August, 2017

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The Worst Nightmare of Any Product Manager

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: Liel Aharon (Mentee, Session 4, The Product Mentor) [Paired with Mentor, Felix Sargent]. At the end of 2015 I was in the worst nightmare of any Product Manager. I had a strong roadmap, clear goals and a vision for the product. The team had been working for almost a year and had a huge amount of code under their belts. We would regularly meet to discuss the features required, what the customers expected.

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How to Improve Your Experiment Design (And Build Trust in Your Product Experiments)

Product Talk

I’ve got a pet peeve to share with you. If you’ve been following along with the growth of the Lean Startup and other experimental methods, you’ve probably come across this hypothesis format: We believe [this capability]. Will result in [this outcome]. We will have confidence to proceed when [we see these measurable signals]. If you aren’t familiar with this format, you can learn more about it here.

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Do Product Owners Need Technical Skills?

Roman Pichler

How can you tell if you would benefit from having technical skills as a product owner? To answer this question, I find it helpful to look at how the role is applied. If you manage a digital product that end users employ, such as a web or mobile app, then you usually do not require in-depth technical skills, such as, being able to program in Java, write SQL code, or know which machine learning framework there are and if, say, TensorFlow is the right choice for your product.

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How to Break Free of the Feature Factory by John Cutler

Mind the Product

In the closing talk of this year’s MTP Engage Hamburg, John Cutler looks at why his Medium post 12 Signs You Are Working in a Feature Factory touched a nerve for so many people in product development. There’s widespread tension in our industry, John says. While everyone talks about “outcomes over output” and says they strive for “real impact” with their craft, in our day-to-day work many of us simply give all our priorities and attention to shipping features.

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Mastering Apache Airflow® 3.0: What’s New (and What’s Next) for Data Orchestration

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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A Better Approach To Demoing Can Turn Sales Around

The Secret PM Handbook

A Sales Demo Challenge. At one of my previous companies our new logo sales – that is, new customers – were tanking. The account reps were not hitting quota on new logos. The sales engineers felt this was due to a large degree to our “story” on agile. Our product was not as strong as some of our competitors for managing agile projects.

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5 User Pitfalls to Avoid

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: David Parmelee, Digital Strategy Consultant. As Marc Wendell described in a Product Mentor video, the foundation of success in both product management and user experience (UX) is solving a problem for a specific user. Products fall short when they include and/or over-prioritize extraneous features that don’t solve that user’s problem.

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How to Differentiate Your IoT Product: Provide Insights Not Data

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

IoT products are known for producing large amounts of data. Some people even argue that the reason to deploy IoT products is to produce and collect all this data, that the data in itself is what provides the value. I don’t think so. In this post, I describe the importance of having a data strategy and […]. The post How to Differentiate Your IoT Product: Provide Insights Not Data appeared first on TechProductManagement.

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Podcast: Product Management in Agile Orgs

Melissa Perri

After Mile High Agile, I sat down with Howard Sublett from SolutionsIQ for the Agile Amped Podcast. We talked about how Product Management is missing from many Agile Teams and how they need to think about introducing the right practices and principles. Check out the podcast below. The original link to the podcast is here.

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Taylor Wescoatt – Being the First Product Manager

Mind the Product

In working at Seedcamp and helping over 100 startups understand product thinking, Taylor Wescoatt has learned some valuable lessons he’d like to share, together with some real-world examples to drive the point home! Being the first product manager at a startup typically means being the 10th or 15th employee, and recognizing that – although product management has both tactical and strategic components – you’ll initially be more focused on tactics.

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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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A New Focus On Product Management Opportunity

The Secret PM Handbook

Looking through to the next stage. A long work in progress. This blog has been going for a long long time. It started as a site to share ideas and lessons I’ve learned in my career as a product manager for enterprise software products. Recently a bigger theme has started to emerge and coalesce. It’s more ambitious than my initial (lack of) vision.

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TEI 139: Crisis management for product managers – with Jim Parham

Product Innovation Educators

Listen to the Interview for Product Managers and Innovators. The topic of this episode is crisis management — meaning a crisis that threatens the reputation of a brand or product. When a crisis happens that involves a product, the product manager is expected to help with the issues. Also, as you take on more leadership responsibilities, it becomes more likely, if a crisis occurs, that you’ll be part of the team helping to manage the problem.

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Managing Product Managers – Building Trust

The Product Guy

Out of the hundreds of nominations, and amazing finalists, the 7th annual winner of The Best Product Person is … Chris Butler. The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group. Take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2016: Chris Butler. ( tweet ).

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Agile Transitions – Managing Expectations

Clever PM

We live in a day and age where there’s a ton of information and mis-information out there about pretty much every topic imaginable, and Agile development is certainly not immune to this phenomenon. In fact, anyone who looks for help in pushing through an Agile transformation in their organization is immediately confronted with a vast […].

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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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Hyperbolic Discounting: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices

Nir Eyal

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written and illustrated by Lakshmi Mani, a product designer working in San Francisco. Have you ever had a mounting pile of work you know you need to do but for some reason didn’t? There’s an important deadline looming, your boss is breathing down your neck, the pressure is on — […]. The post Hyperbolic Discounting: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices appeared first on Nir and Far.

