October, 2023

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Special: Level Up Your Product: Innovation with Game Mechanics – with Mike Hyzy and Bret Wardle

Product Innovation Educators

How product managers can gamify their products, process, and career I am interviewing speakers at my favorite annual conference for product managers, the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference. This discussion is with Mike Hyzy and Bret Wardle, whose session is titled “Level Up Your Product: Innovation with Game Mechanics.” In our competitive landscape, businesses constantly seek innovative ways to captivate users and empower their teams.

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Doing the Wrong Thing the Right Way

The Product Coalition

When the Higher-Powers have made their decision, it’s up to the team to de-risk in real time: A pragmatists survival guide to un-validated demands. Photo by Àlex Rodriguez on Unsplash You wouldn’t read a book from the end to the beginning, watch a film backwards, or get paid by a restaurant to eat there (at least, generally speaking…); yet these simple facts alone are not enough to stop us, as Product Teams, from being regularly tossed un-validated feature demands over the fence by those who kn

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Critical thinking for product managers

Mind the Product

Critical thinking - how should we define it and why is it so important for a product person to master? Read more » The post Critical thinking for product managers appeared first on Mind the Product.

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OKRs vs Outcomes: What is the Difference?

ProductPlan

When you first learn product management, the terminology can get quite confusing. A couple of terms that the product management world introduced to the software product development domain are outcomes and OKRs. Since those two terms are used separately, it’s tempting to think they represent different concepts that are opposed to each other. That’s not the case.

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How to Streamline Payment Applications & Lien Waivers Through Innovative Construction Technology

Speaker: Dylan Secrest, Founder of Alamo Innovation and Construction Digital Transformation Consultant

Construction payment workflows are notoriously complex when you consider juggling multiple stakeholders, compliance requirements, and evolving project scopes. Delays in approvals or misaligned data between budgets, lien waivers, and pay applications can grind progress to a halt. The good news? It doesn't have to be this way! Join expert Dylan Secrest to discover how leading contractors are turning payment chaos into clarity using digital workflows, integrated systems, and automation strategies.

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6 Best Practices for Product Adoption in Financial Services, Media, and Retail

Amplitude

Unlock success in financial services, media, and retail with our expert best practices and real-life companies leading the way in digital product adoption.

More Trending

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GO Product Roadmap Checklist

Roman Pichler

Listen to the audio version of this article: [link] Overview The GO Product Roadmap consists of five elements, as the image below shows: Date, name, goal, features, and metrics. The most important element is the goal: It describes the outcome you want to achieve or the benefit you want to provide. Sample goals include “acquiring new users,” “increasing conversion,” and “reducing cost.

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Retire These Metaphors & Reframe the Discussion to be More Effective

Johanna Rothman

For years, we've used several metaphors to describe software product development: People-based metaphors, such as: Man-weeks for all the humans working on a project or a product. FTE for full-time Equivalent (as in human beings!) “Resources” instead of the words: people, or human beings Construction metaphors, such as: build, which describes how we organize and create a usable product.

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The Business of Technology

Business Acumen Institute

Why Business Acumen Matters to the IT Profession Whether you’re in the C-Suite as Chief Technical Officer, an IT Director or an IT project manager, it’s imperative to ensure that your initiatives are aligned with the firm’s strategic intent, and that you are part of a team moving in the same direction. Why is this important? According to research done by Business Acumen Institute , 62% of people who work within the information technology ecosystem are working on projects that don’t contrib

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Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do?

Product Talk

Many teams, like sales and marketing, have time-bound goals, like reaching $X in bookings or generating Y leads by a specific date. Product teams are also held to time-bound goals. Empowered product teams, for example, are asked to deliver outcomes each quarter. But sometimes companies take this too far. They ask product teams to deliver specific features by specific dates.

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Build the Case: Quantify the Real Costs of In-House Testing and QA Gaps

Underinvesting in software testing costs more than you think, and now you can prove it. This guide helps you quantify hidden costs like developer time, support overhead, tech debt, and lost revenue. Use the companion calculator to model your own data, and present your findings with a ready-to-edit presentation template. Whether you're making the case to leadership or validating outsourcing, this toolkit gives you the numbers and tools you need.

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461: Customer use cases to guide product design – with Lilac Muller, PhD

Product Innovation Educators

Tips for creating customer use cases – for product managers Today we are talking about how to create and use customer use cases to guide product design. Our guest is Dr. Lilac Muller, VP of Product Management at Kymeta Corporation. She oversees product strategy, definition, and launch activities for Kymeta’s mobile satellite communications product line, which is making mobile broadband connectivity around the world ubiquitous.

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Product Portfolio Management & the Strategic Ripple Effect 9 of 10 – The Best Product Launches Launch the Story, Not the Product

Product Management University

The best product launches are like the cream cheese frosting on a decadent chocolate cake! You’ve just built some cool new A.I. enabled product or feature set and everyone’s totally energized over the upcoming announcement and marketing launch activities. The new product is going to boost your differentiation in the competitive space. Existing customers have greater confidence you’re keeping pace with or staying ahead of the technology curve in ways that benefit them.

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The hallmarks of good and poor B2B product teams

Mind the Product

Deepak Deolalikar, an experienced B2B product leader, discusses the key disciplines that good product teams must follow to find success in B2B products. Read more » The post The hallmarks of good and poor B2B product teams appeared first on Mind the Product.

B2B
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Techniques to Build Consensus and Convince Others

The Product Coalition

A variety of concrete approaches to change minds.

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What’s New in Apache Airflow® 3.0—And How Will It Reshape Your Data Workflows?

