Sachin Rekhi

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

Product managers require a diverse set of skills to excel at their role, including design, technical, analytical, communication, and more. Yet there is one skill that I find is often underrated but critical for the success of a product manager. And that is the skill of influence without authority. Product managers have a unique challenge in that they own the product, yet do not manage any of the people who are directly responsible for executing on the product.

Product Management 109

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 109

Pragmatic Marketing

JUNE 3, 2013

Agile developers want user stories; product managers want to bring back stories from the market about users. What we really need, however, is to understand user goals. User stories are one of the most misunderstood and misapplied artifacts when implementing Agile development. At first glance, they look like requirements—and it can be very easy for a team to sit in a room and crank out a bunch of them when under the gun to generate work for the next sprint.

User Testing 70

User Testing Customer Experience Customer Feedback Weak Development Team 70

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

When I think of business acumen, the show Shark Tank comes to mind. If you are not familiar with it, I really recommend you check it out. The premise is that hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their company to a panel of 5 successful business people (a.k.a Sharks) in hopes of getting investment for their company. It’s very interesting to see the […] The post Are You a Business-Savvy Product Manager?

Product Management 62

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 62

Tyner Blain

JULY 9, 2013

There are several ways to answer the question “is agile cheaper than waterfall?” Here are two of my favorites: “It depends. Agile done well is cheaper, as long as you measure correctly.” “You’re asking the wrong question. The right question is: is agile better?” How Agile Is NOT Cheaper. The fun thing about relative terms is that you have to do a comparison.

Agile 73

Agile Weak Development Team Feedback Software Customer Feedback 73

Traditional PM struggles with the complexities of platform ecosystems. B-MAP framework tackles this challenge. B-MAP goes beyond features, focusing on building, managing, adapting, and partnering to foster a thriving platform ecosystem.

Product Management

All About Product Management

MAY 28, 2013

As a Product Manager I’m responsible for ensuring that stakeholders express their requests in terms of business problems as opposed to a pet feature, so that their real needs are met and do not get lost sight of when backlog items are aggregated into common themes as the product team figure out the best solution. Albert Einstein said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Product Managers tend to spend a lot of ti

Customer Experience 59

Customer Experience Product Management Product Manager Management 59

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

DECEMBER 8, 2013

This blog is in memory of Dave Fulton, a dear colleague and a fellow BPMA member who passed away two years ago from Leukemia. Dave was a product manager whose blog was called “Fulton Ventures” One of his last blogs discussed the two most important words in product management: Why? and No! Why? This is a key question product managers should ask.

Product Management 56

Product Management Product Manager Product Research Management 56

Product Beautiful

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

If you are a ProductCamp leader, or are thinking about starting a ProductCamp in your area, this post is for you. There is a problem with how ProductCamps are organized and run today: they are very tribal. Knowledge is passed on a one-to-one basis, or by physically traveling to another city to watch how that camp performs. This is inefficient and error-prone, and leads to a “multiplicity” problem where we are making a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy and missing out on the chance to share

Travel 45

Travel Product Management Product Manager Management 45

SidsAvenue

DECEMBER 27, 2013

Understanding Indian Demographics India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years. The number of first time voter in General elections 2014 stands at whopping 149.36 million. Majority of the first-time voters consists of youth considering that 50% of Indians population is below 25 years of age.

Advertising 40

Advertising Transportation Customer Experience Messaging 40

TSIA

DECEMBER 18, 2013

SAP Services offers consulting, education, custom development, and support services to customers worldwide. At Technology Services World (TSW) Service Transformations held in Las Vegas this past October, Anand Eswaran, head of SAP Global Services, led a powerful keynote discussion that outlined the success factors in today’s economy, the impact of evolving Millennials’ (“Gen Y”) buying behavior, and what game-changing technologies such as cloud, big data, and mobile mean

Data Visualization 40

Data Visualization Education Consulting Technology 40

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Product Manager in Heels

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Occasionally, we have guest speakers at Babson College, and sometimes we get a really good guest speaker! Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Friend from Bain Capital Ventures. He was extremely sincere and provided very useful feedback about what matters most to investors, and how he evaluates the pitches he receives. When evaluating a company to invest in, Scott listed several things that he focuses on: TEAM TEAM TEAM TEAM (do you get the point?

Differentiation 40

Differentiation Customer Experience User Testing Customer Feedback 40

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 25, 2013

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product. Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerant to the dissemination of ideas, to team cohesion, and to even the motivation and inspiration of team members.

Data Visualization 84

Data Visualization Product Management Product Manager Reporting Tools 84

Bryce York

JANUARY 23, 2013

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the software of the web isn’t ready for the influx of parallax backgrounds that are flooding the web. What I’m referring to here is the scrolling backgrounds all over the web that move at different speeds to the ‘foreground’ in order to create the perception of 3D layering. Example.

Reference 40

Reference User Experience Customer Experience Marketing 40

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

OCTOBER 19, 2013

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the people-related challenges of integrating UX into an Agile team. Once you create a cohesive team, it’s now time to polish the process. Are you ready? It is true that process for the sake of process won’t do you any good. But, if you’ve already adopted Agile as your development methodology, […] The post How to build a UX and development team that really delivers (Part 2/2) first appeared on Daniel Elizalde.

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UX Development Agile Enterprise 62

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Tyner Blain

AUGUST 7, 2013

Paddy Barrett in Ireland is preparing his Master’s thesis on Product Management and would like to interview (USA) state-side product managers for his primary research. It would be awesome if you could help him, and help us all. My Connection. I am a visiting lecturer as part of the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Product Management degree program.

