Product Management, Digital Strategy, and Leadership
I was rereading Marty Cagan’s book Inspired and I came across this quote: “Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results. Bad teams celebrate when they finally released something.” Marty Cagan, Inspired It’s a good reminder that as a leader we need to pay attention to what we celebrate. Launching …
I attended a talk several years ago by the CEO of a very successful software company, and afterward a current customer asked about a product enhancement. Most CEO’s would respond with something like, “It’s on our roadmap” or “That’s good feedback, we’ll take it under consideration.” Not this CEO! His response, “Our product is not …
I’m in the process of selling my car, and making a 20-year old truck my dad gave me my primary vehicle. The car was paid off, reliable, comfortable, and I really enjoyed driving it. So why get rid of it? Because I realized I didn’t want to invest my money in it any longer. I’m …
Shouldn’t we always listen to our customers if we want to create great products? Yes and no. Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake. Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton Christensen goes on to outline the dilemma we face as product managers. …
As a product leader, we should never let our teams think success is just delivering a feature, because our product teams don’t exist to deliver features. We exist to deliver business value by solving customer problems. Any time we learn how to solve a valuable customer problem and we launch that, we have succeed.
Why do we produce such complicated products when most would with Ockham’s Razor that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” How do things end up so complex when we all want to have the simplest possible solution, design, or implementation that we can come up with? I believe there are a few reasons: We …
What warning signs from your competitors might you be missing? Just before the start of World War II, pilots from Japan set numerous flight records outlined in a recent Air & Space article: “The flight of the Mitsubishi Ki-15 was the first of an impressive series of Japanese distance and endurance flights during the buildup …
Rework or change requests are the enemy to a project manager. But to the Agile Product Manager, they’re the result of learning. I don’t believe we are truly Agile if we only plan to build and release each feature once. To me that’s gambling. To be Agile, we must admit that we need to learn …
What exactly is an MVP for your product? Some see it as a way to avoid feature creep. Others as a way to phase out development. Still others will argue it’s a prototype or a mini finished product. I’ll leave the definitive answer to someone else, but one thing must be true. You need to …
Was the iPod a successful product because it was the best MP3 player on the market in terms of specs and features? No, the iPod succeeded because it combined a great technology (iPod) with a great business model (iTunes). Being a great digital companies today means no longer treating software development as separate from the …
