Why do some products and companies fail, where others succeed. Based on surveys spanning 3,000 companies, 40,000 individuals and one-on-one interviews with 30 technology CEOs, Pragmatic Marketing found seven consistent success factors related to company culture, management style, and product & marketing strategies that propelled the winners. And also the seven fatal flaws that derail market laggards.

Article provides an overview of twelve rules for writing good requirements. Each rule has its own page (linked from this one).

... another benefit of having such a Knowledge Base System in place is that it is a valuable source of customer feedback. ... You, as a product manager, could be monitoring the system to understand better what your customers expect from your products...

A short article on stakeholders for PMs and BAs. Covers what is a stakeholder, the cyclical approach to stakeholder management and the influence engagement model. "The definition of a stakeholder is controversial. For example, project team members are generally not considered stakeholders, but in virtual teams, across matrix companies, they may be stakeholders, as their roles extend to beyond the project. They are thus committed more to their local business unit than the project’s success and have an impact on whether the project goes ahead and whether it is considered successful..."

To be successful, a product must not only do a better job on the process than what it is replacing (by a factor of 10 in some dimension), but also connect to the preceding and following processes without an impedance mismatch.

The Cranky PM throws out a request for strategies and tactics and gets several in the comments.  The question:

How do you tell customers that feature X won't be in the promised release? 

Overview, explanations, and details from Scott Ambler.  This documentation approach can be used for agile and non-agile processes.  It can also be used for product management / development and for business analysis.

If you want to be a bad product manager, ask customers to tell you why they love your product. If you want to be a good product manager, ask customers to tell you why they hate your product.

I have skimmed the topic of project success a few times but have never got into the meat of the topic. Here I am framing some thoughts I have about what constitutes success for project workers like you and me.

Product success,

Project success and

Project management success.

Perceived success What do you think?

The topic of applying agile methodologies to your business processes seems to have become quite popular these days. The benefits of becoming agile are pretty attractive for software companies and yet many of them still do not clearly understand how they could make a smooth transition and whether this “agile” thing really works ...