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Page 6 Secrets of a Winning Product Launch A product launch is a critical time for an early stage company. The success of the next Product Launch could determine if your company survives. What are the k...
Page 2007 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey
Page A Fact-Based Approach to Outsourcing for Product Managers The word outsourcing invokes fears of the unknown, of losing jobs, of losing competitive advantage, and of losing intellectual property. By Barbara Nelson.
Page A Look at Clarity in Positioning Positioning is a process that focuses on conveying product value to buyers, resulting in a family of documents which drive all outbound communications. the best...
Page A Market Intelligence Primer True power comes from the integration of all four cornerstones of Market Intelligence. By Ed Crowley.
Page A Model for Metrics-Driven Feature Prioritization Learn the technique that relies on statistically-valid samples of broad-based customer data to understand customer needs and prioritize product enhancements. By...
Page Add “Quick Hits” and (Finally) Address Those Priority 3 Enhancements Woe to the minor enhancement request that gets tagged as a dreaded Priority 3 or nice-to-have feature during the prioritization phase of a project. All too ofte...
Page Agile Market Requirements Product managers write horrid requirements that are littered with buzzwords, ambivalent language, and non-specific performance parameters. They read like somewh...
Page Alignment—A Little-Understood Aspect of Product Management Knowing and understanding the customer is often called alignment. This article provides a foundation for the concept of alignment and relates it to several key...
Page An Agile Analysis of 2008 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey By Adam Bullied
Page Are You Decent? The Naked Truth About Product Management Performance Product management is typically thankless. Remind me again, why we do it? By Alyssa Dver.
Page Ask the Expert
Page Ask the Expert: Are There Best Practices for Business Cases? Are there best practices for business cases? Is there a standard way to develop a business case for my products?
Page Ask The Expert: Is There a "Gateway" Job or Path to Product Management? I’m looking to “break into” product management, but I have no direct “product manager” experience. I’d love to know if there is a “gateway” job ...
Page Avoiding The “Netscape Moment” What do you do when your company is facing its “Netscape Moment?” That is, the day Microsoft announces it will enter your market. By Nilofer Merchant
Page Before the MRD The market requirements document (MRD) is one of the key product management artifacts. But did you know there is a document that product managers should have in...
Page Beyond SEO: Driving Customer Attraction, Retention, and Top-Line Growth Does your website speak to your customers and fulfill your business objectives? By Jeofrey Bean and Sean Van Tyne
Page Brand Extensions We have a product which is well recognized in the industry. However, it is narrowly associated with a certain type of functionality. We are about to release som...
Page Building a Better Beta Delivering a successful beta program can be one of the hardest things to do as a product manager. By Saeed Khan.
Page Building a Listening Post Online For Customers Now, more than ever, companies are feeling the need to stay aligned with their customer’s evolving needs. By Sherri Dorfman
Page Building an ROI Calculator Tips on building an ROI Calculator that leads to better sales at a lower cost. By Jacques Murphy
Page Building Product Management Credibility How does one build strong credibility around the Product Management team in an environment where there is subtle tension between Product Management and Engineer...
Page Building Tomorrow's Products Requires Listening to the Market Becoming a market expert can be the most valuable of all activities you can do as a product manager. By Barbara Nelson.
Page Built To Order: Making Product Management Fit Each new company, product, or team may require customizing the way you conduct Product Management in order for it to take hold and succeed. By Jacques Murphy
Page Buy/Build/Partner Evaluation Have you ever created a visualization that shows the true development cost and lost opportunities compared to (vs) partnering for quick time to market? Put anot...
Page Buyer and User Personas How to develop clarity about the ideal buyer and user. By Steve Johnson.
Page Can Customers Doom Your Software? How the act of gathering and implementing the wrong requirements can cause your product to lose its competitive edge, and what a Product Manager can do to preve...
Page Career Growth and the Product Manager The most effective product managers and mentors of product managers recognize the importance of mastering the portfolio of informal leadership skills, and they ...
Page Career Management Lessons from Product Management Applying product management processes to your career. by Melissa Paulik
Page Case Studies: Top Eight Ways to Get them Done Most enterprises realize the value of effective case studies, yet many product managers struggle with the task of actually developing them. This article describ...
Page Change is Pulling Us into the Cloud Product Management must communicate with and understand the development team. In an Agile world, they must maintain a sequentially prioritized requirements list...
Page Change Now, Change Later If your naming challenge is simply based on a hit-or-miss process, then you are definitely not going forward. By Naseem Javed.
