Archive of Lists Articles

Welcome to product management! Over the the better part of three months, Adrienne Tan at brainmates, product management people, put together a series of posts with ten tips for new product managers. Check out our article for a quick summary, and links to all the articles at brainmates.

In a slight segue from our agile project articles, here are five tips that may help other first time Ruby on Rails / Capistrano deployments. Even with the great resources available on the internet, there were some unexpected and obscure hurdles for a new-to-rails developer to get a site up and running. While Ruby favors convention over configuration, not all hosts are set up with the same conventions - so there isn’t much help available for the really weird problems.

Active listening is about more than gaining understanding. Active listening is about giving. Giving assurance that you understand someone’s needs. Giving confidence that you will address those needs. Giving feedback and acknowledgement that someone’s input is valuable. If you haven’t tried active listening, you may think it is a passive, receptive activity. Active listening skills will help you guide your customers and your team to do the right thing, and enjoy the experience.

Return on investment calculation is critical to using ROI for prioritizing requirements. We’ve discussed how to forecast return on investment by estimating costs and predicting benefits. Here are five tips to help you when calculating return on investment.

The following ROI calculation tips are detailed in this article:

1. Recognize the Risks
2. Discount Future Cash Flows
3. Separate Sales From Expenses
4. Overcome Ozymandias Syndrome
5. Ignore Infinite Elvises

Read on for the details…

The first step in writing the use cases for a project is to define the scope of the project. One way to do that is to list the use case names that define all of the user goals that are in scope. To do that, you need to know how to write good use case names. Good use case names also serve as a great reference and provide context and understanding throughout the life of the project. We present our tips for writing good use case names.

Marketing is as foreign to most software developers as swimming is to fish. We’ve found a list of ten truths of marketing, and we’re secretly sharing them with the developers who hang out here. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone in marketing.

The BABoK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge) lists 10 techniques for gathering requirements. Here’s an overview of each one. For more details, check out the latest Guide to the BABoK.

Seilevel has a post that presents the top 10 signs that you should not pursue a career writing requirements, check it out. Thanks Joy for the great article!

If This Be Treason, Make the Most Of IT! (Patrick Henry)

The customer is always right, except when he is wrong. When we have bad customers, we should fire them. Declare today as Customer Independence Day, where we declare our independence from bad customers.

Michael on Product Management and Marketing has posted the first in his series of product management commandments - Know Thy Customer. He provides five tips on how to know your customer better. We extend his idea to include understanding our customers’ markets, and provide more tips. By analogy, this is the difference between a detective who studies a criminal and a profiler who seeks to understand a class of criminals.