Getting Real about Customer Delight: The Strategy of Emotional Outcomes
It’s all the rage, and is often the reason we get out of the bed each day – we want... Read →
How Do You Know Your R&D Spend is Appropriate?
There is no more measurable part of an organization than the sales team. They have targets and quotas, and they... Read →
Top 7 Reasons You Need to Conduct a Squad Calibration With Your Product Team
Ocean’s 11. “The A-Team.” All those Fast & Furious movies… US popular culture is littered with examples of assembling all-star... Read →
Aligning Your Roadmap Themes to the Customer Journey
Much has been written over the last few years on the idea of the featureless roadmap, which challenges product teams... Read →
My Experience Transitioning From Engineering to Product Leadership
When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t set my sights on becoming a product manager. Flash forward... Read →
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... Read →
Your Dev Squads Shouldn’t Be Hitting 100% of Their Sprint Goals
Goals are a good thing. Without setting goals, we have don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish and have no... Read →
4 Useful Real-Life Customer Interview Email Templates
Communication is a vital skill for product managers. We spend lots of time thinking about the best way to deliver... Read →
More from Heather McCloskey
Why the Most Forward-Thinking Product Teams Work Backwards
You’ve probably heard the old adage “success is not a destination, but a journey.” Clearly its authors were not product… Read →
The Myth of First-Mover Advantage
First-mover advantage is a real thing. It even has its own TLA (its three-letter acronym being FMA, obviously). The common… Read →
Why Cost of Delay is a Product Manager’s Secret Weapon
Product management receives a constant barrage of requests from a variety of sources. Whether you’re talking to customers, salespeople, executives,… Read →
The Definition of Done: What Product Managers Need to Know
Are we there yet? This is a difficult question to answer when no one agrees on where exactly “there” is…. Read →
Outcome-Driven Roadmapping: The Secret to a Focused Product Strategy
Most aspects of our lives are about achieving specific goals. We want to eat, so we make a meal. We… Read →
3 Reasons Product Managers Quit (and How to Prevent It)
When an employee leaves a company, there’s more walking out the door than a salary and a nameplate. They take… Read →
How Do Roadmaps Fit into Continuous Delivery?
When you’re continually shipping code, how do you plan, build, and communicate your roadmap? In this post, we’ll outline the… Read →
How to Recruit and Hire Product Managers in 8 Steps
According to leading research on technical recruiting, the interview process for the Internet and Tech industry currently averages more than… Read →
10 Smart Ways to Avoid the Consequences of Design by Committee (While Still Listening to the Team)
One of the biggest challenges product managers face is including the entire organization in product planning while avoiding a phenomenon… Read →
4 Companies that Successfully Scaled Product Quickly
Leading a product team during a high-growth period can be exciting. The team grows, roles shift, output increases, and many… Read →
11 Key Competencies to Look for When Interviewing Product Management Candidates
Interviewing a product management candidate (and hiring product managers in general) is definitely more art than science. There aren’t many… Read →
How Product Managers Measure Product-Market Fit
The path to the product-market fit is not clearly paved for all products. Today we’ll explore a few ways you… Read →
6 Critical Steps for Onboarding Product Managers
So, you’re scaling your product management team. Congratulations! Your company is clearly doing something right if you need to bring… Read →
5 Key Responsibilities of Agile Product Leaders
What does product leadership look like in an agile context? And, how is it different from leadership in traditional development… Read →
What Does the Agile Roadmapping Process Look Like in Practice?
In today’s article, we’ll discuss the agile roadmapping process. We’ll start by reviewing the objectives of roadmaps and planning for… Read →
The Best Product Management Content of 2018
At ProductPlan, we love content. Especially product management content. That’s why we’ve published hundreds of blog posts and product management… Read →
How to Use Google’s OKR Framework to Prioritize Your Product Roadmap
If you haven’t found the right objective goal-setting framework for setting roadmap prioritization, consider Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The… Read →
4 Steps to Managing Unplanned Work
No matter how much you plan, there’s always going to be some level of uncertainty. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously… Read →
The Introverted Product Manager
Can introverts be successful as product managers? No matter what you may have heard, we believe the answer to this… Read →
7 Steps to Determine Whether a Customer Request is Actionable
While customer feedback is the gold standard of insight for product managers, not every customer request is actionable. Today we’ll… Read →
3 Key Traits of Successful Product Designers
What exactly is product design? And how do you differentiate between a good product designer and a great one? Today… Read →
7 Horrible Things to Say to Executive Stakeholders
Your executive stakeholders have life-and-death power over your products. In most companies, they have the final vote about which product… Read →
4 Mistakes Your Company Might Be Making with Your Product Culture
If we asked you right now to describe your organization’s product culture, what would you say? Don’t be too hard… Read →
3 Products That Capitalized on Excitement Features
No product is too dull for excitement features. No matter your product, there’s always a way to add excitement and… Read →
Product Innovation: Is Your Product a Slow-Melting Ice Cube?
Product innovation can certainly be exciting and rewarding. And in today’s hyper-competitive and fast-changing business environment, innovation is not optional…. Read →
5 Product Management Career Mistakes to Avoid
Product management roles demand the ability to think about both strategy and tactics. Ironically, the most common product management career… Read →
8 Ways to Use Agile Principles to Drive Innovation in Large Organizations
When we think about product development within enterprise organizations, the phrases “rapid innovation” and “agile development” are probably not the… Read →
No, Your Customer Is Not Always Right. Why You Need to Validate Customer Requests.
It is difficult to think of a phrase that has been more misinterpreted and misused by businesses than, “The customer… Read →
Why Transparency Matters When Prioritizing Product Features
Product management is about making informed, strategic decisions and ensuring product aligns with organizational goals and customer needs. But a… Read →
5 Common Pitfalls in Data-Driven SaaS Product Management
If you’re a product manager responsible for SaaS applications, you’ve probably been hearing increasing chatter about data-driven SaaS product management…. Read →
Product Management’s Role in a Modern Cross-Functional Team
Would it surprise you to learn that in the early days of scrum, the product manager was not generally considered… Read →
Growing Pains: 5 Challenges Faced by Product Managers at Rapidly Scaling Companies
Product managers at rapidly growing companies are a unique breed that require different skills to be successful. Just as a… Read →
Product Management Lessons I’ve Learned From Cave Diving
After working in the product management space for a few years, I realized that I needed to take some classic… Read →
Customer Feedback Opportunities Most Product Managers Miss
It takes hours of hard work to get a product to market, and after putting in long hours and attending… Read →