Research Software 66

Research Software Product Research User Testing Product Management 66

All About Product Management

MAY 22, 2013

I’ve spent the past year bringing a new product to market, as a consultant Head of Product for a start-up business unit that’s owned by a multi-national. I had the opportunity to pretty much start at the beginning: pulling together the vision, setting up a product council/steering group, talking to users about the initial concepts and shape the overall product direction.

Advertising 54

Advertising Presentation Consulting Vision 54

UserTesting

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

Today we’re proud to introduce a guest post from Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is a product strategist, Lean UX advocate, interaction designer, author , and all around good guy. Without further ado, let’s hand this post over to Jeff… Besides … The post 5 steps to kicking off your Lean UX team appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

UX 26

UX Blog 26

Product Management and Strategic Marketing

MARCH 27, 2013

Most of you are probably familiar with skills & expertise on LinkedIn. Among the many skills to choose from is product management. Being a product management professional, I have posted that on my profile and have been widely endorsed. But I was surprised to see that some of my colleagues who are recruiters, CFOs, VCs, sales people, etc. posted product management as one of their skills.

Product Management 40

Product Management Product Manager Finance Product Research 40

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Reporting Tools

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 31, 2013

I usually summarize the role of the product manager as the CEO of their product. But I had a great conversation with a fellow product manager a couple of weeks ago who was telling me what he loved most about being a product manager was being the quarterback of the team. That stuck with me and the more I thought about it I realized it was another great way to describe the role and the key attributes needed to be successful in it.

Product Management 84

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 84

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 17, 2013

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product manager makes such decisions can result either in an extremely well functioning team dynamic or. quite the opposite. When it works well, the team feels as if the best ideas, regardless of where they came from, get implemented.

Product Management 83

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 83

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 18, 2013

In the ever evolving world of web and mobile products, it’s incredibly important to have a constant pulse on the sentiment, needs, and frustrations of your users. While traditional user research and usability studies are still an important part of the product development process, the web today affords real-time alternatives for getting daily insights into the minds of your users.

Customer Feedback 81

Customer Feedback User Testing Customer Experience Feedback Software 81

Sachin Rekhi

SEPTEMBER 2, 2013

Most entrepreneurs assume that the marketing and audience building phase of their startup begins post product launch. Yet I’ve seen some startups successfully build their audience well before they reach this point. They’ve been able to do this by investing heavily in building out a blog with independent value separate from their product yet designed to attract the target audience that their product will eventually serve. 37signals , SEOmoz , and Mint.com are three such success stories. 37signals

Finance 79

Finance Product launches Blog Startups 79

Speaker: Shreya Rajpal, Co-Founder and CEO at Guardrails AI & Travis Addair, Co-Founder and CTO at Predibase

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT offer unprecedented potential for complex enterprise applications. However, productionizing LLMs comes with a unique set of challenges such as model brittleness, total cost of ownership, data governance and privacy, and the need for consistent, accurate outputs. Putting the right LLMOps process in place today will pay dividends tomorrow, enabling you to leverage the part of AI that constitutes your IP – your data – to build a defensible AI strategy fo

Artificial Inteligence

Sachin Rekhi

MARCH 3, 2013

The role of a product manager is a broad one and there are variety of tasks you could be involved with each day. You could be performing core product responsibilities including conducting a customer interview, triaging incoming bugs, reviewing a new design, authoring a feature spec, brainstorming improvements for your next release, testing the latest release, and more.

Technical Review 77

Technical Review Product Research Framework User Testing 77

Sachin Rekhi

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

I’m often asked how I think about coming up with the product roadmap for an upcoming release. To help answer this, I thought I’d share how my team recently went about thinking through the roadmap for an upcoming product we’re working on. Analysis of existing usage metrics. When you’re innovating on top of an existing product, the best place to start is by conducting an in-depth analysis of the existing usage patterns of your product.

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Roadmap Customer Feedback User Friction Feedback Software 72

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 12, 2013

It's customary in the design world to evaluate a designer's existing portfolio as part of the interview process to get a better understanding of their work and the process they leverage to develop their designs. I find it equally valuable to evaluate a product manager's existing portfolio of products as part of a product management interview. When evaluating a product manager's portfolio, I'm looking to assess how successfully the product manager has owned the vision, design, and execution of th

Product Management 72

Product Management Product Manager Management Management 72

Sachin Rekhi

MAY 22, 2013

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics. Collaboration. Many of the responsibilities of a product manager involve collaborating, communicating, and coordinating efforts across a team of engineers, designers, product managers, and more.

Analytic Tools 66

Analytic Tools Feedback Software Data Visualization Product Management 66

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Sachin Rekhi

JANUARY 13, 2013

The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. This enables them to take smart risks by focusing on what they can dedicate the needed resources to win.

Startups 66

Startups Customer Experience Differentiation Branding 66

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Each company is different, so the process and challenges for integrating a UX team into an Agile development team are unique. In this post, I focus on the people-oriented challenges, which oftentimes arise from designers and developers being completely different. They have different backgrounds, different motivations, and usually different personality types.

UX 62

UX Development Agile Enterprise 62

Daniel Elizalde IoT Blog

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

UX is short for User Experience Design, and it can be defined as the branch of design that creates easy-to-use and delightful products that focus on the user’s needs. UX is very important to all Product Managers because it is a key component of the 4 pillars of Product Leadership. You can think of UX as another tool in your […] The post UX for Product Managers first appeared on Daniel Elizalde.

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UX Product Management Product Manager Management 62