Most companies that need a Head of Product Management don’t know how to find one. They write kitchen sink job descriptions; look for subject expertise instead of product expertise; fail to organize their interview process; and eventually give up on hiring the right product leader. (Or repeatedly hire wrong folks who don’t stay.) This talk will disassemble the problem, then offer recommendations for getting it right.
Product Management Auckland hosted this take on internal stakeholders, their competing goals, and what they really look for in a product roadmap. Slides included.
How do we communicate product management’s view of prioritization and strategy to ROI-focused executives? Here’s my side of several recent conversations.
We may be over-investing in a few outlier prospects and neglecting our core customers. How do we frame this and get support to fire one or two?
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.
Team-level priorities and backlogs need to be anchored to broader technical and business goals. Here’s how one product leader is getting her various pieces lined up.
The second video (of five) in Tolpagorni‘s product leadership series: Magnus Billgren and Rich Mironov talk about strategic product management challenges in agile organizations: the need for roadmaps, strong market input, and the increased (but very valuable!) additional work load for product managers. Recorded in March 2012 during Produktledardagen.
It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue. These already bake in your core business assumptions, though, so you should “stress test” your assumptions using scenario planning. We’ve worked with a range of executive teams on scenario planning: using market-driven product roadmaps to identify business risks and core assumptions, and then highlight the interrelationships among strategic choices. Once you can see how products and delivery dates relate to market realities, you’ll be able to answer the “what if” and “how…
As CEOs of our products, we product managers have a lot to do. Traditionally, this has included “build-versus-buy” decisions. The debate often hinged on whether technical tasks were “core” or just “context”. Over the last decade, this has shifted from “build-versus-buy” to “buy-versus-buy” as we balance more kinds of internal and external resources. Here are some thoughts on sizing various “buying” opportunities to keep products shipping and revenue flowing. The smallest opportunity might be called “the expert quick hitter”, then up to “niche technology provider” and finally a large “please build this for me.” All three are invitations to think about what your team can do for itself, and your own urgency to get revenue products to market. Small: “The…