As Steven Haines first told me, “strategy first, roadmap second.” There is a step between the two – deciding which problems you will focus on solving with your product. Strategy defines the context for product strategy, and your product roadmap is a planning (and communication) tool for executing your product […]
Product Management Synapses
A peek at the train of thought a product manager might pursue in response to a funny image, with nuggets of useful thinking in some of the passenger cars.
The Potential of Agile
The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery. When an executive, too far removed from what makes creating products hard thinks of “agile” as a silver […]
You Won’t Believe What These Five Lenses Can Show You About Your Product
Fundamentally, product management requires you to assess, synthesize, and prioritize the needs which drive the creation of your product in the context of three main objectives: desirability, viability, and feasibility. While laudable, these objectives are too abstract to be actionable. That’s where the five lenses come in (I could not […]
Good Enough
We hear a lot about building products which are “good enough” or “just barely good enough.” How do we know what “good enough” means for our customers? No one really tells us.
Classifying Market Problems
Theodore Levitt may have developed the whole product model to help companies compete more effectively with their products. We wrote about the whole product game based on Mr. Levitt’s work. Recently, I’ve been using a variant of this model as a way to view a product and upcoming roadmap items. […]
Product Managers & Innovation
Thanks everyone for the great conversation in the most recent #prodmgmttalk chat session! This week, Roger Cauvin inspired us to think about product managers as innovators – or enablers of innovation. Each week, I find myself thinking about at least one of the #prodmgmttalk questions long after the hour is […]
Fast Follower Product Strategy: Microsoft Zune
Microsoft has a product called Zune that is a competitor to the Apple iPod. They just recently announced their second release – the new version of the Zune. Since Apple already dominates that market, Microsoft qualifies as a follower – how are they approaching the introduction of a new product […]