2013

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The Most Underrated Product Management Skill: Influence Without Authority

Sachin Rekhi

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority. Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product.

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Get to the User Goal

Pragmatic Marketing

Agile developers want user stories; product managers want to bring back stories from the market about users. What we really need, however, is to understand user goals. User stories are one of the most misunderstood and misapplied artifacts when implementing Agile development. At first glance, they look like requirements—and it can be very easy for a team to sit in a room and crank out a bunch of them when under the gun to generate work for the next sprint.

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Are You a Business-Savvy Product Manager?

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

When I think of business acumen, the show Shark Tank comes to mind. If you are not familiar with it, I really recommend you check it out. The premise is that hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their company to a panel of 5 successful business people (a.k.a Sharks) in hopes of getting investment for their company. It’s very interesting to see the […] The post Are You a Business-Savvy Product Manager?

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Is Agile Really Cheaper?

Tyner Blain

There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” “You’re asking the wrong question. The right question is: is agile better?” How Agile Is NOT Cheaper. The fun thing about relative terms is that you have to do a comparison.

Agile 73
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The 25 Types of Innovation Dominating R&D Today

Innovation varies widely across sectors and organizations, creating value in diverse forms. Understanding different types is crucial for R&D teams to foster creativity and uncover missed opportunities. This guide explores 25 key types of innovation in management frameworks.

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Product Managers need to help stakeholders define the problems as opposed to solutions

All About Product Management

As a Product Manager I’m responsible for ensuring that stakeholders express their requests in terms of business problems as opposed to a pet feature, so that their real needs are met and do not get lost sight of when backlog items are aggregated into common themes as the product team figure out the best solution. Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Product Managers tend to spend a lot of ti

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The most important words in product management

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

This blog is in memory of Dave Fulton, a dear colleague and a fellow BPMA member who passed away two years ago from Leukemia. Dave was a product manager whose blog was called “Fulton Ventures” One of his last blogs discussed the two most important words in product management: Why? and No! Why? This is a key question product managers should ask.

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ProductCamp Global Coordination

Product Beautiful

If you are a ProductCamp leader, or are thinking about starting a ProductCamp in your area, this post is for you. There is a problem with how ProductCamps are organized and run today: they are very tribal. Knowledge is passed on a one-to-one basis, or by physically traveling to another city to watch how that camp performs. This is inefficient and error-prone, and leads to a “multiplicity” problem where we are making a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy and missing out on the chance to share

Travel 45
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How General Elections 2014 will be driven by WeChat app

SidsAvenue

Understanding Indian Demographics India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years. The number of first time voter in General elections 2014 stands at whopping 149.36 million. Majority of the first-time voters consists of youth considering that 50% of Indians population is below 25 years of age.

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How SAP Services Is Transforming to Outcome-Based Service Offerings

TSIA

SAP Services offers consulting, education, custom development, and support services to customers worldwide. At Technology Services World (TSW) Service Transformations held in Las Vegas this past October, Anand Eswaran, head of SAP Global Services, led a powerful keynote discussion that outlined the success factors in today’s economy, the impact of evolving Millennials’ (“Gen Y”) buying behavior, and what game-changing technologies such as cloud, big data, and mobile mean

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Launching LLM-Based Products: From Concept to Cash in 90 Days

Speaker: Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health and Tony Karrer, CTO at Aggregage

Christophe Louvion, Chief Product & Technology Officer of NRC Health, is here to take us through how he guided his company's recent experience of getting from concept to launch and sales of products within 90 days. In this exclusive webinar, Christophe will cover key aspects of his journey, including: LLM Development & Quick Wins 🤖 Understand how LLMs differ from traditional software, identifying opportunities for rapid development and deployment.

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What matters most (to investors)?

Product Manager in Heels

Occasionally, we have guest speakers at Babson College, and sometimes we get a really good guest speaker! Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Friend from Bain Capital Ventures. He was extremely sincere and provided very useful feedback about what matters most to investors, and how he evaluates the pitches he receives. When evaluating a company to invest in, Scott listed several things that he focuses on: TEAM TEAM TEAM TEAM (do you get the point?

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The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager

Sachin Rekhi

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or. quite the opposite. When it works well, the team feels as if the best ideas, regardless of where they came from, get implemented.

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Parallax Paralysis

Bryce York

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the software of the web isn’t ready for the influx of parallax backgrounds that are flooding the web. What I’m referring to here is the scrolling backgrounds all over the web that move at different speeds to the ‘foreground’ in order to create the perception of 3D layering. Example.

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How to build a UX and development team that really delivers (Part 2/2)

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the people-related challenges of integrating UX into an Agile team. Once you create a cohesive team, it’s now time to polish the process. Are you ready? It is true that process for the sake of process won’t do you any good. But, if you’ve already adopted Agile as your development methodology, […] The post How to build a UX and development team that really delivers (Part 2/2) first appeared on Daniel Elizalde.

UX 62
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An Architect’s Guide for Selecting Scalable, Data-Layer Technologies

There’s no getting around it: selecting the right foundational data-layer components is crucial for long-term application success. That’s why we developed this white paper to give you insights into four key open-source technologies – Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, Apache Spark™, and OpenSearch® – and how to leverage them for lasting success. Discover everything you’ll want to know about scalable, data-layer technologies: Learn when to choose these technologies and when to avoid them Explore h

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How is SaaS Changing Product Management – A Research Thesis

Tyner Blain

Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection. I am a visiting lecturer as part of the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Product Management degree program.

