Product Management Insights

Mark Kromer at TechProdo blog recently wrote a nice blog post titled SaaS Product Management: Is there a difference?

In his post Mark poses the interesting question (applicable to a lot of product managers):

I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved to the software-as-a-service model…

As our company makes a popular SaaS tool for product management teams, we have good first-hand experience in this - and I’d like to share my thoughts here.

My short answer to Mark’s question is… Read the rest »

Here’s our definitive list of the top-10 blogs on Product Management. We’ve found that all of these blogs consistently produce posts that are useful to product management professionals.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, we arrived at this list using a proprietary, patent-pending, 100% scientific formula. Hence it is infallible and is THE definitive list. Okay?

Without further ado, here is the definitive Top-10 List - drumroll please…
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Today, at the vast majority of software companies that have 500 or more employees, there are two separate but closely related departments: “Product Management” and “Product Marketing“.

I believe this is a fundamentally flawed setup for today’s fast-changing markets - a setup that leads to confusion over roles, lack of ownership, unnecessary politics & poor morale - and often RUINS innovation.

This belief is based on my experiences at successful companies in Silicon Valley over the past two decades, and discussions with friends/colleagues in the industry who manage Product Management and/or Product Marketing departments.

In this blog post, I describe the reasons for my belief and provide an alternative solution.
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One of my pet peeves with most software is the cryptic, unfriendly error messages thrown up by so many of them.

At Accompa, we try to make error messages in our own software as friendly and useful as possible. I think we still have a long way to go, but we work hard at it.

I just saw the following error message from bit.ly - the URL shortening service used on sites like Twitter. On most websites, this is usually a cryptic “404 Error” message. See how bit.ly has made it so friendly and fun!
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Mike Boudreaux, a fellow Twitterer on Product Management topics, said the following recently - tongue planted firmly in cheek (I think)!

Typical win/loss analysis from sales force: majority of losses due to product and price. Majority of wins due to relationship.

Once I stopped chuckling, this got me thinking of the many pitfalls of overly relying on Win/Loss Reports to drive your product roadmap. Here was my tweet to Mike.

I’d like to expand on my tweet in this blog post.
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This article gives an overview of how you can benefit from a requirements management tool, and what to look for when considering requirements management tools.

Product Managers (PMs), Business Analysts (BAs) and Engineers at most companies are responsible for gathering and managing requirements. However, Read the rest »

One of the questions that seems to frequently come up in my discussions these days is:

What’s the difference between a Requirement and a Feature?

Let me try and explain this difference in this short blog post.
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I recently read a nice post by Cindy Alvarez in her blog -  Saying “No” to… Feature Requests

One sentence in her post caught my eye:

…many requests for solutions are obscured insights into problems.

This is an excellent point by Cindy.
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Hi there - We’ve been on a short hiatus from blogging, as we were working hard to get our Spring 2009 release out on time. We did so on Monday - hooray!

This is a short post, but we wanted to share this interesting list with you…

It is based on a quick survey we ran to visitors to some pages of our site between Jan-12th and March-16th. We asked the visitors who were in Product Management or Product Marketing to give us a list of tools they use most often to perform their day-to-day tasks.

Here’s the list of top-10 tools in order of their popularity. Read the rest »

Happy New Year everyone - 2009 is here!

One of our sales reps is close friends with a sales rep from a competitor - let us call them Jim and Bob (not real names!). They actually spent the Christmas holidays skiing together.

One of the stories they commiserated on was how they both felt that executives Read the rest »