Product Management Insights

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.
Read the rest »

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.
Read the rest »

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 »

Do you and your product management team use “Personas” while defining and managing your requirements? If not, personas may be a valuable addition to your arsenal of tools to help you manage your requirements more effectively.

What is a “Persona”?

A Persona is an abstracted representation of a typical user of your product.
Read the rest »

Yesterday I spoke with a prospective customer. They are a midsize enterprise software company, here in Silicon Valley. The reason they’re shopping for a requirements management tool?

They lost a big sales deal (worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars) because they lost track of a critical requirement when their product manager left their company…
Read the rest »

In our last post on this blog, we talked about how ROI Metric can be very helpful to product managers in prioritizing requirements and feature requests.

In this post, we’d like to outline some practical steps that PMs can use to get started with this practice…
Read the rest »

A couple of excellent posts in the blogosphere this week emphasized why you should consider customer problems solved and value added to customers while deciding which requirements/features to implement in your next release.

Scott Sehlhorst wrote:
Read the rest »

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that starting today our blog has a new name.

We used to call it “Practical Product Management” - since we write about topics covering practical aspects of product management.

It turns out that our friends at Pragmatic Marketing, Inc have trademark rights for the phrase “Practical Product Management”!
Read the rest »

There was an excellent post recently at the Product Management Tips blog by Gopal Shenoy that discusses how the usability of a product is severely affected when you add a lot of features.

Gopal compares his stand-alone GPS unit vs the built-in GPS unit in his new Toyota Camry car, and poses a question:
Read the rest »