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Part #1: Implementing an Agile Sales Framework

All About Product Management

By their very nature sales people are agile in their approach to selling products and services. A good sales rep will intuitively carry out a quick inspection of the prospective customer’s situation, adapt themselves to make the customer feel at ease, and continue to inspect (by asking the appropriate questions) until they feel confident enough to present a solution to ease the customers business-pain.

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The Innovation Value Chain and Product Management

All About Product Management

Morten T Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw published an interesting article in HBR about what they call the Innovation Value Chain.

Article 54
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Project Manager or Product Manager what’s the difference?

All About Product Management

I sat down a few months ago with our HR recruitment officer – I began to sketch out the type of person we needed to fill the role of a Product Manager. The recruitment officer asked the question – what’s the difference between a Proj ect Manager and a Prod uct Manager? He posed the question because he had just placed a Project Manager in another department and had a few CVs of people who had applied for the post of Project Manager and might fit the position of Product Manager.

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Part #6 How Everyone Can Get Involved in Agile

All About Product Management

I’m currently using SharePoint 2007 as an interim solution before we implement Team Systems. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was adopting scrum (an agile development frame work). At first implementing scrum identified quite a few issues (mainly bottlenecks) with in the organisation. However the past few weeks have witnessed a turn around – all of a sudden it seems that everyone wants to get involved and be part of the scrum process.

Agile 48
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What do Product Managers do? What is expected of them? And how not to become overwhelmed?

All About Product Management

The answers to the first two questions above depends much upon the organisation, its size, the department ‘Product Management’ lives in your company and the industry sector that you work in. One thing is certain regardless of company demographics the job of the Product Manager can be overwhelming - a view shared by comments made by pragmaticmarketing.com review on Alyssa.S Dver book ‘Software Product Management Essentials’ – a good read for all new and up-and-coming product managers.

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What is the job of a typical on-line Product Manager?

All About Product Management

What’s the job of the Product Manager in a cutting edge web development environment? What does the typical diary of today’s web and/or software Product Manager look like? Product Management business as usual ( BAU ) activities in scrum. 9.30am attend the daily scrum meeting (stand up) with Engineers, Test Analysis.

Roadmap 48
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Successful Product Managers collaborate to ensure innovative product development

All About Product Management

One of the key attributes that a Product Manager has to have in order to be successful is the ability to work in a collaborative way across teams and departments in order to bring new products to market or maintain and increase the profitability of existing products by adding innovative features and enhancements. Collaboration is one of those key requirements listed in the majority of job adverts for Product Managers.

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Profit-Driven Innovation with Hugh Richards

All About Product Management

Product Management View blog and webinar series has a webinar by Hugh Richards entitled " Profit-Driven Innovation". This webinar covers key issues companies face when innovating: #1. Why we innovate. #2. Key drivers of successful innovation. #3. Understaning company operations. #4. Innovation impact across the company. #5. Necessity for strong leadershp. Increase revenue Innovation

Webinar 48
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How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part 1

All About Product Management

Product Managers often need to collaborate, co-ordinate, drive, release and launch innovative ideas into the market place. However there are pitfalls that product management need to avoid if success is be to secured. This is a two part series based on Rosabeth Moss Kanter article in Harvard Business Review entitled Innovation: The Classic Traps. The article focuses on four areas: Strategy, Process, Structure and Skills.

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How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps #part2

All About Product Management

How Product Managers can avoid innovation traps Part#1 touched on two innovative traps that ProductManagers may encounter: #1. Strategy: the misconception that every innovative idea has to be a blockbuster – where as a number of small incremental innovations could lead to over all product success. And #2. Process : subjecting innovative efforts and projects to the same rigor, reviews and filters as standard business as usual (BAU) will stifle innovative growth.

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How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.

All About Product Management

Technology companies often go through good and bad times and even through the good times there will be situations which seek to hinder the personnel performance of Product Managers and Technologists. On occasions there will be situations and decisions that run against the grain of your feelings and the path you’ve laid out for yourself.

Roadmap 48
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Part #10 Justifying Time to Research with Agile

All About Product Management

Agile Research I worked for a company that designed and manufactured niche signal processing equipment for the broadcast industry. Part of the secret to the company’s success was that it was not shy in investing significant amounts of revenue in a research department as well as allowing its engineers to carry out their own research projects.

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10 Tips For New Product Managers

All About Product Management

If you’re new to Product Management then you really should invest 30 minutes of your time to watch Jeff Lash’s podcast “Ten Tips For New Product Managers…” The podcast will also serve as a good refresher for those of you who are experienced Product Managers. Jeff's ten points are listed below. #1. Spend time with customers #2. Ask “dumb” questions #3. Let go of your past #4. Surround yourself with experts #5. Gather data #6. Focus #7. Concentrate on what, not how #8.

