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 →
Category: Product Strategy
5 Strategies for Burning Down Silos and Building Bridges
As organizations grow and expand, keeping stakeholders and employees on the same page to drive alignment with your product strategy… Read →
5 Ways Product Teams Can Drive an Exceptional Customer Experience Strategy
I’ve worked exclusively on digital products for over 14 years, primarily in product and design-centric roles. Thinking back, it’s surprising… Read →
5 Important Ways Product Managers Can Refocus on Goals in 2020
Unless your product management stack includes a crystal ball, all those goals and resolutions we made way back in January… Read →
Product Strategy Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum, featuring Hadrien Raffalli
In our webinar Product Managers: Treat your Strategy as a Product, Hadrien Raffalli discusses the importance of tracking market activity… Read →
6 Things Product Managers Can Do with Qualitative Research
We are excited to welcome guest writer Carlos González de Villaumbrosia to the ProductPlan blog. Carlos González de Villaumbrosia has… Read →
10 Ways a Feature-Less Roadmap Helps Your Product Strategy
Since releasing both a webinar and book on the impact of feature-less roadmaps on your product strategy recently, we’ve gotten… Read →
Prepare Yourself Against Executive Shiny Object Syndrome
Do you find yourself continually diverted from your product’s itinerary to delve into your boss’s new favorite subject? Are you… Read →
The Activities of a Strategic Product Manager
A strategic product manager (PM) is responsible for shaping and sharing a strategic vision for a product, and yet—oddly enough—finding… Read →
Your Product Outcomes Need to Impact Company KPIs (Otherwise You’re Doing it Wrong)
We live in the age of quantifiable measurability. Data abounds, analysis is cheap, and numbers are harder to dispute than… Read →
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… Read →
What Happens When Customers Have a Negative Product Experience
A human mind is a pattern-seeking machine. Our species has evolved an impressive ability to spot small, subtle clues to… Read →
Demystifying Product Management’s Role in Pricing Strategy
Technology pricing can be tricky, particularly for software and services. When there’s no traditional cost of goods sold (COGS) to… Read →
Without Justifying Opportunity Costs, You Might Prioritize the Wrong Features
Windows of opportunity are fleeting. Sometimes there’s only a short amount of time to do something before its benefits diminish…. Read →
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… Read →
Why People Buy and What it Means for Your Product
Your customers don’t want to buy your product. I mean, sure, they’re willing to hand over the cash (or credit… Read →
What to do When Investors Say No to Your Product Idea
Imagine this scenario. You’re a product manager working for a software startup, and you’ve come up with an idea for… Read →
37 Roadmap Tips to Align Stakeholders
In product management, there are many ways to build a roadmap and many types of roadmaps you can make. Some… Read →
Building Your Roadmap with Cybersecurity in Mind
Security is someone else’s problem. It’s up to IT. The developers will handle it. We use AWS or Azure, so… Read →
The Cost of a Bad Product Strategy
We spend lots of time praising the savvy strategic moves of winning products and companies. But for every success story,… Read →
When is Your Product Ready to Remove the “Beta” Tag?
Until real users get their hands on your product, you can never be 100% sure it works. That’s why product… Read →
4 Reasons You Must Use Metrics to Determine Feature Decisions
Any good goal is measurable, so organizations with properly defined objectives will establish metrics and KPIs to track their progress… Read →
A Product Manager’s Guide to Building Customer Loyalty
In a world where advertising-supported products, SaaS products with monthly renewals, and free trials are de rigueur, customers don’t have… Read →
Should You Try to Extend Your Mature Product’s Life, or Build a New One?
Product managers will encounter many forks on the road to growth and product success. Those forks always require answering difficult… Read →
Sticking to Your Product Vision Means Saying “No”
Product managers wear many hats, but one of the most uncomfortable ones they’re forced to occasionally don is that of… Read →
5 Ways to Make Time for Strategic Thinking
The daily demands of product management make it challenging to carve out time for strategic thinking. But if we’re only… Read →
From Awareness to Adoption: Keys to a Successful New Feature Launch
Product teams must not only create a fantastic product, but they also need to set the stage for the product… Read →
Managing Products that Lose Money
It should be counterintuitive, but one thing many “unicorns” and scrappy startups have in common is a whole lot of… Read →
9 Ways to Recruit Beta Testers
Working with beta testers is a great way to ensure a new product or feature is ready for “prime time”… Read →
Sticky from the Start: How to Create Products that Stick
“Stickiness” isn’t always a good thing—but when it comes to products, we generally prefer users stick around and keep using… Read →
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 →
Conduct an Effective Competitive Analysis Everytime
Competitors make our own products better—they create urgency and drive innovation by providing both motivation and a measuring stick. If… 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 →
7 Project Management Principles Product Managers Can Learn From
Product managers often think of project managers as tactical professionals. This is only partially true, but it’s an understandable misconception…. Read →
Forget about Growth. Here’s the Metric that Really Matters.
Ask any SaaS company about their key metrics, and growth will inevitably come up quickly. Whether they’re exceeding expectations or… 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 →
Product Management’s Role at Every Phase of the Product Lifecycle
Every product has a lifecycle that consists of various phases. And the demands placed upon a product manager often vary… 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 →
How to Include Stakeholders in the Product Planning Process
Unless your company is literally a one-person show, your role as a product leader includes stakeholder management. And including stakeholders… 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 →
How to Use Google’s HEART Framework to Make Product Decisions
Need help prioritizing the many features and other initiatives competing for space on your product roadmap? One way to make… Read →
3 Questions to Ask About Every Potential Product Feature
If you’re a product manager, then you know that demands for new features come from all directions. Sometimes these demands… Read →