Page Changing Jobs in Product Management: Evaluating, Farming, Interiewing, and Negotiating There comes a time in every product manager’s career when a job change is inevitable; either through choice or circumstance. Given today’s economic reality,...
Page Clash of the Titans Billions of pages going to trillions. Most of the information available online is replicated again and again, then twisted, corrupted and re-entered. When one s...
Page Collecting Contacts for Win/Loss What are some best practices for managing the collection of the sales contacts (for either prospects or existing clients) that will be interviewed for win/loss?...
Page Competitive Analysis for Sales Getting information so that your sales reps can sell better against the competition. By Jacques Murphy
Page Competitive Analysis: Digging for Info Pointing you in the right direction when you are called upon to analyze the competition. By Jacques Murphy
Page Competitive Analysis: Ready When They Are Competitive analysis is a vital function at a company, especially in the fast changing software industry. Yet it is an activity that is often neglected or hapha...
Page Competitive Information and Sales Guides: What Sales Forces Need to Win Six field-tested salespeople-approved best practices to help you put competitive intelligence to work for your sales force.
Page Content-Free Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List How many times have you read marketing materials for software that did not contain any real information? Here is a list of meaningless buzzwords and ways to avo...
Page Contract Product Management What are your thoughts on the prospects for contracting out product management? I have engaged with companies that I have worked with in the past to provide pro...
Page Creating A Great Trade Show Playbook Advice on what to include when you create a Playbook for your trade show team in order to maximize your company’s return on a trade show. By Jacques Murphy
Page Creating Product Management at a Startup the pitfalls involved in creating a Product Management function at a company, along with guidance that will help you be successful in such a vital component. By...
Page Creating the Right Product Roadmap In most companies, Product Management is responsible for building, maintaining, and presenting the product roadmap inside and outside of the company. However, o...
Page Customer Loyalty: Mind & Body, Heart & Soul A whole lot has also been written about how to build customer loyalty. These stories cover companies that advocate vastly different ways of creating loyal custo...
Page Customers: Love Them As You Would Yourself How the Product Management function can help build an enduring connection with your customer base. By Jacques Murphy
Page Degrees of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management What do you look for when you want to hire an ace product manager to champion your product and move forward relative to the competition? By Jacques Murphy.
Page Desktop vs. Enterprise Applications: The impact on Product Management There are many differences between managing a desktop tool or application and managing an enterprise-ready software package. By Daniel Shefer
Page Distinctive Competence or nothing Developers, executives, managers, sales people and others are all in high demand in our industry. Our time is precious. (And money is not.) By Steve Johnson
Page Does Agile Have to Be Acrimonious? Avoiding Engineering vs. Product Management disagreements in an Agile world. By Stacey Weber.
Page Doing Market Analysis - Easy Right? For anyone involved in product strategy, one of the key milestones to accomplish is market research. At its best, it uncovers that diamond in business and mark...
Page Downsized? Fired? Here are the new rules of finding a job Sending out hundreds of resumes is not the answer. Learn the new rules of job seeking. By David Meerman Scott
Page Due Diligence for New Product Ideas Any company can use due diligence principles to evaluate new product ideas. This article presents a hypothetical example of how to use due diligence for new pro...
Page Effective Product Managers Know Their Market Webinar with Barbara Nelson
Page Enabling Cross-Functional Teams: A Leadership Role for Product Managers A cross-functional team helps communicate more broadly, gain alignment more easily, and builds better products. And as an added benefit, the team helps product ...
Page End of Life: Retiring a Product Outdated software can turn into a monster. How do you discontinue a product that is no longer profitable? And how do you know that it's time? By Steve Johnson.
Page Everyone needs to know what we do here Technology marketing and product management requires domain expertise. People who tell you otherwise probably aren't very effective in working with technical pr...
Page Expand Your Comfort Zone A Product Management Quiz to Point You in the Right Direction This quiz can help you assess your effectiveness in working with Sales, Engineering, and executives. It’s a bit like the Myers-Briggs test, but just for produ...
Page Exploiting the Full Potential of After-Sales Market Technology product managers often think only in terms of tangible product, missing the incredible opportunity to double or triple revenue with services. By Dr. ...
Page Faster! Gaining Product Momentum One of the top tasks of a product manager is to make the product gain momentum. Read on for tips about how to build momentum to catch up with competitors and ev...
Page Finding Potentials I've been spending much more time with customers of late and have been gathering lots of valuable information. I'm now interested in expanding my market focus t...