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

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How to Use Generative AI and LLMs to Improve Search

TechEmpower - Product Management

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly transformed the search engine as we’ve known it. This presents businesses with an opportunity to enhance their search functionalities for both internal and external users. With Generative AI and LLMs, new avenues for improving operational efficiency and user satisfaction are emerging every day.

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Product in Practice: Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect

Product Talk

Stepping into your first product leadership role is a major change. As an individual contributor, you’re focusing on your own projects and progress, but as a leader you are now responsible for the team (or teams) that report up to you. You may find yourself less involved in the day-to-day work of discovery and delivery and more focused on higher-level strategy.

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457: The right way to apply Kickbox to unleash innovation in your organization – with Ralph Hartmeier

Product Innovation Educators

How product managers can use Adobe’s Kickbox innovation system Today we are talking about using the open source innovation system called Kickbox that was created at Adobe. This is a simple and effective tool for increasing innovation by orders of magnitude in an organization. Our guest is Ralph Hartmeier, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of rready, an organization that started from personal experience applying Kickbox, and which now helps other organizations unleash innovation.

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Product Portfolio Management & the Strategic Ripple Effect 7 of 10 – Portfolio Positioning Is What Makes Your Product Positioning More Strategic

Product Management University

Here’s a simple example of portfolio positioning and how it makes your product positioning more strategic. Your accounts payable product improves the customer’s cash flow. It sounds strategic. What CFO doesn’t want a stronger balance sheet? Your accounts receivable product further enhances cash flow. Even more strategic when customers use both, right?

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Agent Tooling: Connecting AI to Your Tools, Systems & Data

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

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What we get wrong about technology by Tim Harford

Mind the Product

In the opening keynote at #mtpcon London 2023, behavioural economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford outlines two common mistakes people make when thinking about technological innovation. Read more » The post What we get wrong about technology by Tim Harford appeared first on Mind the Product.

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Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Models: Unleashing the Power of Generative AI

The Product Coalition

Generative AI is transforming diverse domains like content creation, marketing, and healthcare by autonomously producing high-quality, varied content forms. Its prowess in automating mundane tasks and facilitating intelligent decision-making has led to its integration into various business applications such as chatbots and predictive analytics. However, a significant challenge presents itself: ensuring that the generated content is coherent and contextually relevant.

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Product Managers Try To Decide How To Handle The Metaverse

The Accidental Product Manager

The Metaverse has arrived, are you ready for it? Image Credit: Juska Wendland Ok, so I think that we all have to agree: the metaverse has arrived. For anyone who didn’t realize that Facebook has renamed themselves to “Meta”, the metaverse is going to be a big deal. If you enjoyed the book / movie “Ready Player One” you know what I’m talking about.

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Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Product Talk

A regular cadence of assumption testing helps product teams quickly determine which ideas will work and which ones won’t. It’s one of the highest value activities we can do. And sadly, most product teams don’t do any assumption testing at all. And those that do, don’t do nearly enough. I want to change that. In this article, I’ll cover assumption testing from beginning to end, including: Why should product teams test their assumptions?

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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458: Selecting, planning, and prototyping product features – with Matt Genovese

Product Innovation Educators

Product feature validation and iteration – for product managers Today we are talking about tips for selecting, planning, and prototyping product features. To help us, our guest is Matt Genovese. He is the Founder and CEO at Planorama Design. He has in-depth experience marketing products, addressing product requirements, research, UX design, and management.

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Decoding Self-Serving Bias: A Spy’s Guide to Clear Thinking

Nir Eyal

One Sunday morning early in my career, I arrived at work to find a colleague of mine already there. We were working on a critical piece of software for an upcoming covert operation. He approached me shortly after I sat down at my desk. “That code you were writing was supposed to be done two days ago,” he said. “The operation is tonight, and we can’t go without you.

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A case study: How to build useful AI features with a cross functional ‘AI Squad’

Mind the Product

Lightful has been building features with AI tools with a fairly novel approach with an 'AI Squad'. The organisation has been working through daily iterations with a cross-functional team trying to apply product and design theory to the practical part of building AI products. In this case study, Jamie Eliott, Head of Technical Operations shares the team's key learnings from the perspective of tech, design, and product parts of the process.

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As a [persona], I [need] because I [need]

The Product Coalition

The user story format imposes just enough formality to insist we account for the persona, need, and purpose of a planned capability.

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From Start to Scale: Driving Growth Through Seamless Payments Implementation

Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting

Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical

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Alchemer Adds Slack, Shopify, Gladly, and Braze Always-On Workflow Initiators 

Alchemer Mobile

Now you can listen to more events from the systems your business runs on so you can collect feedback in context of your customer’s experience. By Justin Falk, Alchemer Product Manager, and Vanessa Bagnato, Alchemer Director of Product Marketing Every month, we release updates to the library of Alchemer Workflow Initiators, so that you can create always-on surveys and feedback in the context of your customer’s or employee’s experience.

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Product Portfolio Management & the Strategic Ripple Effect 10 of 10 – How to Set Customer Success Managers Up To Play Offense

Product Management University

In most B2B organizations, it’s more the exception than the rule that customer success managers inherit accounts where they’re in a position to play offense because the customer is thrilled with your products. Let’s dream for just a minute. It Starts With Product Management Product management consistently does discovery at a level that makes them more knowledgeable holistically on the markets and customers than all other disciplines.

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459: CX Design for products customers love – with Debbie Levitt

Product Innovation Educators

How product managers can promote human-centered design I wonder if you can relate to this frustration—the pressure to get products and product updates released quickly sometimes means making compromises on design quality. It’s an organizational issue—moving quickly to beat competitors and keep up with changing customer preferences. Speed is more important than quality.