December, 2019

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The Three Cs of Putting the Customer First

ProductCraft

What differentiates a mediocre product manager from a great product manager? Is it technical acumen? Superior planning and roadmapping skills? The answer may (or may not) surprise you. What separates a decent PM from a great one is their ability to empathize with the customer. Even if a PM is aware of this fact on. Read more » The post The Three Cs of Putting the Customer First appeared first on ProductCraft by Pendo.

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Priority Starts at the Top

Folding Burritos

I talk to a lot of PMs and I ask them (and everyone who subscribes to my newsletter) the same question: what’s your biggest struggle as a Product Manager? I get back all sorts of replies, but by far the biggest issues are about prioritization, in some shape or form. Having put together a fairly popular resource on product prioritization methods, I would’ve hoped the situation to be different.

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The Top 5 Technical Skills Every Product Manager Should Know

UserVoice

While a technical background is a mandatory prerequisite for becoming a product manager, there are some technical skills worth having in your toolbox as a PM. The good news is you don’t need to go back to school to master these technical competencies either. The skills we’ll discuss in this article won’t put you in competition with your engineers or make you smarter than your system architects.

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Competitive Analysis to Competitive Intelligence: Evolving for Greater Product Management Impact

280 Group

Introduction. To pay homage, yet modify a quote from football coaching legend Vince Lombardi, “Competing is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing.” Unfortunately, when it comes to the competition, product managers often postpone this important work to be a “sometime thing.” Most product management exercises are little more than creating feature matrices—using columns and rows to compare products to that of their competitors.

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Platform Product Management Beyond Features: Introducing B-MAP for Platform Ecosystem Success

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.

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How to Write Fewer Requirements

Ask Benny

Free your time to be more strategic Requirements are overrated In Are Requirements Overrated and Your Role is not to Write Requirements I explained why writing requirements should be a minimal task. I talked about 3 major reasons why it is good for everyone: Your time is valuable. Every minute you spend in perfecting the details of a solution, for a problem you already know you need to solve, is a time you don’t spend trying to find the next one.

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How To Position a Product

BrainMates

Updated December, 2019. Stand out from the crowd and reap the rewards. Product positioning is an important part of a product marketing strategy. It helps buyers and users understand where a product ‘fits’ in terms of what it offers and how it compares with competing products so that they can select the product that will best serve their needs. Simple example: think of a major car manufacturer like Toyota.

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How a Product Leader Can Make Better and Faster Decisions

The Product Coalition

Photo: Shutterstock/Ducks Very often decision making is a complex and complicated process, especially if a Product Leader does not only sustain existing functionalities but also develop and roll out new ones. There are many factors that affect a decision on a solution of a problem or fulfilment of a need. Those factors should be taken into consideration while the decision is made.

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Ship outcomes, not just features, with the Product Impact Framework

Intercom, Inc.

Our industry is in the midst of a big philosophical debate about the fundamental way of thinking about how we build our products, with the focus shifting from the outputs of what we build to the business outcomes generated by those outputs. We’ve been thinking deeply about how to make this change in our own organization, with Des and Paul leading our discussions about it.

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Mastering Business Testing: Formulating Strong Hypotheses

Strategyzer

When you are working on a new business idea, you may be confident that you are on the right path. However, each building block of your business model and value proposition represents an area of risk that needs to be tested: Customer segments, key resources, channels, value propositions, revenues and costs. In order to run good experiments to test our business ideas we need to formulate strong hypotheses that are testable, precise and discrete.

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Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.

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Reorganizing Product Teams

Mironov Consulting

At workshops for product leaders, we often discuss different approaches to implementing major organizational changes within product management teams and adjacent groups (e.g. Engineering). Not surprisingly, the general answer is “it depends ” on lots of factors. But worth recapping some of the choices and their implications. First, a nod to Saeed Khan , who points out that there is no universal, perfect organizational model across all product teams and all situations.

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The Secret Sauce to Hiring Great Product People by Kate Leto

Mind the Product

In this #mtpcon London talk, Kate Leto examines the importance of emotional intelligence in individuals and teams and asks how it can be used to make better hiring decisions. Key Points. Emotional intelligence is more important than any of the technical skills we use in our roles. If we want to build greater emotional intelligence into our product teams, then we need to design our hiring processes to look for it.

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Product in Practice: Getting Started with Opportunity Solution Trees at SuperAwesome

Product Talk

Hi there, Product Talk readers! It’s me, Melissa. I’m Teresa’s blog editor. I mostly work behind the scenes here, polishing and proofreading posts prior to publication. But every once in a while, I’ll contribute a post like this one. Here at Product Talk, we’re excited about showcasing what good product management looks like. That’s why we recently launched the Product in Practice series , where we’re highlighting excellent work that different product teams are doing.

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Why Companies in a Multi-Screen Era Must Embrace the Unknown

ProductCraft

Last Saturday, like seemingly every Saturday this fall, I started some yard work. This time I expected to be on the roof for at least three hours. So I knew that music would be required. And that email needed monitoring. And that a friend may call. And that college football was at full tilt. I. Read more » The post Why Companies in a Multi-Screen Era Must Embrace the Unknown appeared first on ProductCraft by Pendo.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Technical Debt vs Product Managers

Ask Benny

Why should product managers involve themselves with prioritizing technical debt? When it comes to technical debt many product managers do not like to get involved. They see it totally as the domain of the development. Most of the developers also do not want product managers involved in technical debt decisions because they feel that product managers care only about features.