Page Five Slices of Segmentation Segmentation has always been a key part of marketing. Sorting customers into appropriate segments allows business and marketing types to filter ideas, glean int...
Page Five Ways to Torpedo Your Product Management Career With technology-based solutions it really does “take a village” to raise a successful product. Failing to recognize that can lead to disaster. Learn the fiv...
Page For Product Success Some Factors Matter More I like product management. I’ve done it, directly or indirectly, for over 20 years, in startups, small companies and large. It’s demanding and fascinating w...
Page Fresh Or From The Can? Why The Better Product Still Struggles In The Marketplace Learn how to incorporate the fundamental tenet of human nature into your product planning and marketing to increase adoption and sales. By Kevin Mireles.
Page Get Results? or Get Approved? Marketing is about listening to our customers; we cannot assume that we represent them, that our personal experience is the same as theirs. By Steve Johnson
Page Getting Management to Buy-In on Positioning Are your product people muttering that management doesn't listen to them? Adapt a positioning process that includes executive management approval of your messag...
Page Getting People to Answer Win/Loss Questions In my win/loss calls, a lot of people just say "I don't know" to an open ended question... how do you get people to really answer the question that will benefit...
Page great tips for doing great demos I know Demo is a great PR opportunity, but if you don't do a demo, only you'll know you have mediocrity. If you do the demo, the whole world will. By Guy Kawas...
Page Guerrilla Training: Learning the Product How do you get to the point where you know the product inside and out, especially when you are assigned a new product or change companies? By Jacques Murphy
Page High Impact Product Management: Creating and Measuring Product Management Success A discussion about how to measure the impact of product management, the need to be proactive, and key elements and considerations for successful product managem...
Page Holding A Successful Customer Conference Ideas about holding a successful customer conference that enhances the reputation and success of your product. By Jacques Murphy
Page Holding Development to Dates How can product management most effectively hold development groups to dates that are promised?
Page How Can Product Managers Help Marketing? See how you as Product Manager can contribute to Marketing in order to make your product's marketing stand out in the busy, crowded, and uncertain software mark...
Page How has your job changed?
Page How Many Products per Product Manager? Are there any guidelines on how many products a product manager should be responsible for?
Page How Product Managers Help Development? Product Managers are in the unique position of having dual citizenship, with passports for both Marketing land and Development land. By Jacques Murphy
Page How to Conduct a Successful Webinar: A Presenter's View A webinar is the perfect venue for most formal presentations. Yet, something's missing. For all its high-tech convenience, a webinar lacks a human touch. By Har...
Page How to Fit Your Product Strategy to Small & Medium-Sized Businesses Opportunities abound for the small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) market to adopt technologies that will advance their operations and expand their sales cap...
Page How to interview your Customers Your personal success depends on talking to your customers. Here are ten points to help you do just that. By Kristin Zhivago.
Page How to Make Less of a Mess in Software Product Management Understanding the role of product management in your business can be very confusing. It can also make or break your company. By Bruce Hadley.
Page How to Make Selling Complex Solutions Simple Explore why product training fails and what can be done to succeed in this area. By Andy McGinn.
Page How to Turn Sales Engineers into Your Biggest Fans Here are some tips not only for a successful. working relationship, but also the fundamental activities that will turn SEs into the PM's biggest fans. By Darrin...
Page I Am Customer, Hear Me Roar A Product Manager's Irreverent Look At How Technology Companies Listen To Their Customers--or Fail To. By Les Jickling.
Page I Know Nothing about Product Naming (but that Doesn’t Stop Me from Doing It!) As a marketer for a new product, naming is something you may have to do even though you know nothing about it. There isn't a magic formula for creating a good p...
Page Idea Generation for Product Managers Are you creative? Learn some techniques for generating your next big ideas. By Robert Siegel
Page If You Could Say One Thing to Your Company President... If you could say one thing to your company president without fear of reprisal, what would you say? We received nearly 650 responses to this annual survey questi...
Page Inability to Get a Product Launch Date in Scrum Environment In our SCRUM environment, It is impossible to have an official Product Launch date that the project team can drive towards and deliver. Does SCRUM prevent us fr...
Page Industry Immersion An important part of being a product manager lies in understanding the industry where your product competes. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t actually r...
Page Integrating Users into Product Development This two-part series explores the impact and process of incorporating users into the product design/development process. In the first article of this series, ...
Page Investment in Customer Advisory Programs Helps Build Business Read how three customer-focused companies have been listening and collaborating with their customers to keep up with evolving needs and staying one step ahead o...
