Category Archives: Product Management

art and science of getting tech products imagined, built, shipped and successful

What’s A Vice President of Product Management?

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consigliereMy last two posts were about getting into product management and the climb to Director. This third post asks how Vice Presidents of Product Management (VP PMs) are different from Directors, why they are so rare, and where else Directors can look for organizational advancement.

Product groups vary widely and are not rationally designed. (Sorry.) So let’s imagine a pure VP PM position generalized from my own tours of duty plus a half-dozen interim/acting VP PM roles.  Your organizational mileage may vary. Continue reading →

Dublin’s Software Pioneers

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Dublin Institute of TechnologyI had a chance to spend a week with some of Dublin’s software thought leaders, including two days teaching in a Postgraduate Diploma Program in Product Management offered by the Dublin Institute of Technology and Software Skillnet. In addition, the Irish Software Association generously hosted a workshop and lecture, where we talked about technology management, agile, and building commercially successful products. Continue reading →

Moving Up To Director

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director's chairIn the second of three posts about the product management hierarchy, we’ll focus on technology product managers (PMs) who’ve been in their jobs long enough to consider what comes next.  (User story: “As a Senior Product Manager, I want to be promoted to Director so that I get more money and respect and glory.”)

Let’s break this problem into a few parts: likely candidates for promotion; how the Director job differs from line Product Management; and ways to show that you’re ready for a bigger role. Continue reading →

Getting Your First Product Management Job

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knocking on the doorLooking over dozens of discussions, presentations and Quora threads from the last few months, a frequent question has been “How do I get a job in technical product management?”  Here is the first of three posts split along job levels:

  1. How do I move into tech product management, especially if I’m currently a developer?
  2. How do I move up from an individual PM role to Director? 
  3. I’m a Director of Product Management, and want to be a VP. 

Continue reading →

Webcast with John Peltier

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John Peltier is a seasoned product manager out of Atlanta, and does a periodic  John Peltierwebcast with guest product folks posted on his Product Owner Vision blog.  He generously included me in an interview posted on12 December.  We recorded a half hour discussion covering:

  • How Product Camps can increase awareness among senior and executive level product management
  • How product managers can help engineering organizations to understand what product managers do outside of engineering to help ensure the success of a product
  • Options for a product manager to advance in the field

Listen to the entire session here.

‘Getting Promoted’ Talk at SV ProdCamp

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svpcampThis year’s Silicon Valley Product Camp (the fourth!) drew the largest crowd ever of product managers and product marketers to share, network, learn and have fun! Estimated at almost 600 and hosted at eBay’s Paypal/San Jose location, it pulled attendees from around the continent for nearly 40 sessions.  It also included a job fair with a dozen local companies.  I was honored to be emcee and event coordinator emeritus, having passed PCamp management to new leadership.

I ran a session on Understanding the Next Job Up and Getting Promoted…

Continue reading →

Does Your Product Suck?

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lemonIt’s been a tough week on the technical front, with a variety of products failing to perform their core functions for me. Which prompts a somewhat emotional question for those of us who oversee products (or services) for a living:
Does your product suck? Does it #fail to do the one thing that customers buy it for?

Continue reading →

Skills You Need to Succeed as a PM (SVPMA Panel)

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SVPMA marked its 10-year anniversary with a panel discussion on the key role that product managers play in today’s organizations and the skills PMs need to succeed in the next decade.  120+ attended.

What: “Skills You Need to Succeed as a Product Manager in the Next Decade”
Panel: Rich Mironov (moderator), Tom Grant, Greg Cohen, Christina Noren, Ivan Chalif
When: Wednesday, December 1st, 6:30pm – 9pm
Where: TechMart, Santa Clara

This turned into a spirited discussion among the panelists and assembled PMs/PMMs with questions on their minds.  SVPMA Continue reading →

A Journey of 1000 Miles is Still 1000 Miles Long

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ConfuciusIt’s easy to confuse actual progress with intentions to make progress.

Why point out the obvious? I’ve just come out of another agile conversation where prospective clients confused “we want to build better software faster” with “we hope that some new processes will instantly catch us up on years of slipped deadlines and missing features.”

So paraphrasing Confucius, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but is still a thousand miles long. Even at twice your normal walking speed, be prepared for a very long slog.”

For context, nearly every software development team would like to be more productive, ship better product, and be innovative. Almost by definition, though, those with the biggest productivity issues are the furthest behind – with months (years) of unmet customer requirements and technical debt. Continue reading →