Sep 10As a PM, You Probably Shouldn’t be as Confident as You Are (The Risk/Confidence Matrix)In the realm of product management, creating remarkable and impactful products requires a profound understanding of (and empathy for) the end customer and their goals/problems. A while ago, I wrote a post titled “Begin With the End [Customer] in Mind” where I reframed Steven Covey’s 2nd habit “Begin with the…Product Management5 min readProduct Management5 min read
Jul 8Oh No! AirBnB got rid of Product Managers! The Sky is falling!There’s been a lot of talk recently about the fact that AirBnB is getting rid of product managers, and the doomsayers are suggesting that it’s the beginning of the end for Product Management, and that no one really needs product managers after all.Product Management3 min readProduct Management3 min read
Jun 21Member-onlyI smell a RAT, or why you’re doing MVPs wrong.In the world of startups and product development, the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has gained significant popularity. It is an approach that focuses on creating a product with the bare minimum features to gather feedback and validate assumptions. Lots of people…MVP5 min readMVP5 min read
Feb 3, 2021Want to be Agile? Then you can’t be Predictable! (or can you?)Agility vs Predictability in Product Development This week in Product Growth Leaders we discussed the tradeoffs between Predictability and Agility in Product Development. How do you manage predictability versus agility when making budgets and plans? This is a oft-discussed topic, and somehow managed to come up 3 times in very different contexts for me this week…Agile3 min readAgile3 min read
Jan 9, 2021Product Management Professional DevelopmentHi all, and Happy New Year! After taking a little time off to recharge, be with family, and celebrate the holidays, we’re back in the saddle again this week with the Product Growth Leaders Topic of the Week. This week’s question was: What was your most valuable product management professional development experience (a course…Product Management4 min readProduct Management4 min read
Jan 1, 2021Reflections on 2020As I write this, it’s early on the morning of January 1, 2021, and my family is still asleep. It’s quiet, just me and the dogs as I have my ritual cup of coffee. Today is really like any other day — not really different than yesterday, if you really…New Year5 min readNew Year5 min read
Dec 21, 2020What Background Should You Look For for Product Managers?Another week, another excellent Product Growth Leader’s Topic of the Week discussion. This week’s Topic of the Week was: When hiring internally for a new product manager, what background do you look for? My initial answer was: By “new product manager” I’m assuming this is their first PM job, but…Product Management3 min readProduct Management3 min read
Dec 14, 2020Bringing Product Management to a company for the first timeI belong to a community called Product Growth Leaders, and we get together regularly to talk about various product topics. This past week we had a discussion on bringing product management to a company for the first time. …Product Management3 min readProduct Management3 min read
Dec 16, 2018You shouldn’t build your productIt’s really interesting how easy it is for founders of technology companies to lose sight of why they’re making things. Or to make things for the wrong reason in the first place. People start companies and build products for lots of reasons, for example: <b>They identified a hot new technology…Entrepreneurship3 min readEntrepreneurship3 min read
Aug 3, 2018I don’t want to hear about your buzzword laden product, and neither do your customersI see so many companies position their products and tell people all about their features and technology and everything. Especially software engineer-type founders who have trouble with human-type stuff anyway. Countless startups are so in love with what they’ve built that they can’t help talking about it, but it’s definitely…Startup3 min readStartup3 min read
