Publications
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By John Mansour on March 14, 2024
How Customer Success Can Grow User Adoption on New Releases
If you’re looking to grow user adoption on your products, a few more tools in your arsenal beyond traditional release announcements and in-product reminders will help your cause. Put yourself in the shoes of your users. They’re short-handed, carrying heavier workloads, and they’re overwhelmed with the amount of information coming at them from every direction, […]
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By John Mansour on March 6, 2024
What Makes An Effective Product Management Process
A great 30-minute conversation with Paul Heller, Chief Evangelist at Sopheon. But we didn’t discuss the process itself. We talked about value-driven product management, what it takes to get the rest of the organization on board and how to help other disciplines see the benefit to them. 30 minutes never went so fast. It’s definitely […]
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By John Mansour on March 5, 2024
The Definition of Product Management Is Shrinking. It’s Not Good!
The definition of product management has been changing and evolving over the past 10 years and I’m not sure it’s for the better. I make it a regular habit to have conversations with product management directors and VPs. Most of them are not our customers. It keeps me current on the landscape of the product […]
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By John Mansour on February 21, 2024
Competitive Demos – How to Attack Your Competitor’s Strengths
Competitive demos are stressful, especially when you’re operating on very little knowledge or hearsay information about your competitor’s weaknesses. Here’s the thing about focusing on your competitor’s weaknesses. Just like you, they know their own shortcomings and there’s a good chance they’ve been schooled on how to neutralize them with some clever positioning or avoidance […]
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By John Mansour on February 12, 2024
How To Climb The Product Marketing Career Ladder Faster
If you’re looking to climb the product marketing career ladder faster, here are five things you can do that’ll accelerate your climb. How you do these things may differ depending on your products and your sales model, but they’re otherwise timeless. I had great success with them in both individual contributor roles and leadership roles. […]
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By John Mansour on February 1, 2024
How To Avoid the Product “Version 1 and Done” Dilemma
You followed the textbook process for uncovering an unmet market need, justified the financial investment and successfully released product version 1 to market with great success. So, what’s the problem? The problem is you’re just getting started while the majority of your stakeholders are blissfully dusting off their hands thinking it’s done and eager to […]
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By John Mansour on January 17, 2024
Onboarding Customers – How To Use Job Tasks For Superior Results
When you’re onboarding customers, the end game is to improve the job performance of your users in ways that have measurable value to their organization. If that goal sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. It’s the exact same goal product managers aim for when they’re building new features and products. Onboarding Customers With a New […]
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By John Mansour on January 10, 2024
The Most Basic Rule of Product Positioning – It’s Easy
I learned a lot about product positioning long before I ever stepped into a product marketing role. For the first four years of my software career, I was a pre-sales solution consultant, a.k.a. demo guy! I think of demos as verbal product positioning. The difference is demos are a two-way dialogue with buyers whereas product […]
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By John Mansour on January 8, 2024
How to Be The Solution Consultant You Love Buying From
For all of you pre-sales solution consultants and sales engineers looking for new ways to differentiate your demos, step away from your products for a quick minute. Sure, the product is what prospects are buying in the literal sense, but with few exceptions, the biggest thing that’ll differentiate your products and your organization in the […]
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By John Mansour on January 2, 2024
Portfolio Management – Strategic Product Management at Its Finest
If you ask 10 different product managers to describe strategic product management, you’ll probably get at least 10 answers, maybe more. Here’s the one thing they’ll all have in common though. Every description will be something related to the product manager’s job responsibilities, and that’s why the definition of strategic product management varies so widely […]