Real-World Tips and Advice for Software Product Managers
One of the biggest headaches for software companies of all sizes is the creation of RFPs. RFPs are labor intensive, exhaustive and exhausting efforts to tout the product. The effort to produce RFPs can be a drain on precious resources in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. And Product Managers get involved more often than they wish ...
Setting prices for a software product is definitely one of the more daunting tasks for a Product Manager. While it's a little easier to set the price for shrink-wrapped, mass-marketed software for consumers, finding your way to a satisfactory and satisfying price for enterprise software is like finding your way through a labyrinth. It's hard to ...
Remember the good ole' days, the days of the dot.coms? People didn't just build software. They set out to build the best transformational software ever. Development groups held meetings that never had action items and talked excitedly about how they were going to apply cutting edge technologies. They didn't plan to upgrade the existing software (when ...
If I could point to a common trait of Product Manager positions, whether the focus is technical or marketing, it's that Product Managers spend much of their time in what I call interruption mode. Interruption mode is when it seems like everyone, from the CEO to the UPS delivery man, pops into your office to ...
Reams of advice have been written about how to design a highly usable user interface for software products. There are experts who have devoted their entire careers to this subject. Far be it from me to try to compete with this body of knowledge. However, as a Product Manager, I have usually found myself in a ...
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 ...