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How to get stakeholder buy-in for user research: 31 expert tips

Userzoom

Getting stakeholder buy-in for user research can be like talking to a brick wall, except the brick wall isn’t just ignoring you, it’s telling your colleagues you don’t know what you’re talking about, sends texts from their phone while you’re trying to explain something, accuses you of inventing the term “UX” and is somehow in charge of how much money you have on a daily basis.

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How to Set Big Picture, Priorities and Measures For Your Product

The Product Coalition

Product management framework for making and communicating decisions and progress. Continue reading on ProductCoalition.com ».

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The Step-by-Step Guide to Rapid Releases with Agile Product Development

AB Tasty

Here are 7 simple steps that will help you overcome the biggest challenges in agile product development, and make rapid releases effortless! This article was originally posted on AB Tasty as The Step-by-Step Guide to Rapid Releases with Agile Product Development.

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IDC Analyst Report: The Open Source Blind Spot Putting Businesses at Risk

In a recent study, IDC found that 64% of organizations said they were already using open source in software development with a further 25% planning to in the next year. Most organizations are unaware of just how much open-source code is used and underestimate their dependency on it. As enterprises grow the use of open-source software, they face a new challenge: understanding the scope of open-source software that's being used throughout the organization and the corresponding exposure.

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The power of pause in leadership

Lead on Purpose

The most effective leaders know there’s only one thing they have complete control over: “the way in which I respond and react to another human.” They know their success depends on the unity and determination of their team members.

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Product Manager vs. Project Manager: Tackling the Differences

280 Group

One of the questions I frequently get asked when training our Optimal Product Management and Product Marketing Training (OPM) course is, “What’s the difference between a Product Manager and a Project Manager?” Today I want to tackle this question, but also talk more about the vital relationship between Product Managers and Project Managers that can make both successful in their roles.

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Book Review: The Team that Managed Itself

The Product Bistro

Christina Wodtke’s latest is a gripping read, combining a compelling story line, with some novel, and useful ideas to help team dynamics and how to lead. Without giving too much of the story away (trust me, this is a page turner) the main protagonist is Allie, a product manager of a studio at a game […].

Books 221
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The decade software ate the world

Intercom, Inc.

As we cross the threshold from one decade to another, it’s natural to look back at the previous 10 years and try to make sense of events. Putting narrative order on the past decade, a 10-year-period that has somehow remained stubbornly nameless, is quite the challenge, but it’s impossible to make sense of the 2010s without understanding the role of software.

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LLMOps for Your Data: Best Practices to Ensure Safety, Quality, and Cost

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

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Customer Advisory Boards: Three Best Practices and the Jaw-Dropping Moments

Product Management University

Customer advisory boards can deliver tremendous strategic value to your organization if you organize them with the appropriate customer roles and have business conversations. Employ these three best practices for your customer advisory boards and you’ll be able to accelerate the maturation of product management and product marketing with greater focus on delivering strategic value to the customer.

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How to Prepare for the 2019 App Store Holiday Shutdown

Alchemer Mobile

‘Tis the season for the annual App Store holiday shutdown. Every year, Apple implements a code freeze on all mobile apps where no new app submissions or app update submissions will be processed. The 2019 holiday shutdown schedule will begin December 23rd and run through December 28th. The App Store shuts down during this time to allow Apple’s manual submission reviewers to take some much-deserved time off around the holidays.

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The Importance of Being Clear by Lindsey Jayne

Mind the Product

In this #mtpcon London talk, Lindsey Jayne, VP Product at Monzo, discusses the importance of writing clearly in order to make better decisions and diversify thinking. Key points. There is too much noise in our working lives – we are bombarded by words and thoughts which are difficult to understand. By being clearer in our writing we can bring more people with us and expose bad ideas before they progress too far.

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The Phenomenal Product Manager: Influencing Engineers – Part 3

280 Group

Read Part 1 of this article where we discuss Strategy One: Credibility and Part 2 where we discuss Strategy Two: Building Rapport. Strategy Three: Assessing Your Team and Adjusting. When working with your engineering team, you need to read the team you are dealing with and then adjust accordingly. Some of the scenarios you will encounter are listed in the chart below.

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Use Cases for Apache Cassandra®

There’s a good reason why Apache Cassandra® is quickly becoming the NoSQL database of choice for organizations of all stripes. In this white paper, discover the key use cases that make Cassandra® such a compelling open source software – and learn the important pitfalls to avoid. From understanding its distributed architecture to unlocking its incredible power for industries like healthcare, finance, retail and more, experience how Cassandra® can transform your entire data operations.

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Book Review: The Team that Managed Itself

The Product Bistro

Christina Wodtke’s latest is a gripping read, combining a compelling story line, with some novel, and useful ideas to help team dynamics and how to lead. Without giving too much of the story away (trust me, this is a page turner) the main protagonist is Allie, a product manager of a studio at a game company. The studio is like a little business unit with a lot of autonomy, yet strong responsibilities to the executive staff.

Books 195
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Found in translation: How multilingual support helps you scale customer experiences

Intercom, Inc.

For online businesses, our customers can come from any part of the world and at any time. How do you ensure a great customer experience globally without adding a ton of headcount? In the United States alone, roughly 20% of the population doesn’t speak English at home. Although it may seem like a no-brainer for businesses to offer customer support in multiple languages, in a recent survey we found that the vast majority of businesses struggle to implement an effective multilingual support strateg

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Hiring a Product Manager – The Million Dollar Dilemma

Product Management University

You’re hiring a product manager. Do you hire an experienced product manager who can acquire domain expertise or a domain expert that can learn how to be a product manager? It’s a dilemma for many hiring managers. In the absence of the ideal candidate, an experienced product manager with strong domain expertise, you’re faced with a tough decision. In all my years as a practitioner and 18 years listening to my clients, this is a no-brainer.