Fundamental rules to understand when working in Product Management — NOTE: This post was originally written in 2007 or 2008. I honestly don’t remember. It was one of the first blog posts I wrote and was published in the Pragmatic Marketer magazine and also on the web. You can find the original here. The examples in the article may seem…

A common piece of Product advice is for people to “Find a Problem Worth Solving”. This is often the first piece of advice in a list of how to build a company. On the surface, it makes sense. I mean, why would you focus on a problem that’s NOT worth…

The Art AND Science of Winning an Unfair Game. — NOTE: This is Book #1 in my list of recommended books for Product Managers. Book #2 is Invisible Women by Christine Criado Perez. You can read my post on that book here. I normally don’t recommend books to read because books are personal and contextual. What’s a great book for…

A Compilation of a Product AMA I held on Linkedin recently — I held a Product AMA on LinkedIn on July 14, 2023. It was quite active with many people asking questions. To more easily share the questions and answers, I’ve compiled them all here (in some cases augmented beyond the original). But the Linkedin thread has a lot of interaction, follow…

Far too many people think Product Management is about delivering product features. It’s not. It’s about setting the company up for ongoing business success. — It feels odd to have to say it, but I will: Product Management is about driving product success, not delivering product features. It is my observation that far too many companies struggle with business success because they don’t have a clear connection between what they do in Product and what…

Roadmaps and Plans are very different artifiacts with different purposes, and it is important to understand those differences and leverage them. — TL;DR Roadmaps are NOT Plans. They are not a finite set of things you will explicitly do. Roadmaps are the outputs of a Strategy process. …

Why having a vision is important and how to use it in steering your product — I ran a poll recently on LinkedIn asking people to select a topic for a blog post, and surprisingly (at least to me), the dominant choice was “Creating a Product Vision”.

Delivery is an internal activity, Launch is about making an initial impact in your market — I was asked a question recently about how companies should execute product/release launches in the context of a continuous delivery environment. i.e. how can we “wow” the market with a product launch when there is a continuous trickle of new features and functionality coming out of Engineering? To answer this…

We undermine ourselves with loose terminology and hand-wavy definitions — Every profession has it’s own language precepts and terminology. Legal, Medicine, Dentistry, Engineering, Epidemiology, Finance, Project Management etc. all have specific terminology to clearly identify important and common concepts. And even if you’re not in those professions, you’ve heard some of those terms and may have an idea of what…