Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
When we’re building software products, we’re faced with daily/weekly “build versus buy” decisions. Should we license in a commercial product or platform to handle part of our own application, or build a capability ourselves? Product managers and developers can have dramatically different points of view…
Jason Knight invited me onto his One Knight in Product podcast for a wide-ranging chat about product issues and organizations titled “Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management”
Product Management Helps Us Build the RIGHT Things:
Strong product managers spent up to half of their time talking directly with customers, buyers, and partners. And the other half of their time with their teams: framing problems, collaborating on solutions, translating features into benefits and vice versa. Making sure that we’re building the RIGHT things as validated directly by users and buyers so that we deliver customer-defined value as well as increased velocity. That’s different from the narrow scrum definition of product owner, which is mostly internal-facing.
What Product Leaders Do:
Product management is a complex and strategic, with most of us falling into it accidentally. Career paths are unclear. So what do product leaders — the people managing teams of product managers — do? We’ll unpack this, including a discussion of narrower product owner roles versus broader product manager roles.
Rachel Obstler, VP Product at Heap, invited me in for a two-part conversation on her Product Therapy podcast. This is the second portion, where we talked about: Can we schedule innovation? No, but start with hypotheses… Insights are in the heads of our users: we have to discover things that they don’t already know What
Steve Divitkos’ In The Trenches podcast series is for entrepreneurs and CEOs running small/medium-sized businesses. I joined him for an episode about the importance of product management at the executive level.
Prioritization is hard, and we HOPE that a clear corporate strategy plus well-considered OKRs will get our internal stakeholders to agree on what’s most important: unambiguous #1 and #2 and #3 priorities. That our spreadsheets and analysis will sell everyone on our plan. But that rarely happen…
Rachel Obstler, VP Product at Heap, invited me in for a two-part conversation on her Product Therapy podcast. This is the first portion about why finding insights is so painful – and what you can do about it. We had a free-wheeling chat about common analytics pain points for product teams and how digital experience
Rich is joining Product Tank Des Moines/Ames for an “Ask Me Anything” session on working with sales and executives — ensuring they have the appropriate input without undue influence over product decisions.
How do we navigate when our internal stakeholders are misaligned (and they usually are)? It’s important to understand what drives this, see the pattern rather than get angry, and find some tools to keep our products/business moving forward.
