From Forbes’ Leadership blog: my comments about the impending Unicorn Apocalypse. What happens when a few highly visible startups stumble and funding slows down?
Appreciative hat tips to bloggers, events, podcasts and product-specific tools that caught my eye during 2015. An embarrassment of riches!
There are a lot of inputs to product strategy including advisory boards, customer forums, sales teams and ROI prioritization algorithms. None are sufficient on their own: we have to develop and apply strategic judgment, and test that in the marketplace.
The software bits we release are not the whole product, but a part of the product. We need to make sure we ship a whole product, which includes a compelling story of interest to customers. Strategy, segmentation and customer joy matter.
If all of the profits are in the nth copy of software that we sell, we need to understand the Law of Build Once, Sell Many. Building for market segments is different (better) than custom development or professional services.
It’s a fact: your development team will never, ever, ever be big enough. As a software executive or product lead, how should knowing that change your actions or decisions?
In a job search, *you* are the product that you’re trying to market. Look for ways to apply your product management skills to yourself: segmentation/targeting, turning features into benefits, and solution selling. Become your own demo.
Product management is about allocating scarce resources across existing products/services while exploring new opportunities. We need to combine top-down, bottom-up and market-in approaches to make good decisions.
We make day-by-day or story-by-story prioritization choices without noticing the cumulative impact of those choices. But they add up. How can we easily see our implied product priorities?
Sometimes, ad-serving technology serves up exactly the wrong thing. Laugh or cry?