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Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum

All About Product Management

Scrum has three key roles: #1 The team – who owns the sprint backlog and are responsible for estimating. functionality and fulfilling the commitment made at sprint planning meetings. #2 2 The Product owner – who owns the product backlog and decides on product functionality. #3 3 The scrum-master who owns the impediment log and is responsible for removing any blockages that hinder the team from performing and fulfilling their commitments. So what's the role of the Product Manager in scrum?

Books 48
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Part #8 Tips on being an Agile Manager

All About Product Management

The agile manager must be able to constantly inspect and adapt in order to keep pace with a changing environment and capitalise on the changes as they occur. Here are 6 tips on ways in which you can inspect and adapt in order to improve the agility of your management and/or Product Management.

Agile 48
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Part # 7 Points to watch out for when converting from waterfall to agile testing

All About Product Management

Agile can be a challenge for the Test Analyst who has been trained and is accustomed to working in the traditional waterfall, Prince 2 environments or using the V model. A tester who finds themselves as part of “the team” using the agile scrum frame work can find that they are out of their comfort zone and may feel a little exposed.

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Part #5 How to adopt Agile Product Marketing

All About Product Management

The Agile Product Manager works closely with the engineering and technical teams working with in an agile framework such as scrum. The adoption of an agile methodology means that new features will get delivered incrementally every 30, 20 or even 10 days.

Agile 48
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How Product Managers can successfully ride the storms of a commercial life.

All About Product Management

Technology companies often go through good and bad times and even through the good times there will be situations which seek to hinder the personnel performance of Product Managers and Technologists. On occasions there will be situations and decisions that run against the grain of your feelings and the path you’ve laid out for yourself.

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Part #4 Agile Customer Support

All About Product Management

I worked for a company where in the morning I was booked on a flight to troubleshot issues at a customers site in Switzerland at Midday it had changed to Germany and by the time I went home I was booked on a flight (for the next day) to Florida. That’s agile customer care for you. The ethos of the company was to adapt your schedules to meet the customers' need.

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Part #3 How to run an agile training course

All About Product Management

We’ve all attended training session which were death by power point. There was little interaction from the attendees and the trainer seemed determined to get through everyone of his/her dozen or so bullet points that appeared on the numerous amount of slides that they had.

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Part #2: Agile meetings run by an agile chairperson

All About Product Management

All of us have attended many meetings during our careers, some good and some not so good. The idea of the sprint meeting: where hands on stakeholders (product owner(s) and technical team) meet for 10 to 15 minutes each day, stand up around a white board and answer 3 basic questions: # 1 What did you do yesterday (reporting back on the commitment you made the day before), # 2 What are you planning to do today (today’s commitment) and # 3 Is there anything stopping you fulfilling your commitment.

Agile 48
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Identifying Agile Organisations, Functions and Roles

All About Product Management

There currently seems to be a strong move towards agile software development. Engineering teams and I.T. departments are adopting one agile method or another. However the conversion of software teams, to agile, does not naturally result in the other areas of a company adopting an agile method of working. The question is why should other areas adopt an agile approach to work?

Agile 48
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Pain without gain (ROI) or pleasure with gain (ROI).

All About Product Management

Pain with a threatened ROI or pleasure with an improved chance of a greater ROI - which one appeals to you? At the end of a waterfall project (or any project for that matter) the product manager or project manager will usually hold a ‘ lessons learnt’ session where the participants of a project that has not gone so well discuss what went wrong with the view of improving performance on the next project.

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Agile people working in a non-agile world

All About Product Management

Implementing an agile development frame work , such as Scrum , does not solve your company’s problems but helps identifies them. My current company has implemented the scrum agile management frame work.

Agile 48
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Being up front during an interview

All About Product Management

During the past 6 months I’ve been interviewing a number people for Product Management vacancies. My company is currently experiencing rapid growth with its online products at the moment and therefore needs to build strong Product Management teams to facilitate that growth and help secure ROI. I tend to follow the same pattern for each candidate: scenario based discussions/questions that reflect key milestones in the typical product life cycle.

Article 48
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Product Management and Value Chain Analysis

All About Product Management

Product managers who analyse the value chain aid in increasing their company’s profitability and therefore return on investment (ROI). Michael Porter’s value chain analysis is usually applied to the processes that would occur in a typical manufacturing company. Porter views a company as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs.

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What direct reports and co-workers expect from a Lead Product Manager

All About Product Management

In this article I give my take on Larry Bossidy’s article “What Your Leaders Expects of You” published in April’s Harvard Business Review and “.What What is Expected from Product Managers.” Where I report what senior managers expected from me as their Product Manager. Identify what your line manager, MD, and other senior stakeholders expect from their Product Manager is only half of the story.

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How Agile is Your Product Management?

