“What If Dev Doesn’t Think Prod Mgmt Represents Customers?”

Recently, I put up a small assessment tool for product management teams.  This tool is intended to generate discussion and highlight areas for team improvement.  Several PMs had follow-up comments and questions along the lines of “what should we do if we’re scored ourselves poorly on a specific item?”

There are no generic prescriptions for improvement, especially in product management.  It’s worth drilling into an individual item or two, though, and imagining how we might analyze the situation and take corrective action.  Continue reading

Reducing Risk Through Agile Product Planning (webinar)

What: “Reducing Risk through Agile Product Planning” webinar
When:  June 2nd, 10:00am PST / 1:00pm EST
Speaker: Rich Mironov, Principal, Mironov Consulting
Replay the webinar here

This webinar is part of Accept’s Agile Management Series, which also includes speakers from Forrester and PRTM.
Agile development teams focus on delivering products faster and with higher quality, reducing the risk of being “late to market.”  But product managers also worry about business risks including: building the wrong product, missing profitable segments, and constant roadmap changes.  How can we apply agile product planning to reduce our overall business risk?

Metrics and More Metrics

Continuing a discussion that was raised in Tom Grant‘s recent conference call with Saeed Khan, they (we) made a distinction between metrics about products that Product Managers use to monitor the world, and metrics about Product Managers for promotions and salary reviews.  Some additional thoughts of mine, along with a lightweight PM assessment tool…

Metrics About Products

For the most part, metrics track the health of products*.  We should be constantly monitoring things like: Continue reading