This is part 3 of a series of articles about leading through influence. The first article focused on the concept of social capital and how we earn the right to ask people to follow us; the second focused on how to use effective facilitation skills to establish yourself as a valuable resource for others to reach decisions; and this article will focus on the importance of trust and respect, and how ultimately everything that we do as Product Managers comes down to these two fundamental interpersonal concepts.
Archives for December 2014
Dropbox: The Most MVP of All MVPs
It’s constantly surprising to me that people seem to have such widely different ideas of what the term “MVP” or “Minimally Viable Product” really means. Perhaps it’s a result of the term becoming an industry buzzword, or perhaps it’s because it’s used in some very different contexts, but it always baffles me that people focus on the “minimal” part of the term and completely forget the “viable” and “product” side of things. To me, you don’t have an MVP unless you meet all three criteria:
- You have identified the minimum set of features necessary to engage your users and to solve their valuable problem;
- You have identified a way to ensure that your solution is scalable enough, stable enough, and valuable enough that you can confirm your product hypothesis; and
- You actually have something that you can sell, market, or test.
Whenever I think of what MVP means to me, I think of Dropbox, the cloud-based file-sharing system that pretty much encapsulates everything that an MVP should be.
Five Ways to Be a PM That Developers Actually LIKE!
Product Managers sometimes have a bad reputation when it comes to Development teams — and we often unintentionally earn these reputations, by the way that we work with them. There are, however some things that Product Managers can do to build a strong relationship with their development teams — something that is, in fact, essential to the success of the product and your company as a whole. Here are five tips that you can use to ensure that you have the best relationship possible with your development teams:
Five Things a Clever PM Can Learn From Strategy Games
In an earlier post, I talked about five things that a PM can learn from role-playing games. Since I’m a pretty avid gamer, I realized that there are lots of things that PMs can learn from all genres of games, so I’m considering making this a recurring theme. Today’s discussion focuses on real-time strategy (RTS) games — the Starcrafts or Age of Empires of the world. These games typically simulate some form of wargame scenario, in which the player takes on the “commander” of a variety of units, starting with low-level units and few resources, and working their way up to a vast army of units with which to crush their opposition. In many ways, this is similar to how a PM works with what they have to deliver high-value product to their customers. To wit, my top five list for today: