article thumbnail

Tools for Product Management; ProductCamp Atlanta 2014

Good Product Manager

Take the 2014 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools Survey now ! — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 22, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 19, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 25, 2014. What tools do you use for product management? What tools and technologies do you use for product management? How well do they work?

article thumbnail

Priorities for Product Management Leaders; Product Management Festival 2014 recap

Good Product Manager

Recap in Tweets: Product Management Festival 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 17, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 17, 2014. — Michael Smith (@myksmith) September 17, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 17, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 17, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 17, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) September 18, 2014.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Product Management Tools; Three Questions to Improve Product Management; Happy Holidays 2014

Good Product Manager

Have a great rest of 2014 and see you again soon in 2015! SiriusDecisions Field Guide Product Management Tools. I’m pleased to announce the release of the SiriusDecisions Field Guide “Product Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping 2015.” ” This is a project that I have been involved in for the past several months with several colleagues at SiriusDecisions.

article thumbnail

Top Challenges for Product Management; Priorities for Product Management Leaders for 2015; Buyer Personas in Action

Good Product Manager

The webcast will be held on Wednesday, November 19, 2014 at 11am ET and is free to attend. His post — SiriusDecisions EMEA Summit 2014: Buyer Personas in Action — summarizes presentations by three of our clients at our recent SiriusDecisions EMEA Summit where they showcased examples of how they have leveraged buyer personas to transform their businesses. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) November 10, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 28, 2014.

article thumbnail

Join me at PIPELINE 2014!

Product Beautiful

On this Friday, June 6, 2014, I will be presenting at a virtual conference called PIPELINE 2014. PIPELINE is put on by Planview , and will include presentations about a wide variety of topics of interest to Product Management and Marketing professionals, including innovation, ideation, prioritization, and how to change your culture.

article thumbnail

TSIA Congratulates the 2014 STAR Awards Winners

TSIA

Thank you everyone for helping make 2014 TSW Service Transformations conference our best yet, with record attendance and lingering excitement about the future of the technology industry. We’d like to take a moment to once again congratulate the winners of the 2014 TSIA STAR Awards that were announced during the Awards Celebration Gala at the conference

article thumbnail

Common Mistakes in Implementing a New Product Management Framework; Tools for Product Management; ProductCamp Atlanta Recap

Good Product Manager

Take the 2014 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools Survey now ! — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 18, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 18, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 18, 2014. — Anand Thaker (@AnandThaker) October 18, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 18, 2014. "Market — Tyler Anderson (@TylerSirius) October 18, 2014. — Jeff Lash (@jefflash) October 18, 2014.

article thumbnail

The State of Knowledge Management: 2014

TSIA

Originally published on Ragsdale's Eye On Service - Today at Technology Services World I am releasing the results of my August knowledge management survey both online, and in my Power Hour session at 4:15. The data shows that companies continue to find enormous potential in knowledge management, but are often thwarted by corporate culture, and tend to blame technology for process problems.

article thumbnail

2014 Mid Year Trends Recap: Knowledge Management, Social, and PSA

TSIA

Now that we're wrapping up 2014, I wanted to recap with some of the insights I learned mid-year as food for thought going forward into 2015. At our Spring Technology Services World (TSW) Best Practices conference in Santa Clara, California, any time I wasn’t presenting, I was in one-to-one meetings with TSIA members and partners. Here is my account as I originally wrote it this spring

article thumbnail

The State of Managed Services: 2014

TSIA

The world of tech is changing. Consumers of enterprise technology have voted with their wallets. They are concerned with the lack of return on investment for their infrastructure technology expenditures. They are frustrated with the ever-increasing complexity of their IT solutions driven by the rise in software centricity and network dependency

article thumbnail

Hot 2014 Trend: Knowledge as a Service

TSIA

Based on discussions with hundreds of companies over a number of years regarding failing knowledge management programs, it appears that there are three common denominators linked to the majority of companies who claim not to be getting the expected value from their KM expenditures. Discover what these denominators are

article thumbnail

A Year of Service Industry Transformation: A Look Back at 2014

TSIA

As 2014 draws to a close, the TSIA research team wanted to provide a brief recap of the top trends, lessons learned, and key takeaways the past year had to offer. Let's take a look at what we've learned this year, as well as what's on the horizon for the technology services industry in 2015

article thumbnail

Good Enough

Tyner Blain

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.

Article 70
article thumbnail

9 Scrum Metrics to Keep Your Team on Track

Pragmatic Marketing

The old adage “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” indicates the need to know how you know. In traditional projects, milestones and key performance indicators (KPIs) measure project progress and individual contributions to that project. But while agile scrum defines several milestones—sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, sprint retrospective, backlog grooming—the milestones alone don’t provide any guarantees of progress or success.

article thumbnail

TSW Power Hour Session Recap: The 2014 Technology Heatmap

TSIA

What’s happens in a TSW “Power Hour” session? Attendees gain data points on key areas of technology services, delivered by TSIA’s top research execs. TSIA’s John Ragsdale shared a recap of his Power Hour session, discussing adoption, satisfaction, and planned spending within key areas of tech services

article thumbnail

2014 TechFUTURES: What will service operations look like in 2019?

TSIA

TSIA's John Ragsdale, vice president of technology and social research, wrote a great blog entry on the opening event at TSW Best Practices: TechFUTURES. Discover what’s in store for the future of tech

Events 40
article thumbnail

The Two C’s of Agile

Pragmatic Marketing

One of the most frustrating things I’ve heard over my career is that “agile is something that software developers do.” It is said dismissively by those who are happy with how things are today and see no reason for changing how they operate. It ignores all the success agile teams have had in software the past decade and in other industries including architecture, marketing, video production and even the auto industry.

article thumbnail

Why Marketing Should Go Agile

Pragmatic Marketing

Marketing has changed more in the last five to seven years than at any other time during my career. The pace of change has quickened, there is more direct pressure for marketing to demonstrate its contribution to the bottom line, many more channels of communication are available to reach increasingly fragmented audiences, and all of this must be done with scarce and expensive talent and resources. Despite all this change, many of the core processes of marketing remain unchanged.

Agile 70
article thumbnail

Opposite Views of a Product Roadmap

Tyner Blain

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? Your roadmap is both – but one is more important than the other – and product managers need to be able to view the roadmap both ways.

Roadmap 64
article thumbnail

Agile Through a Matrix Lens

Tyner Blain

“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. Let’s apply this lens to agile as applied within a company, and see if it helps people decide to do things differently. When You Say Agile, What Do You Mean? There may be as many definitions of agile as there are teams practicing agile development.

Agile 54
article thumbnail

Agile Cadabra

Tyner Blain

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. One tenet of agile is to make decisions at the last responsible moment. Following this powerful and easy-to-remember mantra reduces the risk that you are wasting time on unnecessary work.

Agile 57
article thumbnail

Product Managers trading in land mines for gold mines

All About Product Management

Is your product built on a gold mine or land mine? As a product manager I would like to ensure that my product is built on solid technology so it can be maintained with minimal effort. Scenario you’re a Product Manager, you work for a big organisation. You inherit a product that causes you a lot of frustration because: Your development/engineering teams have been diverted for a number of months to migrate legacy/unsupported databases across the portfolio of products to new DBS.

article thumbnail

Classifying Market Problems

Tyner Blain

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. Recently, I’ve been using a variant of this model as a way to view a product and upcoming roadmap items. It is a powerful way to share a perspective on your product with the rest of the team, and frame conversations about where best to invest. Whole Product Model.

article thumbnail

Chromecast Wins Fame, iOS7 Wins Shame

Product Culture

Coin gets special mention thanks to Alexis and to several other posters on Twitter who are looking forward to it in 2014. Make my life easier and I will tell my friends. Make my life harder and I will tell everyone. That’s my take-away from this year's raft of nominations for the 2013 Product Powers Hall of Fame & Shame. Hall of Fame. Chromecast, Pocket, FitBit Force and a dozen other products were nominated for Fame, most because they do a great job making things easier for us.

Blog 66
article thumbnail

The Best Product Managers Fall in Love With a Problem

Sachin Rekhi

I’ve had the chance to work with a variety of product managers across tech giants and startups alike. While there are many critical skills for being a world class product manager, I’ve noticed one pattern amongst the very best: they fall deeply in love with the problem their product is solving. When you see a product manager fall in love with a problem, you notice the following…. A deep understanding of the target user.

Vision 63
article thumbnail

The Importance of Developing Personas in Product Design

Sachin Rekhi

Sample personas from MailChimp. Personas are an important design tool that should be in the toolset of any product manager or designer. Personas are fictional characters developed to represent the different archetypes of users of your product. A persona typically describes the goals, pain points, behaviors, and psychology associated with members of a particular segment. To bring them to life a name, a profile image, and sometimes even a background history are associated with them.

article thumbnail

The Inertia to Innovation at Scale and How To Overcome It

Sachin Rekhi

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to launch innovative new products not only as an entrepreneur at my own startups like Anywhere.FM and Connected, but also as an intrapreneur at Microsoft and LinkedIn, bringing brand new products to market at these established tech firms. Every established tech firm aspires to bring the innovation culture that’s so native to startups to their own organization, but often struggles to do so.

article thumbnail

The Problem with Building Products in an Agile World

Product Beautiful

Over the past decade, there has been a ton of ink spilled over Agile development. Much of the Agile narrative has focused on the pros of implementing Agile methodologies , such as better planning, faster feedback, and the ability to quickly pivot and make changes. These are all good things. However, from a Product Management standpoint, Agile has some major problem areas that can create inefficiency at best, or completely wreck a project at worst.

