People value something most when they’ve just lost it or come close to doing so. If your product prevents this happening, take some advice from Joni Mitchell: you need to save your client the heartache of loss by helping them remember how much they value what they have now so that they don’t take it for granted.
Do you spend more time writing documents about your product than actually managing it?
Many companies with some kind of product management function become all caught up in the process, drowning themselves in increasing numbers of documents. These rapidly become overwhelming to manage, contain duplicated detail and ultimately obscure the real objective of product management, namely to create successful products.
We product managers are a surprisingly upbeat bunch considering that we seem to spend a good proportion of our time making compromises. We very rarely get the opportunity to deliver everything we need in a product in the best possible way.
So much of being a product manager depends on successfully persuading and influencing others. Whether you’re presenting your product strategy, presenting a business case to the Board or talking with your customers, you need to know your subject matter: to demonstrate a good knowledge of your products and market to ensure that you come over as authoritative and credible.
When we start thinking about the requirements for a new product version, I bet we all make the same mistake when deciding what goes in: we guess solutions rather than find problems.
Ah, pricing. Always a thorny topic for product managers as it’s one those more subjective areas of the job. I’d love to have some kind of oracular spreadsheet that foresees how much customers would be willing to pay for my new product. Ironically, I would pay good money for such a thing…
You expend a lot of effort getting people to buy your product and they’re happy with it.
Time passes.
You then go back to your satisfied customers and tell them what they have is now mediocre, so they have to move onto your latest and greatest product version. You see this everywhere, from washing powders to family cars, so it must work for enterprise software, right? So why are your no-longer-happy customers now chasing you with pitchforks and burning torches?
As a product manager, how do you know you’re doing your job well? This article outlines the problem with traditional metrics for product managers and offers some better alternatives for measuring success: communication, ideas, roadmapping, launch and end-of-life.
There are many questions you need to be asking to determine the best course of action or to analyse underlying motivations. Of them, I use the following three questions most often:
1. So what?
2. Why?
3. What’s stopping us?
