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 managers. Product teams aren’t...
More from Heather McCloskey
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 sense rationale is that...
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, customer service, or the...
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. In an Agile world...
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 want to look nice,...
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 with them institutional knowledge,...
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 basics of continuous delivery,...
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 24 days. And that’s...
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 we often call “design...
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 other pivotal changes happen...
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 quantifiable indicators of future...
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 can measure product-market fit...
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 in more professionals to...
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 environments? For the product...
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 agile teams, then share...
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 resources over the past...
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 OKR framework was popularized...
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 said, “Plans are useless,...
The Introverted Product Manager
Can introverts be successful as product managers? No matter what you may have heard, we believe the answer to this question is a resounding...
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 discuss a few ways...
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 we’ll look at the...
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 initiatives get the green...
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 on yourself here. Almost...
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 customer delight. Today we’ll...
