In today's issue I'm going to write about something that is near and dear to my heart, something that I have found tremendously helpful working with customers to implement new software and working on my own and with teammates to make important things happen. It's a way to understand the psychological stages which you - ...

We've all heard of the "No job too small" attitude, where a person considers nothing beneath them or too trivial to tackle as part of getting their overall job accomplished. Well, it seems to me that Product Managers have to deal with a very different challenge, the "No job too big" issue, where it seems ...

Volumes have been written about the concept of customer loyalty and how essential it is to a company's profitability and growth. There's no denying that when a company has loyal customers who keep coming back year after year to buy its product and recommend it to others, then that company sells more products at lower ...

If you have ever watched people playing on the tennis courts, you see two, or four, players in a game, actively running around and hitting a ball back and forth. Many rackets, one ball in the game. Have you ever taken a look at the edge of the court? There are tennis balls, lots of them, ...

In many companies, the management team, Marketing, and Business Development are full of ideas about where to take your product. They come up with all sorts of potential applications for it, applications that would be competitive and profitable. These ideas sound great, but they have to be implemented before they'll make any type of substantive difference ...

Product Managers, because of the nature of their responsibilities, carry out the unique function of making strategies real and turning realities into strategy. Since they are often called upon not only to view the product from the perspective of management and competitive strategy but also to apply the software tactically, and with great mastery, Product ...

Most companies pay lip service to truisms like "The customer is king." But it's easy for software companies to immerse themselves in the magic of their technologies and not actually focus all that much attention on the customer base. Far more companies talk about treating their customers well than do a good job at it. Yet ...

It's an unfortunate characteristic of our economy today that inadequate time is spent on training employees on a product. Usually, companies look to Product Managers to be the gurus on the product, understanding the ins and outs of all the features. So how do you get to the point where you know the product inside ...

Product Managers usually find that their success depends in large part in how well they work with teams of others to accomplish goals related to requirements, marketing collateral, sales support, analyst relations, and much more. It's a situation that involves influence rather than direct control, and direct responsibility but with indirect authority over others. It involves ...