Page Is Product Management Agile? There’s a lot of talk about Agile Product Management these days, and for obvious reasons. The thinking is that because of Agile software development, Product ...
Page Is Your Product A Missionary Or A Savior? Is your product a Missionary or a Savior, and what does that mean for your business model? Is one easier than the other? How does this change the role of the Pr...
Page I’m Agile? I’m Agile. I’m Agile! Becoming an Agile Product Manager After 18 months of practicing Agile product management, I am finally feeling more like a yogi rather than a victim of medieval torture. Here are five things I l...
Page Keeping Close to Customers How we listen to the market to become experts in what they need. By Barbara Nelson.
Page Knowledge Transfer: Starting It Out Right Knowledge transfer is the one important thing that companies forget to build into their plan time and time again. Read on for tips about putting together an eff...
Page Lead on Purpose: How Product Managers Lead Teams to Success How do the principles apply to product management? The role a product manager often plays in an organization resembles (at a macro level) the role a person’s ...
Page Leading Teams to do Great Things: How to Succeed When You Have All the Responsibility and No Authority! Webinar with Anne Pauker Kreitzberg
Page Listening to the Market in Lean Times By Marina Gil-Santamaria
Page Make Your Product Succeed: What Will It Take? As a Product Manager, your scope of responsibilities calls upon you to get involved across the board in all aspects of the product. By Jacques Murphy
Page Managers as experts Nowadays, people who manage people are now called Directors and people who manage ‘things’ are now called Managers. In effect, the term manager can now be e...
Page Managing Complex Competitive Environments Foremost in the minds of product managers is determining the best way in which to position their products against competitors. The decisions made have huge impl...
Page Market-Driven Goal Setting: Using Market-Driven Techniques to Align Your Own Quarterly and Annual Goals with the Market Webinar with Stacey Weber
Page Marrying Up: Partnering with Big Companies Learn the basics on what a small company needs to know in order to make its alliance or partnership with a big company work out for the best. By Jacques Murphy
Page Maximize Your Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Turning users into fans It isn’t just about winning customers anymore. You have to build fans. By Scott Sehlhorst
Page Maybe Your Opinion IS Relevant A famous Pragmatic Marketing quote is reconsidered. By Jim Foxworthy
Page Measuring Success of a Software Product How do companies measure the success of a software product after it has been installed on the customer's site? I usually use customer surveys and questionna...
Page Metric for New Headcount I am trying to identify a metric as to the typical revenue or # products that is used to justify a new headcount. I have heard $40M to $50M per product manager....
Page Migrating From a Product Manager to an Entrepreneur There are key factors you should consider as you dream of building the next Yahoo! or eBay on your own. If you decide to take the plunge, here's a top-ten check...
Page Missed Delivery Dates - The Trust Factor First, take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone – this happens to many product managers. Second, understand there are ways to avoid it. By Stacey ...
Page Monitoring Metrics Puts You in the Drivers Seat Learn to focus on key performance indicators to find what is on track and what needs to be changed before it is too late. By Barbara Nelson.
Page More Performance Anxiety: More About Performance Improving product performance so that your software remains competitive. By Jacques Murphy
Page Multiple Products, Multiple Product Managers When a company expands to multiple products and product families, firms must integrate a broad set of skills among multiple product management professionals. Re...
Page Navigating Pathways to the Future: Product Roadmaps Lead Their Readers in Multiple Directions At a recent Product Strategy Network roundtable, a group of product strategists shared their benefits as well as frustrations with the technique of roadmapping....
Page New Features: Moving Ahead On All Fronts Tips on how to keep making progress on several new features with each software release. By Jacques Murphy
Page No Job Too Big: Cutting Your Job Down To Size How can anybody possibly cover all the ground that needs to be covered? - from PRODUCT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES A Newsletter of Tips For Companies that Develop ...
Page No One to Blame: The Perfect Crime Satisfy customer needs with a mindset of being customer-driven. By Eran Livneh.
Page OEM'ing Software for Product Managers The "ins and outs" of identifying OEM'ing opportunities, successfully negotiating OEM agreements and bringing the deals to fruition. By Daniel Shefer
Page Old Demo War Stories For the many Product Managers and others out there who have given software demos, you know just how badly things can go wrong. By Jacques Murphy
Page On Reqs and Specs: The Roles and Behaviors for Effective Product Definition Do you write Requirements or Specifications? Or do you combine them into ReqSpecs? Each has a place but combining them just causes confusion. By Steve Johnson a...
Page One Voice of Priority Speaking with one voice to the product team is critical for an agile product manager.
