Innovation • 7 min read Talking Directly with (Real) Customers I speak/write incessantly about the importance of product managers talking directly with their users and buyers (collectively “customers”), not…
Market Thinking • 5 min read Let’s Abandon Customers and Users I spend a lot of time sifting through documents, positioning and stories – trying to figure out who we’re talking…
Leadership • 5 min read Selling Vs. Learning I talk with product managers all the time, and always ask whether they are talking directly with end users and…
Market Thinking • 4 min read Why (Agile) Program Management Tools Don’t Help (Agile) Product Managers Agile development teams need tools for tracking the creation of software. There are dozens of well-known, purpose-built offerings including Jira,…
Leadership • 1 min read Tuesday is Female Pronoun Persona Day As a long-time B2B infrastructure product manager, I’m used to thinking about my customers as guys. IT managers and…
Agile • 7 min read Enhancement Requests are Personal and Political, Not Just Analytical As deeply data-driven, analytical product managers (or product owners or business analysts or development leads), we’d like to pretend…
Market Thinking • 5 min read EOL Cookbook This product end-of-life recipe has been hiding on my hard drive for dog’s years, but never got published. It’…
Market Thinking • 3 min read Does Your Product Suck? It’s been a tough week on the technical front, with a variety of products failing to perform their core…
Market Thinking • 5 min read Grocers and Chefs: Software Service Models This article captured an April 2007 talk I did at SVPMA [http://www.svpma.org]. The original slide deck is…
Market Thinking • 3 min read Avoiding the Post-Course Correction As early as 1961, Soviet and American space scientists planned for mid-course corrections: those tiny bursts of rocket power designed…
Market Thinking • 5 min read Insider Thinking Product managers and other product champions spend a lot of their time driving internal processes and decisions — the daily incremental…
Market Thinking • 4 min read The Strategic Secret Shopper I’ve often played the “secret shopper,” hired to approach key competitors as a customer or as a consultant to…