Product Management Insights

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” and less “Detractors”. This concept is much easier for employees to understand and act upon - compared to complex, hard-to-understand, impossible-to-act-upon metrics.

This Wikipedia article lists more pros and cons of NPS.

The question I’d like to raise today is:

Is there a similar “ONE number” that can be used to measure the performance of Product Management teams?

I believe the answer is “Yes” - read on for my thoughts…

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I recently read an excellent book - “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky.

The book has a lot of great ideas that are very beneficial to those of us in product management - whether you’re a VP/Director of product management, or a product manager.

The book covers the general topic of “How to make ideas happen” and innovation. In this post, I’d like to share with you a really cool equation in the book - it’s directly applicable to product managers…

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Greg Cohen is the author of the new book “Agile Excellence for Product Managers“. We did a quick interview with Greg to get answers to some important questions we had about product management within Agile teams.

If you’re responsible for product management in an Agile team - check out this interview, then go get Greg’s book. As a former President of SVPMA and a certified Scrum Master - Greg knows as much about this topic as anyone. Here’s the interview - drum roll, please!

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If you’re a Director/VP of a Product Management team or otherwise responsible for hiring PMs, there are many qualities to look for in candidates.

Analytical ability, communication skills, technical competency, ability to lead without authority, and organization skills are - and should be - at the top of the list.

But the one skill I look for more than anything else is this…
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I was reading a recent, excellent post by Tom Grant over at Forrester.

One sentence in particular caught my eye:

“Managing the enhancement list is not the same as understanding the reasons behind those requests.”

I feel this is such a critical (yet routinely overlooked) point, I’m writing this short post to share my thoughts on it.
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At companies of all sizes, product managers are increasingly working with development teams that are either partly or mostly located offshore. Usually at countries like India, China or countries in Eastern Europe.

Our own development team is distributed between the US and India. In this post, I’d like to share some tips our product management team has learned over time - on working effectively with our offshore development team.

(Please note that these tips are for working with your company’s development team that is located offshore, not outsourced teams). Read the rest »

As we usher in the new decade, I can’t help thinking that this decade is going to be the best one yet for the discipline of high-tech product management.

Why am I so optimistic, you ask? Here are my primary reasons:
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I received a fun email recently from one of our customers.

As many of you know, at Accompa we make a popular SaaS tool used as product management tool (by PM teams) and requirements management tool (by Engineering teams). Some of you may also know that I manage the Product Management & Marketing teams at Accompa.

Our customer was wondering in his email how it’s like to do product management for a product management tool! I hadn’t consciously thought about it a lot before - but his question got me thinking.

The more I thought, the more I realized there are indeed several differences. In this post, I give you an “inside peek” into the key differences in doing product management for a product management tool. Read & enjoy!
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Just a quick post to address a question that seems to come up quite frequently.

Should “User Interface” (UI)  be a part of requirements? Do UI specs constitute requirements?

Here is my quick answer to this question…
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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts on this topic (here and here) from bloggers I respect a lot. This spurred me to finally get around to writing this post.

This post is about using “personas” as a part of software requirements process. It’s not about marketing, sales or other activities.

At most companies, personnel with the job title of “product managers” or “business analysts” write Requirements Documents. These documents are then used by engineering teams to build and test the software.

There’s a school of thought that says that Personas are a very useful concept as a part of gathering and documenting requirements.

Having been a part of a few teams that tried to use personas in their requirements process - I consider personas mostly a waste of time. Here’s why…
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