Portfolio Management for Dummies
Portfolio planning is essential to help your organization decide how it’s going to meet its objectives – get it wrong and you’ll miss targets, waste resources and frustrate stakeholders.
Whether you’re a product manager wanting to position your product with the senior team or a team leader involved in the portfolio planning process this blog provides some insights to the tools you can use to get a robust, transparent process.
The fight over the customer
Historically there was a battle between Sales and Product Management. Sales, having more contact with customers, felt they had a better understanding of customer needs than product managers (and sometimes they were right). But I think today the bigger fight is between User Experience (UX) practitioners and product managers.
Product Managers and User Experience professionals are increasingly working together to deliver products. In some cases this relationship is highly productive, leading to outstanding products, but in others, it can be a bit dysfunctional.
Data is essential for Product Managers
Data is a big trend so as a product manager it’s likely you’ll need to get to grips with it.
Our advice is to make sure you’ve got at least basic Excel skills and don’t hesitate to pull in the data scientists if you need help with more complex challenges.
Why you should never ask your mother if your idea is any good
Talking to customers and getting accurate information is hard….. not because they lie but because they often tell you what they think you want to hear. This is never truer than with your own mother. The Mom Test helps ensure you improve your customer conversations.
Product Management Dashboard
Our Product Management Dashboard is a unique tool that we use when reviewing product management at our clients.
Use it to identify key challenges, discuss what’s going wrong and to communicate what needs to change.
Product Management Maturity Model
Our Product Management Maturity Model has been refined based on the work we’ve done with a variety of technology companies over the past few years. It’s always nice to know what to aim for and this model shows what a best practice product management function can look like.
Download our infographic to review the maturity of product management in your business.
Roadmap Prioritization – a case study
Find out how a process to priortise candidates for the roadmap works in real life.
The winning aspiration
Want to win? Why not build your product strategy on the ideas in this very successful book.
It’s about having a winning aspiration which quite simply means how do you beat the competition?
4 common in-life product problems and what to do about them
You’ve launched your product. The early planning was good, and at launch the product appeared to have a good market fit.
But, now things have gone awry.
Read on to discover the 4 common in-life product problems and how to handle them.
Minimum Viable Product vs the Optimal product
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) versus Optimal product – what’s the difference and the MVP trap that many companies fall into.
Watch our short video to explain the theory behind the Lean Product, MVPs and Optimal Products.
