Product Management
The Critical Importance of Finding Time for Strategic Thinking and Planning
Learn how strategic thinking and planning can help your product team develop strategies to hit targets and align organizational objectives.
Jim Semick
Co-founder, Board Member
Product Strategy
The Evolution of Product-Led Growth
The evolution of product-led growth may seem to be a recent trend at software companies, but the underlying concepts have...
Career and Interviews
Taking the Leap: Why Product Managers Make Better Entrepreneurs
I’ve spoken with so many product managers who have a dream of becoming an entrepreneur or launching their own product...
Roadmap and Roadmap Management
A Product Manager’s Guide to Roadmapping as an Essentialist
This article tackles one of the areas that gets the most interest from product managers: how can they use an...
Product Management
Lean Market Validation: 10 Ways to Rapidly Test Your Startup Idea
This article outlines the advice I gave students and includes updates on some of the concepts to my current thinking...
Roadmap and Roadmap Management
The 5 Top Trends in Product Management to Watch in 2021
The year 2020 shifted the world in fundamental ways. It changed the way we work, learn, play, travel, and socialize....
Product Management
Your MVP is Not the Minimum Product
If you’re a product manager or part of a startup, you’ve likely heard about the Minimum Viable Product concept for...
Product Leadership
Why Distributed Product Teams are Here to Stay
There is no going back to “normal” for product teams. The idea of simply translating what we did in the...
Career and Interviews
The Ultimate Motivation: What Gets Product Managers Out of Bed Every Morning?
No matter how much we love our career, we all have some days when we’d rather stay in bed. So...
Product Leadership
The Essentialist’s Way to Building Better Products
“Am I working on the right things?” “How can I fit it all in?” I find myself asking these questions...
Product Management
How I Learned to Embrace Uncertainty: Tips for Product Managers
I’ll admit it, in the past, I’ve wrestled with needing to control uncertainty. For years I thoroughly planned most everything...
Product Strategy
Patterns of Pain: How Product Managers Solve High-Value Problems
The most successful product managers think of themselves as finders of pain, not finders of products. In my experience launching...
Agile & Product Development
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the...
Career and Interviews
The Most Under-Appreciated Product Management Skill
We write a lot about the skills that product managers need to be effective. The skills are wide-ranging, from ruthless...
Product Management
Product Management 2019: Year In Review
What a year. There are so many changes happening in product management as I write this, and the evolution only...
Roadmap and Roadmap Management
What Your Executives Want to See When You’re Presenting Your Roadmap
As a product manager who now sits on the other side of the table as an executive, I’ve had lots...
Product Leadership
How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
No matter how far into your career you might be, you’re never too old for imposter syndrome to make an...
Product Management
Product Managers: Learn to Let Go
Sometimes it’s hard to let go of something after discovering it no longer works as you expect. Especially if it’s...
Product Leadership
How to Foster a Culture of Gratitude
As we head into a new year, we tend to talk more about gratitude. We talk about what we’re grateful...
Agile & Product Development
Getting to the MVP: 5 Tips for Launching New Products
There’s no universally effective plan for launching new products. So, here are the five most valuable lessons I’ve learned.
Customer-Centricity
9 Tips for Better Customer Validation Interviews
Customer validation interviews are an important component of the product development process. Product managers use customer validation interviews to help...
Product Strategy
How to Break Product Features into User Stories
During our webinar—How Product Managers and Agile Development Teams Can See Eye to Eye—we received so many attendee questions we...
Agile & Product Development
How Product Managers Should Work with Agile Development Teams
What do you think it means to be a product owner — not simply the product manager, but a true...
Product Leadership
5 Ways to Become a Better Product Advocate Within Your Company
I recently did a webinar with Pragmatic Marketing on the topic of thought leadership for product managers. One of the...