The Clever PM

Tips, tricks, and hacks that help you to be a better, more clever, Product Manager.

Curiosity NEVER Killed the PM

by

One of the primary predictors of successful Product Managers that I’ve seen in my time is the amount of curiosity that they are willing to express in their work and in their lives.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about it, given that Product Management is all about having a broad swath of experience and ability from which to pull in their daily lives.  A well-rounded person is nearly always more likely to be a more effective Product Manager than someone who strictly focuses on one or two disciplines.

Here are some of the reasons you, as a Product Manager, should be as curious as possible…

[Read more…]

Your Opinion is NOT Always Irrelevant

by

The folks at Pragmatic Marketing have a popular saying in their training and materials — “Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.”  For the most part, they’re absolutely right — the point that they’re making is that, while you as a Product Manager may have knowledge of the market and of the users, you yourself are not the market, nor are you your users.  Rather, you have an opinion that’s just as valid as any other opinion in your company — no better and no worse.  The assertion is that your decisions need to be based on objective data, nor subjective feelings — on research and testing and reports that you can glean from the actual usage of your product or your actual users.

The problem is, while that’s a good rule of thumb, and when such data is available, it’s absolutely necessary when making decisions.  But we also know, as Product Managers, that such data isn’t always available, or it’s very costly to obtain, or you have to make a decision on the fly.

[Read more…]

Building Your Product Management Toolkit

by

One of the challenges that we have as Product Managers is managing our own career trajectories while at the same time running the products that we are tasked with keeping alive and breathing.  A wise mentor once told me that we’re all consultants in this day and age, and that we should be sure that we’re gaining skills and abilities that will allow us the most flexibility in the future, should a company decide we’re no longer needed, or vice-versa.

As a Product Manager, there are some skills and abilities that transfer between companies and markets, and these are the skills that we need to focus on whenever and wherever we can, so that if or when the time comes that we bid a fond adieu to our current employer, it’s with the confidence that the next phase of our career will be that much better.

[Read more…]

How to Be Successful as a Non-Technical Product Manager

by

There seems to be a strong bias in many large companies toward assessing a product manager’s ability to perform based as much (if not more) on their technical ability, background, and knowledge as their real-world, market, and user experience.  To me, this is an entirely backward way of approaching the problem, as the entire purpose of having a strong product manager is not to provide an additional technical resource to determine the “how”, but to provide a strong and knowledgeable resource that can accurately describe the “what” and the “why” of the problems that your product should be solving.

This means that someone who brings a lot of knowledge and ability to the table, but who lacks certain “check the box” background skills in the technical realm may be at a disadvantage.  Here are some tips and tricks that someone coming from a non-technical background can use to excel as a Product Manager in nearly any company.

[Read more…]

What “Agile” Means to the Business

by

Agile development and its related methodologies and practices have long been viewed as something that “developers do” with no consideration given to the broader impacts of those processes on the organization as a whole.  This, incidentally, is also the primary cause of failures on the part of organizations who attempt to implement Agile practices — the belief that all that’s changing is how the developers create, test, and deploy their code, and everyone else in the company proceeds on with business as usual.

Unfortunately, such a belief is far from the truth — in reality, companies who change from a rigorous, planned product process to an Agile process have to face the fact that they have to change the way they do business from the ground up, if they expect to gain the benefits of those changes across the board.

[Read more…]

Break Down the Walls – Five Tips to Become a Product Manager

by

By far, one of the most common questions that I run across online and in discussions at events is how to transition into a Product Management role from outside.  This can often be a challenge, since in most companies there are relatively fewer Product Management roles than there are roles of other kinds — even development management jobs are more frequent and often more than Product Management, simply as a function of the number of teams your average Product Manager works with.  Here are a few tips on how to assess your readiness for such a transition, as well as how to achieve that transition if it’s really something you want.

[Read more…]

Being the Voice of the Customer is Something You EARN!

by

During a discussion with a UX designer and a development manager at a recent Product Management Consortium meeting here in Seattle, one of the topics that came up involved some of the things that Product Managers do or say that they find annoying, ridiculous, or just upsetting.  And, interestingly enough, one of those was the insistence that Product Managers are the “voice of the customer.”

Initially, this shocked me a little bit, as one of the things that nearly every PM training program, certification program, and general rah-rah pow-wow reinforces in us is that we need to be the “voice of the customer” in everything that we do.  Obviously, the fact that something so heavily ingrained in our profession causing such aggravation with the very people we rely on to express that voice is something worth digging into.

[Read more…]