Most of the heavy lifting that a product manager is responsible for is at the beginning of a project. They’re often in charge of customer validation, spec’ing things out, wireframes, prototyping, team building, etc. Once a project gets into the hands of developers, a product manager is still involved, but doesn’t have as much physical […]
Don’t Squeeze Your Product Managers Into Uselessness
Product managers are important. They won’t be the first hire in a startup –since the CEO is very product-focused, particularly early on– but at some point in time, CEOs need product managers to help out. When that happens, product managers have to be very careful about not getting squeezed between the CEO and the development […]
A Holistic View of Products and Product Management
My definition of “product” is broader than most. I think of product as everything and anything a company outputs that touches customers. Your product isn’t just the physical item you deliver to customers, or the software that your customers use. It’s the entire experience your customers have with your company. Product = Customer Experience This […]
Moving Towards a Continuous Integration and Deployment Process
Believing in continuous process improvement is one thing, implementing it is another story. But that’s part of the product manager’s job — to evaluate the processes you have in place for product development, find the trouble spots and try to fix them. In fact, that’s everyone’s job: standing by while things aren’t working is a […]
The Role of Product Managers
I came across an interesting discussion on Branch about the role and future of product managers. I’m not a member there so I couldn’t respond directly, but figured I’d put my thoughts here instead. Yesterday the discussion only had a few comments on it. Today there are more and one of them is very similar […]
6 Tips for Implementing Continuous Process Improvement
Most startups are so busy racing around that they rarely take the time to evaluate and improve their own processes. It’s unfortunate, because as a startup matures it won’t be able to function the same way it did at the very beginning. Once you throw in users, customers, more code, freelancers, more employees, etc. it […]
Performance vs. Features — Which is More Important?
It’s fairly well understood at this point that performance is a critical aspect of building for the web. Better performance typically means better results (for whatever you’re trying to get people to do.) E-commerce transactions go up. Sign-up conversions go up. And so on. The same holds true with B2B / enterprise software. People will […]
Always Be Pitching
Build, measure, learn. That’s the Lean Startup mantra. It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly tough to do well. And while it’s designed to eliminate waste and provide a speedier path through product development and validation, it can still lead to silos in how we think about startup progress. It’s so easy to spend an inordinate […]
Small Features
We often measure the “size” of a feature based on how hard it is to build (development time) and how hard it is to use (for end users.) So a “small feature” is one that’s easy to code and easy to use. But are small features really that easy to build? Coding a feature may […]
The Specification is Dead; Long Live the Specification
In the olden days, most people followed a waterfall method. It involved writing “complete” specifications on exactly what had to be built, how it would be built, how it would work, look, etc. You’d have the “complete” package of documentation up-front and then you’d start coding. Seems like eons ago… Then we were introduced to […]
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