Page Online Customer Forums This article describes the advantages of an online customer forum and offers tips on how to set up and manage one. By Daniel Shefer
Page Overcoming Resistance to Prospect/Customer Visits When approaching a prospect or customer for a "visit the market" activity, what's a good way to respond to their question, "How does this benefit my company?" I...
Page Patents and the Product Manager While engineers are an important source of innovation and legal departments must be involved in the patent process, product managers are uniquely situated both ...
Page Performance Anxiety: Improving Product Performance A user's impression of how fast your product moves from screen to screen, how quickly it calls up lists of records, how seamlessly it performs tasks when you cl...
Page Practical Rules for Product Management: Some rules just aren’t meant to be broken (Part 2) Part 2 of interpretations and personal experiences of Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 rules for product management success. By Maureen Rogers
Page Practical Rules for Product Management: Some rules just aren’t meant to be broken (Part 3) Part 3 of interpretations and personal experiences of Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 rules for product management success. By Maureen Rogers
Page Practical Rules for Product Management: Some rules just aren’t meant to be broken (Part 4) Part 4 of interpretations and personal experiences of Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 rules for product management success. By Maureen Rogers
Page Practical Rules for Product Management: Some rules just aren’t meant to be broken (Part I) Part I of interpretations and personal experiences of Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 rules for product management success. By Maureen Rogers
Page Pretty Please: A Product Manager's Wish List Requirements from the Product Manager are the fuel that powers the product development engine at your organization. - from PRODUCT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES A Ne...
Page Price Tiers I'm trying to develop a new product, which is offered in several tiers. Each tier will have different usage limits. I'm trying to ensure that the limits by tier...
Page Pride, Denial, and Product Positioning For Product Managers who are have not been through the product positioning exercise a few times, the greatest difficulty about it may not be the effort itself b...
Page Product and Pricing Strategies Pricing has far reaching effects beyond the cost of the product. By Daniel Shefer
Page Product Management and Agile Building a product is like driving a train: it takes a long time to start and a longer time to stop. And once the train leaves the station, it's very hard to ch...
Page Product Management and Product Marketing Activity Where do product managers and product marketers spend their time? By Steve Johnson and Adele Revella
Page Product Management and RFPs Make RFPs less painful and streamline the process so that fewer resources are needed. By Jacques Murphy.
Page Product Management and Services Professional services is the next challenge for product management. In many companies, definition of services is an ad hoc affair, nothing more than a rough gue...
Page Product Management as a Counterbalance The ideal company grows in such a way that it contains a balance of all the various strengths it needs: marketing, sales, technical knowledge, customer service,...
Page Product Management Associations A conversation with five industry gurus about product management organizations.
Page Product Management Axioms Here is a small set of axioms to guide you in your job, bring focus to tasks at hand, and convey fundamental ideas and principles in discussions. By Saeed Khan....
Page Product management bonus programs The typical product manager gets a cash bonus each year, yet most do not find their bonus particularly motivating. By Steve Johnson
Page Product Management Budget Where do Product Management costs fall in the corporate budget? I've always seen them as part of the Product Delivery budget (Engineering, etc.), but am being a...
Page Product Management Calendar I am being asked to setup a "Product Management calendar" in which I specify "monthly and annual duties of a product manager". This is to include monthly develo...
Page Product Management Job Titles Titles really are a mess in our business. What one company calls a product manager, another calls a product marketing manager. By Steve Johnson
Page Product Management Tips & Essential Product Manager Tools, Where to Begin in Product Management So you're in a new role as product manager. Where do you begin? By Brandon Whichard
Page Product Management to CEO What is the typical career path for someone starting out as product manager? Associate PM, PM, Sr. PM, Dir of PM, VP of PM, President, CEO? What other pathways...
Page Product Management Triad Some product managers have a natural affinity for working with Development, others for Sales and Marketing Communications, and others prefer to work on business...
Page Product Management: For Adults Only It takes a certain maturity to professionalize technology product commercialization. Learn from a company's abrupt growing-up experiences including sharp about-...
Page Product Manager vs Business Analyst How would you define the functional difference between a Product Manager and a Business Analyst (where the PM sits in the business and the BA sits in the De...
Page Product Manager Wanted: HR's Mission Impossible? Human Resource professionals know that a well-oiled product management organization improves the chances of success for new products while increasing the long-t...
Page Product Managers and Marketers: Who Does What? Recently a reader asked for a definition of the product manager's role in an organization, and explain how the role relates to marketing. Here is the answer. By...