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Process for Prioritising the Product Backlog

All About Product Management

I’ve spent the past year bringing a new product to market, as a consultant Head of Product for a start-up business unit that’s owned by a multi-national. I had the opportunity to pretty much start at the beginning: pulling together the vision, setting up a product council/steering group, talking to users about the initial concepts and shape the overall product direction.

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5 steps to kicking off your Lean UX team

UserTesting

Today we’re proud to introduce a guest post from Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is a product strategist, Lean UX advocate, interaction designer, author , and all around good guy. Without further ado, let’s hand this post over to Jeff… Besides … The post 5 steps to kicking off your Lean UX team appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

UX 26
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Is Product management a skill?

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

Most of you are probably familiar with skills & expertise on LinkedIn. Among the many skills to choose from is product management. Being a product management professional, I have posted that on my profile and have been widely endorsed. But I was surprised to see that some of my colleagues who are recruiters, CFOs, VCs, sales people, etc. posted product management as one of their skills.

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Pricing for Profit: How to Set, Negotiate, and Succeed

Speaker: Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader

In today’s competitive market, pricing is more than just a number — it’s the cornerstone of profitability. The right pricing strategy ensures that you capture the true value of your offering, paving the way for sustainable growth and long-term success. Join Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader, in this exclusive session where he will explore how a well-crafted pricing approach balances customer perception with business objectives, creating a powerful tool for securing both competitive advantage a

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How To Build Your Audience Well Before Launching Your Product

Sachin Rekhi

Most entrepreneurs assume that the marketing and audience building phase of their startup begins post product launch. Yet I’ve seen some startups successfully build their audience well before they reach this point. They’ve been able to do this by investing heavily in building out a blog with independent value separate from their product yet designed to attract the target audience that their product will eventually serve. 37signals , SEOmoz , and Mint.com are three such success stories. 37signals

Finance 108
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The Product Manager as the Quarterback of the Team

Sachin Rekhi

I usually summarize the role of the product manager as the CEO of their product. But I had a great conversation with a fellow product manager a couple of weeks ago who was telling me what he loved most about being a product manager was being the quarterback of the team. That stuck with me and the more I thought about it I realized it was another great way to describe the role and the key attributes needed to be successful in it.

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How Am I Going To Move My Product Forward Today?

Sachin Rekhi

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more.

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Mastering Effective Communication as a Product Manager

Sachin Rekhi

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product. Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members.

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Maximize Supply Chain Spend & Asset Utilization with Innovative Test Automation

Connected devices are emerging at an explosive rate exerting pressure on larger operators; however, some organizations cannot continue to purchase the latest & greatest devices without ramifications. The introduction of automated test technology drives the optimization of supply chain expenditures leveraging forward & reverse logistics paths. Adopting innovative test automation tools addresses these challenges by providing robust solutions for testing the interoperability, performance, & securit

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How a Product Manager Can Listen to Their Users Every Day

Sachin Rekhi

In the ever evolving world of web and mobile products, it’s incredibly important to have a constant pulse on the sentiment, needs, and frustrations of your users. While traditional user research and usability studies are still an important part of the product development process, the web today affords real-time alternatives for getting daily insights into the minds of your users.

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What is Product Management?

Sachin Rekhi

The role of product management in technology firms is a critically important one that is often misunderstood. I’ve done product management at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and various startups, though my product management experience during my years at Microsoft (where it’s called program management) were the most formative and I continue to leverage those lessons to this day, especially when advising new product managers on how to think about their role and where they should be focusing their time.

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The Inputs to a Great Product Roadmap

Sachin Rekhi

I’m often asked how I think about coming up with the product roadmap for an upcoming release. To help answer this, I thought I’d share how my team recently went about thinking through the roadmap for an upcoming product we’re working on. Analysis of existing usage metrics. When you’re innovating on top of an existing product, the best place to start is by conducting an in-depth analysis of the existing usage patterns of your product.

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Evaluating a Product Manager's Portfolio

Sachin Rekhi

It's customary in the design world to evaluate a designer's existing portfolio as part of the interview process to get a better understanding of their work and the process they leverage to develop their designs. I find it equally valuable to evaluate a product manager's existing portfolio of products as part of a product management interview. When evaluating a product manager's portfolio, I'm looking to assess how successfully the product manager has owned the vision, design, and execution of th

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Enhance Customer Value: Unleash Your Data’s Potential

The complexity of financial data, the need for real-time insight, and the demand for user-friendly visualizations can seem daunting when it comes to analytics - but there is an easier way. With Logi Symphony, we aim to turn these challenges into opportunities. Our platform empowers you to seamlessly integrate advanced data analytics, generative AI, data visualization, and pixel-perfect reporting into your applications, transforming raw data into actionable insights.

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Presentation: What is Product Management?

Sachin Rekhi

I recently gave this presentation on product management at LinkedIn that I thought was worth sharing more broadly. Product management in my mind boils down to owning the vision, design, and execution of your product. I start the presentation by detailing what it means to own each of these areas of your product and their associated key responsibilities.

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My Favorite Product Management Tools

Sachin Rekhi

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics. Collaboration. Many of the responsibilities of a product manager involve collaborating, communicating, and coordinating efforts across a team of engineers, designers, product managers, and more.

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The Best Startups Minimize Their Dimensions of Innovation

Sachin Rekhi

The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. This enables them to take smart risks by focusing on what they can dedicate the needed resources to win.