Is the Product Demo Actually Product’s Responsibility?
Imagine: One of your sales reps pings you to ask if you’ll hop on a sales call to give a product demo to a...
More from Maddy Kirsch
Benefits of a Purpose-Built Roadmap Tool
We’ve written a lot here at the ProductPlan Blog about the value of crafting your product roadmap using purpose-built roadmap software, as opposed to...
6 Tips to Manage a Product Team That Spans Time Zones
Here’s a conundrum for you. The first tenet of the Agile Manifesto states that teams developing software should value “individuals and interactions over processes...
5 Creative Ideas Your Product Team Can Run with, from Design Giant IDEO
Here at the ProductPlan blog, we’re always looking for great ideas we can share with you. Which means we read a lot more than...
Is Product Management Transparency a Good Idea?
You’ve seen it 100 times in movies and TV shows. Something horrible is about to happen—an asteroid is hurtling toward earth, a pandemic is...
How Product Managers Can Benefit From Project Management Software
As a product manager, you have two key roles in your company. Actually, you likely have something more like 4,523 roles, but we’ll keep...
5 Things Product Managers Should Be Testing (But Probably Aren’t)
One of the most useful product management insights we’ve heard in a long time comes from a professional poker player. No, seriously. Hear us...
When Should You Stop Gathering Customer Feedback… and Make a Decision?
Your product is ready. You’ve tested it—and it works exactly as you’d envisioned. You and your cross-functional teams have reviewed your plans for marketing,...
How Product Managers Use Metrics to Build Better Products
Ever heard the story of Google’s early user-experience tests, where researchers sat users in front of a computer and then watched to see how...
8 Blogs Product Managers Should Bookmark Immediately
At ProductPlan, we’re big fans of blogs. We publish hundreds of articles a year on our own blog, and regularly share other articles, blog...
5 Agile Best Practices Many Product Teams Neglect
People can get very philosophical when talking about agile best practices. And often, a product manager’s discussion of their company’s agile philosophy is so...
Does a Software Product Manager Need to be Technical?
Let’s skip right to the punchline: Yes, if you’re a product manager or hoping to begin a career in product management, particularly in a...
Is Product Training Part of the Product?
You can learn a valuable lesson about product training from an anecdote about toilet paper. The CMO of a well-known restaurant chain (you’ve eaten...
Should Product Managers Focus More on High-Level Strategy or the Tactical Details?
A reporter once asked renowned behavioral psychologist Donald Hebb—the man credited with introducing the field of neuropsychology—a variation of the standard nature vs. nurture...
6 Ways Product Managers Can Help Manage Technical Debt
In software development, how to manage technical debt refers to the accumulation of work that builds up when developers implement quicker, short-term solutions instead...
When Someone On Your Cross-Functional Product Team Won’t Cooperate
You’ve kicked off the development phase of your new product. Your executive team seems enthusiastic about the product’s potential. Your first meetings with the...
6 Reasons Product Roadmaps Fail
Product roadmaps fail more often than you might realize because they can be difficult to create properly. To be effective, a roadmap needs to...
How to Manage Stakeholder Expectations for Your Product
Optimism can be a great asset, and enthusiasm for your product is invaluable. But super-high expectations? Not so much. As we’ve written here on...
4 Example Business Roadmaps
Before we look at some example business roadmaps, and roadmap templates, try this word-association exercise. As you read a word in the list below,...
Could You Explain Your Product’s Mission in Under 10 Words?
Think of this as a pop quiz. If you’re a product manager or other product management professional, you spend hours every day driving your...
Can Agile Product Management Work in a Non-Agile Company?
Now that it’s been around for a number of years and many businesses have been able to use it to great effect, agile product...
5 Questions Product Managers Should Ask Their Sales Teams
Effective product managers employ all sorts of strategies to gather actionable intelligence about their products so they can continually improve them. They study the...
Why Your Minimum Viable Product Sucks
It’s not your fault your minimum viable product sucks. Not entirely, anyway. The pressure on software product managers seems to grow more intense every...
Creating a Roadmap: A Guide to Get You Started
If you’re ready to start creating a roadmap, I’ll assume two things. First, your organization has already determined your product’s vision which is the...
Product Managers: Don’t Waste Your Time On These 6 Things
The dental profession has a saying: “You’re only billing if you’re drilling and filling.” A dentist’s practice is a complex operation requiring a large...
10 Great Podcasts for Product Managers
Why create a list of podcasts for product managers? Easy. Product managers are busy. We want to learn, improve our craft, and stay up-to-date...
Why Founders Shouldn’t Be Product Managers (At Least Not for Long)
It must seem to the founder of a young company like the most natural move to make, an absolute no-brainer. Why not take on...
What Game of Thrones (and the Rest of Hollywood) Can Teach You About Product Management
In his controversial bestseller Everything Bad is Good for You, author Steven Johnson made the case that TV, movies, video games and the rest...
Product Planning: What to Do, with Whom, and When?
Product planning is a difficult term to define because it’s so broad and involves so many different aspects of a product manager’s job. In...
Must-Haves Before an Item Makes it on Your Roadmap
Let’s say someone at your company, maybe an executive, suggests prioritizing a new epic for your product. And let’s further assume that the epic...
Measuring Product Management Performance: Do’s and Dont’s
In an interview with MTV years ago, hip hop executive Lyor Cohen offered an important insight when asked about the string of professional failures...
Do Product Managers Make Good Startup Founders?
Do product managers make good startup founders? The short answer is (probably) yes, product managers are well equipped to transition to startup founders. The...
Product Managers, Stop Defending Your Product
Sometimes I think a product manager’s job could be more accurately described as Manager of Conundrums. As a product manager you’ll need to build...
Successfully Scaling Product Teams: A Panel Conversation From Product Stack Denver
How do you effectively scale a product team from just a handful of product managers to several dozen? What skills are important for product...
Is Agile Project Management a Good Idea?
The idea of agile project management might strike you as wishful thinking at first. It’s like the notion of limiting yourself to just one...
Product Management Training: 5 Excellent Resources
If you want to become a software developer, one option is to major in computer science or software engineering in college. You probably won’t...
5 Strategies for Creating an All-Star Product Team
If you’ve been tasked with scaling the product team, you’ve probably already spent some time thinking about the traits of high-performing product teams. Today...
How to Nail Your Product Roadmap Presentation
The product roadmap presentation might be one of the most important meetings that a product manager has with internal stakeholders. This is, after all,...
Product Manager Career Paths: 3 Myths Debunked
When ProductPlan spoke recently with Brian Crofts, the Vice President of Product at Namely, as part of our Product Lessons Learned interview series, Brian...
Building a Software Company: A Conversation With Jim Semick
We recently teamed up with Pivotal Tracker and Notion to host a product management networking event in Los Angeles called “Product Stack”. Over drinks...
Product Launch Checklists: From the Oscars to a Software Product Release, They’re Necessary
Before we talk about product launch checklists, let’s do a quick thought experiment. Do you think that if the producers of the 2017 Academy...
5 Ways to Deal With an Unreasonable Customer
There’s a great scene in Seinfeld where Jerry goes to a rental car counter to pick up a midsized car he reserved. When she...