Page Product Managers are Really Super Heroes in Disguise! There are two really hard jobs inside a company. One is being a CEO, and the other is being a product manager. By Nilofer Merchant.
Page Product Pricing and The Socratic Method Product pricing, how to structure and set the price of the software product. By Jacques Murphy
Page Product Road Map: The Real and The Ideal The Product Road Map deals with information at different levels of detail. And what looks realistic from 30,000 feet may seem a little idealistic once you get d...
Page Product Roadmap to the Promised Land Do you have a Product Roadmap? One can be critical to supplying the inspiring vision that everyone uses to march in the same direction. And this is all the more...
Page Product Roadmaps Just like planning a trip, a roadmap communicates in broad strokes what you plan to do. Explore ways to the most direct route. By Steve Johnson.
Page Product Strategy Doesn't Just Happen Discover the need for developing a process to drive the development of your product strategy in order to achieve sustained growth. Explore both the key aspects ...
Page Product vs. Solution How would you define the difference between a "product" and a "solution"?
Page ProductCamp Best Practices ProductCamps are taking North America by storm. If you haven’t participated in a ProductCamp, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. If you have partici...
Page Providing a Product Roadmap to Customers When we provide quarterly projections of functionality to customers, it sets their expectations. Internally, there is no way to get a committed delivery date un...
Page Questions to Ask in Win/Loss Analysis
Page Re-Inventing Product Management with LOVE To deal with the changes in how customers interact with companies, a new model for customer relationships is needed. The Lifetime Opportunity Value Equation (LO...
Page Re-Write of our Core Product We are trying to tackle a re-write of our core product. The re-write is huge and will be the foundation for the next 5-10 years of our growth and development. T...
Page Reconciling Maintenance And New Releases What you need to consider as you continually strike a balance between development on maintenance releases and on new feature releases. By Jacques Murphy
Page Research for B2C Product I am currently a Product Manager in a start-up company. My experience before this has been in B2B software. I am now faced with a B2C product, brand new from...
Page Retiring a Product Are there any methodologies or common frameworks used to manage an exit strategy for a product that will no longer be offered? How do I build a business case a...
Page Role of Product Management An effective product manager is not just support, they are the critical link to the customer. By Steve Johnson.
Page Running Customer Advisory Boards A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is a representative group of customers that meets periodically to offer advice on the product and company direction. This articl...
Page SaaS Product Management You’re a product manager. You have segued from managing on-premise software to on-demand. Everything has changed. Or has it? By Barbara Nelson
Page Sales Training: Revving Up The Troops One of the duties that frequently falls to Product Managers is to train the sales force, getting it prepared to sell the product. By Jacques Murphy
Page Sample Product Manager Job Description Hiring managers should be clear about the job responsibilities before hiring a product manager. This job description details the skills to look for in technolog...
Page Setting the Product Direction In a world where there is never enough time to implement all the ideas that come along for great new features, you need to choose the right ones to put your dev...
Page Seven Things You Can Do to Improve Your Credibility on the Web When it comes to believing what one reads online, credibility matters. Read the top tactics and persuasion strategies you can employ to improve your own website...
Page Seven Ways to Acquire and Retain Customer References Satisfied customers willing to serve as references for your new prospects often make the difference between winning and losing the sale. Getting and keeping tho...
Page Software Product Management: If You Can't Define It, You're Doing a Bad Job at It Learn about the importance of product managers and how software companies are screwing up by not capitalizing on their value and talents. By Bob Weinstein.
Page Staffing: Role of Product/Business Analyst 1) How is a typical product management organization set up? I have product managers and I need to put together a job description for a junior product managemen...
Page Start with the ending You're all fired up to be market-driven. What do you do first? For an existing project or product, start with the ending. By Steve Johnson
Page Start With the Ending: When the Role of Product Management Changes from Tactical to Strategic Webinar with John Milburn
Page Stop Perfuming the Pig: Why “real” marketing is done before the product is created No amount of perfume can overcome the stench of a technology product that people don’t need. By Steve Johnson
Page Stunningly Awful Demo Evolution - Have You Ever Seen Demos Get Shorter? When a demo is first created for a new product, it is often short and well-focused. But with each successive release, demos get longer. After several years, mul...
Page Stunningly Awful Software Evaluations - A Strategy of Hope? If your organization’s evaluations are not as successful as you wish, consider using this list as an assessment tool. By Peter E. Cohan
Page Surveying Pilot Test Customers I am just baffled by a response I received from a co-worker regarding surveying the customers on a product. "In my opinion, way too many questions are being ask...
