Product Management Insights

I read a nice blog post on the Harvard Business Review website by Rob Johnson who worked with Steve Jobs to create the wildly successful Apple Stores. The following quote caught my eye:
So the challenge for retailers isn’t “how do we mimic the Apple Store” or any other store that seems like a good model. […]

I recently came across a blog post by The Cranky Product Manager about product-line complexity. It’s an entertaining post. More importantly, it makes good points regarding the pitfalls of complexity. In this post, I will share my thoughts on this.
Product and product line complexity happens when we add too many features or when we add […]

Just saw a nice blog post by Marty Cagan. If you are a:

Director of Product Management
VP of Product Management
Or aspire to be one of the above (I think that should cover just about everybody in product management, don’t you think?!)

, then check out Marty’s post.
Having said that, there is one point about which I don’t […]

Mark Suster (who has founded and built two successful software startups)  recently blogged about hiring at a startup. It’s an excellent post and got me thinking about hiring product managers at a startup.
From my experience of having built Product Management teams at two different successful startups, and having been an early member of the PM […]

The best companies (B2B) I’ve worked for during my career were highly innovative, and they continuously innovated. But the source of their innovation was not:

Whiz-bang Technology
Genius Personnel, or
Competitive Research

What was the source, you ask? Well, the type of innovation those companies practiced was…

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One of my friends is a newly minted Director of Product Management at a mid-stage startup in silicon valley. I met him for coffee yesterday and we were chatting about how his new job was going.
He has managed Engineering as well as Professional Services teams in the past, but this is his first time managing […]

When I was a kid, I used to love Aesop’s fables - short stories with a moral. I even learned some valuable lessons from them, lessons that have helped me as I’ve grown older.
For this holiday season, here’s my little parable for those of us in product management and product marketing (it’s not a fable, […]

At most companies - old or new, Fortune-500 or startup - most of the departments are looking out for the company. They’re doing things in the best interests of the company. Even optimizing everything to maximize the self-interests of their company.
Often, even the CEO and executive staff may constantly seek to maximize self-interests of the […]

Ben Horowitz is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was the CEO of Opsware before he became a VC - so he has real-world operating experience as well, and I follow his blog regularly.
I was reading one of his recent posts, which linked to a document titled “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager”. Ben […]

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric introduced in 2003 by Frederick Reichheld in his popular Harvard Business Review article The One Number You Need to Grow.
NPS is quite popular among executives in multiple industries including high-tech. The biggest advantage of NPS is that it simplifies the objective of a business to creating more “Promoters” […]