Ah, the lull at the end of the year — that time between Christmas and New Year when things settle for the year (or half, depending on your FY) and the calendar rolls over into a new year, full of new possibilities and new opportunities. For Product Managers, this is the time when you settle […]
The Clever PM’s EOY Recap!
Happy Holidays to everyone out there! As we’re nearing the end of the year, it’s a good time for reflection — 2015 was a great year here at the Clever PM, and I’m looking forward to 2016 providing even more opportunities!! As a little Christmas present, I’ve put together the following list of the top […]
How to Be More Agile as a Product Manager
As Product Managers, we often talk about agility and Agile methodologies from the perspective of how we prioritize and execute the work that needs to be done, but how do we as Product Managers actually make ourselves more agile and responsive to change? As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, Agile methods and agility in general […]
Why Isn’t Agile Working for Me — Part 2
In the first part of this series, I focused on two of the primary causes for failure in the implementation and use of Agile methodologies — cultural failure and lack of training. While these are probably the primary things that cause issues with Agile processes, they’re far from the only things that can (and do) go wrong. […]
Agile Roadmapping is NOT a Contradiction!
Many companies struggle with the challenges of reconciling the need for strategic planning and the desire to execute in an “agile” or Agile fashion. Generally speaking, this is because they’re stuck with the perspective that a “roadmap” must be a set of promises regarding what’s to be delivered, and not merely a strategy that will and must change over […]
Five MORE Things a Product Manager Should Be Thankful For
Last year, around this same time, I created a very popular post on the 5 things that Product Managers should be thankful for: Customers, Sales, Developers, the Cloud, and Our Peers. As we’re running up against another Thanksgiving here in the US, it’s time to revisit that post and provide a few new things that […]
How Much Technology Does a PM Really Need to Know?
It seems to be a pretty common question in the PM world these days — just how technical does a Product Manager really have to be? And what baseline amount of technical knowledge and/or skill does at PM really need to have in order to be successful. Many development teams will tell you that they want […]
Becoming a HiPPO Hunter
This is the second in an ongoing series of blog posts originally published on the UserVoice Product Management blog. There’s no Product Manager alive who hasn’t spent time dreading a HiPPO attack; the sudden derailing of well-laid plans by a management or executive-level stakeholder who insisted that their direction was the right one simply because it was […]
Solving the Mystery of Latent Customer Needs
The single most powerful tool that Product Managers have to make products that amaze and delight their users is to figure out what problems their customers have that they don’t even realize are causing them pain. Most people didn’t understand the benefits of 1,000 songs in their pocket when Apple first introduced the iPod back in […]
Why Isn’t Agile Working for Me?
It seems that lately Agile (and Scrum in particular) have become the latest targets of non-stop complaints and criticism in the Product Management and Development worlds. I’ve read articles that talk about how “Agile is destroying the business” or where “Scrum is a career-limiting methodology that only creates generalists.” Neither of these are necessary conclusions […]
Qualitative vs Quantitative Data
This article was originally written for the folks over at UserVoice, as the first of my contributions to their Product Management blog… To be subjective, or to be objective, that is the question, and the best product managers already know the correct answer is “both.” As product managers, we constantly face situations where the unknowns […]
Understanding the Difference Between Product Managers and Product Owners
I’ve noticed a decent amount of discussion lately on LinkedIn and other areas regarding the difference between Product Owners and Product Managers when it comes to Agile development practices. The confusion largely stems from the fact that textbook Scrum has a very specific definition of the Product Owner role, but has nothing at all to say […]