Page Surviving Product Management For all the goodness of product management, there are the challenges too. This article offers some lessons learned through a career that includes product manage...
Page Technical Sales vs Marketing Identify the differentiators between marketing and technical sales to sweeten the message to your customers. By Rick Tatham.
Page Technology Assessment for a Better Strategy “Strategy” is such an overused term in our industry. “Where’s your STRATEGY?” or “It’s our STRATEGIC direction!” or “How do these tactics fit ...
Page Technology Assessment: Foundation for Product Strategy Webinar with John Milburn
Page Ten Things Product Managers Should Know About Sales Product managers routinely support the sales process but many times lack enough knowledge to do this. By Daniel Shefer.
Page The Art of Panels More than 20,000 people attended "Startup 2006" panel discussion! Learn what to do when you are moderating or participating in a panel (of any size). By Guy Kaw...
Page The Business Case for User Oriented Product Development In developing any given technology product, great care is taken to make sure the technology works correctly. Software is constantly debugged, hardware is system...
Page The Economics of Software as a Service (SaaS) vs. Software as a Product There are numerous ways of selling software these days. Software as a Service (SaaS) has been in the consumer market for a while, and is now making significant ...
Page The Exceptional Product Manager: What is the Right Stuff? What separates an exceptional product manager from a merely competent product manager. By Mark J. Tiedman.
Page The Four Phases of Implementation The Four Phases of Implementation is a helpful concept that you can take with you from customer to customer, project to project, and job to job to help you rema...
Page The Freemium Business Model and Viral Product Management Ever scratch your head and wonder why you can use your favorite application for free? How can a business actually make money (and stay in business) when they...
Page The Fundamentals of Revenue Forecasting It is nearly impossible to predict annual revenues precisely, particularly for new products or businesses, but it is critically important for companies to creat...
Page The Mythical Product Owner Product Managers must quickly adapt to the Agile methodology, or face becoming sidelined. It is critical to understand the relationship between traditional and ...
Page The Real Ideal: Strategy to Tactics and Back The invaluable contribution Product Managers can make to helping the company apply its strategies tactically, and draw from tactics to make solid strategies. By...
Page The Role of Sales Engineer in Technical Sales Sales engineers play a critical role in technology companies. Review the functions of the sales engineer's job and the problems they face in high-tech firms. By...
Page The Sport of Support Of the many activities at a software company, customer support or customer care is one of the toughest to provide. By Jacques Murphy
Page The State of the You Even if your company doesn't ask you to do it, send your manager an annual status report on your projects: a "State of the You" status report. By Steve Johnson
Page The Strategic Product Manager and the CFO Give your CFO an opportunity to contribute, participate in the day-to-day workings of your product as a business, and you may just get a business partner who ca...
Page Three Tips at the Tip of the Iceberg: How to ensure the success of your IT projects Do you work in an IT environment that operates in firefighting mode? Is your department considered overhead for the organization? Are you confident that your IT...
Page Time for product management Are you pulled from one issue to another? Do you feel pressured into helping development, marketing communications, and the sales channel? Would you like some t...
Page Time Management for Product Managers
Page Tips & Tools: How To Run Customer Focus Groups Successfully Despite claims and ad campaigns to the contrary, many companies are doing a poor job of establishing productive dialogues with their customers. A simple but eff...
Page Tips For Delivering Consistent Services Software plus services plus customer effort equals success. It's critical to take steps to make each service you deliver predictable, complete, and consistent a...
Page To Startup or Not to Startup? WANTED: Product manager to work in exciting, fast-paced startup! Must be willing to accept longer hours for less pay. Ability to wrangle founder’s gigantic eg...
Page Top 10 Tips for Briefing Industry Analysts Briefing technology industry analysts is a learned art rather than a formulaic science. Each analyst and analyst group is different, as is each technology compa...
Page Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience The one fundamental truth vital to web product development success is to know the mind of the user. By Giovanni Calabro
Page Training Services The Pragmatic Marketing Framework is the standard for organizing and measuring product management and product marketing teams at 5,000 companies in 21 countries...
Page Two to Tango: The Art of Crafting, Building and Maintaining Business Partnerships More and more, companies are placing an emphasis of pursuing growth strategies that involve strategic partnerships. Read on to see how strategic alliances allow...
Page Understanding Market Needs Through Customer Visits When conducted effectively, the information gleaned from real-world customer environments can be an important part of your product definition and marketing effo...