Agile 61
article thumbnail

Becoming a Product Leader with Win/Loss Analysis

Product Beautiful

Nearly every product manager I speak to desires to be a leader in his or her organization. Everyone knows that as a member of the Product Team, you must exercise soft skills like influence to nudge your product towards success. However, to few know how to gain the confidence to become the leader that they want to be. The first step toward becoming a great product leader is to have the best quality and quantity of information, so that you can attack any problem with data, not opinions.

Seminar 61
article thumbnail

Why do products need a story?

AlphaHQ

I’m often approached by young, aspiring entrepreneurs who ask some variation of the following: . I’m interested in starting a company in [Industry] that does [Laundry list of features], so where do I start? They usually want introductions to investors and developers – rarely are they seeking advice. So I respond with a question in turn, something I know they can relate to.

article thumbnail

Why do products need a story?

AlphaHQ

I’m often approached by young, aspiring entrepreneurs who ask some variation of the following: . I’m interested in starting a company in [Industry] that does [Laundry list of features], so where do I start? They usually want introductions to investors and developers – rarely are they seeking advice. So I respond with a question in turn, something I know they can relate to.

article thumbnail

Why do products need a story?

AlphaHQ

I’m often approached by young, aspiring entrepreneurs who ask some variation of the following: . I’m interested in starting a company in [Industry] that does [Laundry list of features], so where do I start? They usually want introductions to investors and developers – rarely are they seeking advice. So I respond with a question in turn, something I know they can relate to.

article thumbnail

Do you believe in Leadership lessons?

SidsAvenue

The 2 contradicting lessons A most common lesson people give while talking about Innovation is "Fail fast and move on" On the other hand, Guru's also advocate that say "You need to have perseverance and grit to continue doing what you believe in" To me, these are 2 contradicting thoughts. Isn't it? When you are working on something new, there are no ready to use references. Hence the probability of failure is pretty high.

article thumbnail

Do you have an ecosystem to support your Innovation?

SidsAvenue

The hype around the word Innovation has never been as high as it is right now. Everybody is talking about innovation in everything. Innovation is ingrained in Technology to academics. It is talked about in pharmaceuticals to government policies. Innovation is shaping up energy generation and energy conservation. It is defining our home décor and fashion. This post is all dedicated to whole bunch of Innovators out there.

article thumbnail

What are the most common pitfalls of user tests and product concept experiments?

AlphaHQ

The merits of experimentation and testing have been proven in virtually all contexts of business. From manufacturing to marketing to hiring practices, there seems to be limitless application to the scientific method in industry. When it comes to user testing and validating product concepts, it can be all-too-easy to run into stumbling blocks and derive false conclusions from a lot of well-intended hard work.

article thumbnail

What are the most common pitfalls of user tests and product concept experiments?

AlphaHQ

The merits of experimentation and testing have been proven in virtually all contexts of business. From manufacturing to marketing to hiring practices, there seems to be limitless application to the scientific method in industry. When it comes to user testing and validating product concepts, it can be all-too-easy to run into stumbling blocks and derive false conclusions from a lot of well-intended hard work.

article thumbnail

What are the most common pitfalls of user tests and product concept experiments?

AlphaHQ

The merits of experimentation and testing have been proven in virtually all contexts of business. From manufacturing to marketing to hiring practices, there seems to be limitless application to the scientific method in industry. When it comes to user testing and validating product concepts, it can be all-too-easy to run into stumbling blocks and derive false conclusions from a lot of well-intended hard work.

article thumbnail

How can product teams validate demand with prototypes?

AlphaHQ

Enterprise product managers know that continuous improvement is critical for modern digital products. Just look at the evolution of the iPhone home screen if you need a reminder for how quickly products become outdated. At Validately , we spend a lot of time working with our customers to help them validate demand for new products and/or new features within a product.

Testing 40
article thumbnail

How can product teams validate demand with prototypes?

AlphaHQ

Enterprise product managers know that continuous improvement is critical for modern digital products. Just look at the evolution of the iPhone home screen if you need a reminder for how quickly products become outdated. At Validately , we spend a lot of time working with our customers to help them validate demand for new products and/or new features within a product.

Testing 40
article thumbnail

How can product teams validate demand with prototypes?

AlphaHQ

Enterprise product managers know that continuous improvement is critical for modern digital products. Just look at the evolution of the iPhone home screen if you need a reminder for how quickly products become outdated. At Validately , we spend a lot of time working with our customers to help them validate demand for new products and/or new features within a product.

Testing 40