Moving from Services to Products
I’ve written a lot about the huge organizational and technical gulf between services companies and product companies. (See this…
Product Strategy
19 posts
Interview: How to Prevent Product Waste
UserTesting's Mike Mace interviewed me for The Center for Human Insight and produced this long-form post. We covered a lot…
Major Migrations Are An Organizational Challenge, Not Just a Technical Challenge
I’ve sat through planning for scores of major B2B migrations, and implemented a half-dozen of my own. Usually the…
Product or Feature?
Stepping out of leadership challenges for a moment, here’s a practical topic that some product managers struggle with: is…
Product Models, Service Models, and Investor Valuations
Almost every week, I have a conversation with executives at B2B software companies who don’t see a bright-line distinction…
“A Working Request Process Should End in YES” (aka Incompatible Worldviews)
Enterprise Sales/Solutions teams see the world one customer at a time; Product/Development teams see cumulative market impact and aggregate technical demand. These are fundamentally in conflict...…
The Risks of Replatforming
(Or How Major Platform Migrations Really Happen)
Many companies have replatforming efforts underway. Architectures get old, new
kinds of partners…
Prioritization Beyond Algorithms
The problem of prioritization comes up in many of my coaching discussions with
product leaders, and in almost every product…
Business Cases Are Stories About Money
Last week, I had three separate conversations with VPs of Product about business
cases… initially framed as “do you have…
Product In the Time of Cholera
I have about a dozen coaching/mentoring calls each week with product leaders, and the tone of those calls has…
“My CEO is a Finance Guy Stuck on ROI…”
(combining a series of similar conversations)
Head of Product: My CEO is a finance guy*, and is pushing the product…
Let’s Fire a Few of Our Customers
As product managers, we worry about market results – not just successfully
shipping stuff on time, but growing our product’s…