling books such as Agile Excellence for Product Managers, Lean Product Management, and Strategy Excellence for Product Managers.
Nir Eyal
SEPTEMBER 4, 2018
There I was, sitting in a packed movie theatre. I waited two years for this sequel and I’ve got enough popcorn and diet soda to last me a full three hours. Fifteen minutes into the movie, the hero and villain are facing off for the first time when a lady bursts into the theater. Trying […].
Speaker: Ruben Ugarte, Founder, Practico Analytics
Onboarding users is filled with possibilities and challenges. Not only are you showing the user how to use your product, but it's also a chance to connect with them and understand their needs. Of course, it’s crucial to have a good onboarding experience to drive your activation metrics. Quality onboarding is the first step towards turning a newly acquired user into a repeat user. If you're looking to optimize your onboarding to improve your activation metrics, this webinar is for you. Ruben Ugarte will be focusing on how to improve all aspects of onboarding experiences by understanding how your current onboarding process is stacking up, and giving you the tools to prioritize what to try changing. With improved onboarding, you'll see less drop-off and a happier user experience.
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