Real-World Tips and Advice for Software Product Managers
Compared to manufactured goods or hardware, software products are easy to integrate so that they work together seamlessly. Therefore, collaborating with other software companies to complement and extend the scope of your own product has the potential to transform it and greatly increase your customer base, revenues, and profits. Joining up with partners can result in ...
At technology companies, Engineering and Development is the motor that keeps the product moving forward. Unlike real motors made out of metal, this one depends upon a lot of moving parts that are all-too-human, so it stalls a lot. A Development effort that sputters and stalls too often can lead to a product that falls ...
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 ...
Is it possible to do such a good job catering to customer requirements that your product fails? Sometimes your company can listen to users so well that you wind up taking your product down a path that leaves it far behind the competition, and only a superlative effort would let you catch up, if you ...
For Product Managers who are have not been through the product positioning exercise a few times, the greatest difficulty about it may not be the effort itself but what you need to do in order to be ready for it. That's because in order to position your product well against the competition, you need to ...
I have given countless software demos in my career. But the funny thing is that when I myself sit down to listen to a product presentation, my heart sinks and all I can think is: "Oh, no, not another boring demo!" The problem with software demos is that so many of them are so very ...
The software industry, and the high technology industry in general, is so young that sometimes everything about it seems to be brand new. It's a whole new world filled with new products that deal with unfamiliar concepts. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is already "old hat" when it's a term that was unknown ten ...
Technology companies, since they are largely peopled by technically oriented individuals, often fall into the trap of creating marketing and sales materials that are overly focused on the technical side of the product. Product Managers usually play an indispensable role in pulling the development of marketing collateral and sales tools over towards the business perspective. There ...
Companies that make software have one big strong point: they know how to make software. They know how to build all sorts of cool features that work in amazing ways. And when they do that, they create businesses that succeed. But the problem comes when this strength at making new features is not rounded out by ...
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 ...