All About Product Management

Comparisons have been drawn between Prince 2 Project Managers and ScrumMasters. Much has been written about agile software development Vs waterfall with a focus on the developers and testers who actually carry out the technical work. However this blog posting focuses on agile management and in particular ‘Agile Product Management’. Product Management by its very nature calls for agility.

Agile 48
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Business Sense + Technical Sense = Common Sense

All About Product Management

Common sense = ROI (Return on investment). Getting the right balance between technological innovation and business acumen is critical for successful product development. I worked for a company that designed and manufactured niche cutting edge products for the video and film industries.

Demo 48
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Product Management and Knowledge Sharing

All About Product Management

Sources of knowledge for Product Managers: knowledge within people. If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable stated CEO Lew Platt. Companies where knowledge exists in discreet islands (business units or departments) seldom benefit from the synergy of everyone knowing what everyone else is up to and even more important sharing of experiences with one another. I worked for a company several years ago that had half a dozen R&D labs located around the south of England.

Agile 48
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What Your Leader Expects of You

All About Product Management

The latest copy of Harvard Business Review landed on my desk this morning. As usual I took a look at the contents page to see what topics April’s edition would be dealing with, and lo and behold the top article was “What Your Leader Expects of You”. I had just published a blog article (".what what is expected of them? " ) that covered this topics a few days ago. I turned to the article with the view of comparing Larry Bossidy’s (the articles author) thoughts with mine.

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Good TV viewing for Product Managers

All About Product Management

In general I tend to avoid watching too much TV. However there are a handful of programmes that are not only entertaining but also help stimulate the mind and can even help improve your performance as a Product Manager. My first choice is Dragons Den. I’m always interested at the various business/product propositions that people come up with. But I’m even more interested at how they defend themselves as they are cross examined by the dragons on the content of their elevator pitches.

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Calling all veteran, new and up and coming Product Managers

All About Product Management

Welcome to my blog – I’ve thought about setting a blog up for some time – in fact I did set one up at the beginning of the year – started blogging – got real busy at work – didn’t make a post for several weeks and then found that it had gone! So I thought the next blog I start will be on a subject that I’m passionate about and will therefore be easy for me to keep up-to-date – so here it is my blog all about Product Management.

Blog 48
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The Demo goes badly

The Product Bistro

A recent story about the original iPhone demo at Moscone center in SF, in early 2007 from the point of view of the engineers in the audience is particularly illuminating. Every product development project has a crucial milestone, the official demonstration. Sitting here on Memorial Day, watching Robocop, I realized that the demonstration of the ED 209 was like a lot of my own demonstrations. Enjoy. PM Tales demo

Demo 210
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AARRR vs RARRA: Pirate Metrics Explained

Mind the Product

First presented by Dave McClure in his presentation “Startup Metrics for Pirates” in 2007, the AARRR method was originally meant for tracking product marketing and management and focused on acquisition.

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Ignoring Innovation: Lessons from Kodak

Melissa Perri

In 2007 I joined an innovation swat team at Cornell in the Johnson Graduate School of Business. It was called the Business, Science, and Technology Initiative (known to the cool kids as BSTI). We were working with Kodak to come up with a completely new product that would appeal to our age group, the early 20s. For the next two years our team of […]. lean lessons learned

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When I built products the stupid way

Street Smart Product Manager

In 2007, ProductRepair (name changed), a market leader in its industry, was facing some serious threats: A rapidly maturing business. New “digitally native” entrants with greatly enhanced data collection abilities. A 100% call center based customer service model, with an escalating cost per interaction. Service partners with increasingly divergent strategies. Legacy IT infrastructure that made […].

Naming 101
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Behind the Product: Why CNN+ Failed

280 Group

Since Netflix introduced streaming video on-demand (SVOD) back in 2007, the market has exploded. In our “Behind the Product” series, we discuss examples of products or services that highlight a particular Product Management concept or principle.

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I’m on the Tim Ferriss podcast — talking my new book, growth hacking, metaverse, creator economy, and more

Andrew Chen

I have a bit more more audio today to talk about as well… When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007, I was introduced to Tim Ferriss at a dinner — before he wrote 4 Hour Work Week, before his podcast, when we were both getting started. Hi readers, My first book — The Cold Start Problem — is out next week!!! The countdown begins. You can preorder it here as hard cover, kindle, or audiobook. And yes, I recorded the audiobook myself.

Books 54
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10 years in the Bay Area – what I’ve learned

Andrew Chen

January 2007. It was 2007, and the iPhone hadn’t been released yet, YCombinator was just getting started, and MySpace was still bigger than Facebook. I barely knew anyone when I first arrived here, so I had a simple goal in 2007: Meet 5 new people per day, every day. Most importantly, while this started out as a work thing, many of the folks I met in 2007 are now close friends.

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