Page Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework™ Updating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework by Jim Foxworthy and Steve Johnson
Page Use Value Propositions to Validate Your Product Often times, people write value propositions for their products as part of the marketing exercise in the later part of release cycle. On the surface, it sounds ...
Page Using Force Field Analysis to Listen to Customers Force field analysis is a technique that elevates a painful exercise into powerful feedback. Learn to use this simple tool to quickly brainstorm and prioritize ...
Page Using Research in Defining New Products Every company can benefit from understanding the new product development processes that are used by brand leaders that manage to thrive during tough and uncerta...
Page Using the Pragmatic Marketing Framework for Job Interviews Here’s a great tip: when you’re part of a product management job interview, take along your Pragmatic Marketing Framework. Whether you are a hiring manager ...
Page Using Twitter for Product Management Using Twitter is not all about what you had for lunch or who you are meeting with tonight. It can be used to research markets, competitors and your customers. B...
Page Utilizing Co-Design to Create Market-Driven Products Designers are not typically users of a product, yet they often engineer a product with little or no end user involvement—and without understanding in advance ...
Page Validating a Market Problem Our team is struggling with a question internally: How many potential end points (prospects/customers) does a enterprise- level, B2B, market-driven product m...
Page Visionary Product Manager What are some of the traits and characteristics of a visionary product manager.
Page What are Patents? According to the patent office, an invention is “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement...
Page What Do I Do With All These Facts? All the market evidence in the world won’t help if you can’t tease out market problems, and prioritize them appropriately. By Stacey Weber
Page What is a Product Manager For? When I tell people at parties that I'm a Product Manager at a software company, the response is usually: "Oh, that's nice ... what exactly is a Product Manager?...
Page What To Do When Your Boss Just Doesn’t Get It! How can you improve your chances of convincing a boss who resists new ideas and new ways of doing things? By Anne Pauker Kreitzberg
Page When Creative Is the Wrong Tool! The Ideative Process: A Better Tool for Our Constrained World When I ask a person if he or she is “creative,” the common response from product and marketing managers, engineers, financial managers, and just about every...
Page When Should You Name a Product? Can you tell me at what point in the process should an organization name a product and what is your recommended process to accomplish this successfully?
Page When to do Win/Loss Interview How long should you wait till after the deal is done to conduct a win/loss interview?
Page Where do I begin? A Product Triage There's so much to do! In every situation, there are more things to do than can be done, so a new product manager has to determine the best use of time. By Stev...
Page Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization? Product Management’s placement in an organization is an indicator of the CEO's understanding of its potential. By Steve Johnson.
Page Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization? The strategic role of product management is to be “messenger of the market,” delivering market and product information to the departments that need facts to...
Page Where should product management be in the company? It seems that many corporations try to solve internal process problems by moving people around. But where should they put product management? Is there one perfe...
Page Where Should Product Management Report? Companies are all over the map when it comes to which part of the organization is in charge of Product Management. By Jacques Murphy
Page Who Needs Product Management? Product management is a well-understood role in virtually every industry except technology. In the last ten years, the product management role has expanded its ...
Page Who Should Conduct Win/Loss? Should Sales follow up or is that something the Product Manager should do?
Page Who's driving your company? Corporate business goals and wants are relatively similar across diverse industries, but the methods they use to reach their goals vary greatly. Explore these d...
Page Why API as a Strategy A compelling reason to build your product and its strategy around an API. By Emile Kfouri
Page Why Are We Winning and Why Are We Losing? Exploring how we listen to the market to become experts in what they need. By Barbara Nelson.
Page Why Are We Winning? Why Are We Losing? Webinar with Barbara Nelson
Page Why Demo at Trade Shows? Why do we demo at trade shows? Do you have a good answer? By Steve Johnson
Page Win/Loss Analysis Checklist for Product Managers So, now that you are conducting win/loss analysis, what is the next step? Use this handy checklist and you will be on your way to performing effective win/loss ...
Page Working With Partners Ideas on how to develop a good marriage with the right partner company for your product, and how Product Managers can play a key role in forming a long lasting ...
Page Worry: A Product Manager's Best Friend Worry is the habit that kept us paranoid enough to be ready to run in case we found a bear or wolf or wildcat around the next bend. By Jacques Murphy
Page You can never have too many product managers Count the number of people in your company who presume to have or assume some part of the product management role. I’m not talking about people who influence ...
Page You Can't Innovate Like Apple When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without questi...
Page You Want to Start a Company. Where Do You Begin? Find a problem, solve the problem, tell the world you solved the problem, and sell it--take these four key tips from Intuit and learn how to be market-driven. B...