Some of you may be familiar with Sisyphus, the Greek king who was punished in the afterlife by being condemned to roll a boulder up a hill. Whenever he neared the top of the hill, the stone would roll all the way back down to the bottom again. For those Product Managers who are only just ...
(Today's issue has a fun challenge question that demonstrates just how much the software industry has changed in the past 20 years. See Can You Answer This? below.) Requirements are the fuel that Product Managers produce to feed the company's software development engine. As part of refining the quality of those requirements, it's helpful to understand ...
With product requirements, one temptation a Product Manager has to fight is the desire to jump into the details. You already know what you want, lord knows you've heard what people want often enough, someone's got to actually put them on paper, and that someone is you, so you might as well get started. But there's ...
Product Managers are tasked with managing a product. Yet they do not have control over the many departments who do the work of building, marketing, selling, and delivering the product. This means that Product Managers must learn to manage by influence. For Product Managers, having to manage by influence can lead to a mindset where they ...
Implementing new technology in the product is a task that often stymies software companies. Because the change frequently goes to the very core of how the software works, and developers are on unfamiliar ground, there is lots of potential for your company to get stuck delaying the use of new technology year after year. The key ...
One of the key contributions that a Product Manager can make is to provide regular, bite-sized input to the sales force about product benefits and competitive advantages. So often, sales reps are thrown into quarterly (or even less frequent) product training sessions consisting of more than an hour's worth of material poured into a single hour's ...
Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.
Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.
What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.
As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.
Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one
Of the myriad responsibilities that Product Managers take on, probably the most challenging one is training the sales force. It's like teaching at a troubled inner city school. You have to create all your own learning materials. You get no support from the people who run things. The class is disobedient and out of control. Then, ...
You often see job listings for Product Managers that describe the role as "product champion." It sure sounds interesting, but what exactly does it mean? Just what do you have to do to be the champion of a product? Product Managers are also often described as the "owner" of the product, or the "product CEO" (that's ...
In an earlier topic called "Product Positioning: Where Do You Stand?" I discuss product positioning to give your product a unique and highly competitive placement in the market. One of the outcomes of the process of determining the focus of your product - in terms of such elements as target market, users and features - ...
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