3 Paths to Market Leadership: Flash Mobs, Parades, Movements

We all want to be market leaders. Theres no question about it. However, its hard to achieve category supremacy for anyone especially when selling to businesses. And startups face a particularly nasty uphill battle in establishing a foothold in any existing market. First of all, there is often an established category leader. Second, B2B buyers are a conservative bunch, and their bias is to buy from the established leader or do what they always have done. So how do product management and marketing leaders break through?

Build the Machine That Builds the Product

When we talk about innovative companies and organizations, we mean those which are consistently successful, not just lucky. However, when we have conversations about this topic they usually take a bad turn into speculation about the sources of success. There is lots of talking but little guidance and insight when innovation is discussed.

Scrum Can Save and Destroy You

Scrum can save and destroy you. And sometime it does both in just that order. Only those unaware or unafraid will admit that they are not agile converts these days running scrum teams to build what matters. And there is no doubt that more integrated and continuously improving teams achieve more than their rigidly structured ancestors who went from gate to gate. But why are so many teams unhappy and building unlovable software? We might all be moving faster, but so fast that we are simply creating random acts of software.

Book Review: Cracking the Product Management Interview

If you are a product manager thinking about your next career move or someone looking to move into product management, this is THE book you should read and have as your reference.  I have been doing product management for many years and I found the book so resourceful. Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro have done a great job covering everything from the definition of a product manager role (remember that different companies have different definitions of what we do), how to transition from a non-PM role to a PM role, how to write a cover letter and resume that gets looked at to potential questions (behavioral, case studies, analytical problem solving) that you could be asked in a PM interview. They have interviewed product managers in companies such as Google, Twitter, Airbnb and Microsoft asking them about their day-day to activities and also senior Product Leaders as to how they have managed their careers.cracking the pm interview

It is written so well that it is a very easy read. The chapter I loved the most in the book was the one on “Estimation questions” where different examples such as “how many tennis balls can fit into an apartment” are worked out. The only chapter I have not read in the book is the one on “Coding questions”. This is only because I believe that Product Manager’s focus should be on the “Which” and “What” and not the “How”. It is our job to discover the customer problems, figure out “which” market problems are worth solving and “what” the solutions should look like from a User experience perspective. It is engineering’s job to figure out “how” they are going to develop the identified solution. But the chapter does not take anything away from the book.

I am confident that this book can end up to one of the best investments you could make if you are thinking about switching or finding a PM job. I strongly recommend it.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon: Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology

Launch Planning and Product Management

Great product launches create heroes. And product teams have the best product launches when they have clear goals, deliver the goods on time, and everyone is on the page. This is easy if we work with a really small team or dont have meaningful go-to-market programs timed to our launches. But thats usually not the case for product managers, product marketers, and software developers in mid-sized and larger organizations. This is where some lightweight launch planning can save us and help us as product managers and marketers lead the team with conviction.

A 90-Day Plan for Recovering Kanban-ers

There is growing unrest. As quickly as lean and ultra-lean approaches to software development have emerged, so has a nasty backlash. We see this daily as we talk with tons of product and engineering teams that are trying to build software that matters and be happy doing it. And struggling. As one customer recently secretly told me we are recovering Kanban-ers.

The Folly of Inside-Out Product Thinking

Have you ever run into this deductive reasoning? A. Customers like our existing products and our company. B. We are building a new product that reflects the priorities of a company executive who helped build our existing products. C. Therefore, customers will like our new product. Its clearly a violation of the First Law of Product: Customers decide what products they like, not executives or companies.

I’m Agile But My CEO Could Not Care Less

The developers and I always want to get on with it and build stuff in a sprint-to-sprint fashion, yet our CEO wants to tell everyone where the company will be in two years from a strategic viewpoint. And hes right and so is the team and I am the guy who gets to bridge the gap. I have learned to do both see tomorrow and today. I am a product manager and I am agile on the inside with a hint of blue sky.