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How to Run Product Portfolios at Scale

Mind the Product

In this talk I share my lessons learnt from client engagements with many of the world’s largest organizations. I showcase how I’ve helped enterprises rekindle their capability and culture of experimentation and learning. What are the key aspects to consider? Where should you start? What are the tools and techniques to use? How do you organize to make a meaningful business impact?

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How Are You Going to Fix Onboarding?

The Secret PM Handbook

You have a team of engineers and a three month runway – how are you going to fix onboarding? That’s a question I actually got in a product management job interview a while ago. My answer was, “that’s a really good question but I have no way of answering yet.”. Operating room or aspirin? This is the same question as “Here’s a team of surgeons, and I’ve booked an operating room.

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Interview questions product managers should prepare for–and other innovation insights for product managers Aug 11, 2017

Product Innovation Educators

Each week I scour articles, wading through the dogs, and bringing you the best insights to help product managers and innovators be heroes. Engaging responses to common interview questions for product managers. These questions are not specific to product management, but many would be part of a product management interview, such as the customary, “Tell me about yourself.

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Build Your Best Product Strategy: An Action Plan You Can Start Now

As your company grows and your product matures, so too should your product strategy. Drawing from their decades of experience as product leaders, Stanford Online instructors Donna Novitsky and Laura Marino share best practices for defining your product strategy at each stage of company growth. Get practical, real-world product strategy tips from experts who have lived through the same challenges you’re currently facing.

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Collecting Narratives to Clarify the Complexities of your Product

The Product Guy

Out of the hundreds of nominations, and amazing finalists, the 7th annual winner of The Best Product Person is … Chris Butler. The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group. Take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2016: Chris Butler. ( tweet ).

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Constructive Conflict

Clever PM

There are a great many company cultures in the world that go out of their way to avoid conflict of any kind. And, while the intent is good — nobody wants to work in a combative workplace — the common practice of lumping all conflict together into a single bucket and trying to toss it […].

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Hyperbolic Discounting: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices

Nir Eyal

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written and illustrated by Lakshmi Mani, a product designer working in San Francisco. Have you ever had a mounting pile of work you know you need to do but for some reason didn’t? There’s an important deadline looming, your boss is breathing down your neck, the pressure is on — […] The post Hyperbolic Discounting: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices appeared first on Nir and Far.

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20 Years of Product Management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

Mind the Product

Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0. Since then he’s had his share of successes and failures in a storied career spanning the US and Europe, and in this entertaining and insightful talk from Mind the Product San Francisco he distills those 20 years into twelve key lessons. Listen to Customers… This sounds obvious but it’s surprising how little we actually do listen to our customers.

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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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This Framework Gives You Product Management Super Powers

The Secret PM Handbook

Breakthrough! The Secret Product Management Framework. Finally writing down the Secret Product Management Framework was a revelation for me. It put all the activities I do as a product manager into perspective. We find and validate market problems for which customers will pay for a solution. We then guide the creation of solutions to the problems. And then we take the solutions to market.

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Conducting market research–and other innovation insights for product managers Aug 25, 2017

Product Innovation Educators

Each week I scour articles, wading through the dogs, and bringing you the best insights to help product managers and innovators be heroes. Tips for conducting consumer and market research for new products. You have to identify the right target segment, understand a real problem they have, and learn what action to take. Read the details at [link]. What you can learn from user behavior to improve aspects of products.

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Reconciling Product Management and Product Leadership

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: Lamia Benhaddou (Mentee, Session 4, The Product Mentor) [Paired with Mentor, Amanda Ralph]. A Product manager tasked to lead and manage her team while still providing product management capabilities; that was my position when I was selected to be part of the product mentorship program and paired with Amanda Ralph, my new mentor. Amanda had 18 years of product management experience and was able to clearly foresee the obstacles I might encounter in my new role.

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Silence is a Tool — Use it Effectively!

Clever PM

While Product Managers have a great many tools in their belt to use when working internally with stakeholders or externally with customers, there’s one tool that seems to elude so many of us. That tool is silence. When you’re talking with someone and trying to get them to say what’s really on their mind, what’s […].

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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Duke Heninger, Partner and Fractional CFO at Ampleo & Creator of CFO System

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Duke Heninger, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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IoT Shop Talk with Paul Jauregui, Security Expert and VP of Marketing at Praetorian

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

Welcome to IoT Shop Talk, a new series at TechProductManagement. IoT Shop Talk features in-depth conversations with product leaders on what it takes to build great IoT products…all from a Product Management perspective. In this edition of IoT Shop Talk, I’m talking with Paul Jauregui, VP of Marketing at Praetorian. Praetorian provides comprehensive, end-to-end security services […].

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Do Tech Skills Benefit a Product Manager?

Mind the Product

I have hired product managers for a while now, and worked with dozens. And since I come from a tech background, I have been asked many times (and I asked myself) if product managers should have some tech skills. Should they know how to code, and how it would help them in their daily work? I’ve even been asked by seasoned non-technical product managers if they should take a coding course.

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A Better Approach To Demoing Can Turn Sales Around

The Secret PM Handbook

A Sales Demo Challenge. At one of my previous companies our new logo sales – that is, new customers – were tanking. The account reps were not hitting quota on new logos. The sales engineers felt this was due to a large degree to our “story” on agile. Our product was not as strong as some of our competitors for managing agile projects.

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