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Blog Articles
Viewing entries tagged with 'management'
Regaining Your Product Mojo
In my last article, I talked about the problem where your product organization has been relegated to the role of a service organization, largely documenting the decisions and desires of others. I must have struck a chord because I received a record number of comments, mostly from people that felt trapped in this very situation and were anxious to see if there’s hope for change.
Dogs, Cows and Kids
I have never seen a technology product company that didn’t have more ideas they wanted to pursue, than capacity for pursuing them. So constrained resources is a reality of our world. Sadly, this keeps many companies from pursuing some truly promising products.
Inspiring Product Leaders
Last week Silicon Valley and the Internet industry lost one of its pioneers. For those that knew him, Mike Homer was unique and unforgettable. I worked for him for a time at Netscape, where he was the one of the principals there, initially running the marketing organization, and later the Internet portal effort.
Product Roadmaps
I can¹t tell you how many times product managers have shown me their sophisticated spreadsheets and algorithms for prioritizing their long laundry list of feature requests (weighting various factors like cost, complexity, risk, customer impact, projected sales impact, documentation, dependencies, etc.) eventually leading to a single aggregated prioritized roadmap.
Product Management in Economic Downturns
One consequence of having been around this industry for a while is that I¹ve seen several cycles. Sometimes the downsides are fairly minor and barely touch tech companies, and at other times nearly everyone has lay-offs, cost-cutting, consolidations, or worse. While it¹s never fun to see the industry enter a downturn, I have learned that this can actually be a very productive period for the smart companies that know how to weather the storm.
Product Discovery Diary
When product managers and designers move from the very linear, Waterfall-based processes, to the much more iterative and exploratory discovery-based process that I and others advocate, they sometimes take a little while to appreciate and adapt to the fast pace and rhythm of product discovery.
Product Manager vs. Business Analyst
In certain companies, mostly those that have an IT heritage (see http://www.svpg.com/blog/files/moving-from-it-to-product-organization.html), there may be an additional role somewhere in the product organization either in product management or in the product development organization that may be called 'Business Analyst.'
Laid Off; Now What?
Many of you probably saw that eBay recently had a lay-off, and given the condition of the economy they are not likely to be the only one doing so. What I wanted to talk about in this article was what to do if you find yourself in the same boat.
Product Managers vs. Business Owners
In some companies, mostly larger companies with multiple business units, there is an additional role in the product mix.
Moving From Enterprise To Consumer
Occasionally a company starts its life as one type of business but then finds that they need to change into another type of business. The most common such transition I see is to start by building products for very large companies (enterprises), but then decide you need to switch (or expand) to sell to consumers and/or small businesses.