John Peltier is a seasoned product manager out of Atlanta, and does a periodic 
webcast 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.
It’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:
The high-tech opposite of this is something I’ve come to think of as the “post-course correction.” This is the panicky “oops” moment when your startup realizes – much too late – that its core strategy and assumptions are flawed. In space terms, you’ve missed the moon and don’t have enough resources left for dramatic course changes. There’s still air in the cabin (money in the bank), but little hope of a soft landing. 
Product managers and other product champions spend a lot of their time driving internal processes and decisions — the daily incremental struggle for progress on pricing, packaging, release schedules, upgrade policies and other bits of the production puzzle. This relentless motivation is indispensable, the tech equivalent of keeping the trains running on time. PMs should also be spending time with customers, refreshing their sense of needs and marketplaces. 
I’ve often played the “secret shopper,” hired to approach key competitors as a customer or as a consultant to a prospective customer. The goal is to find out in detail what the Other Guys are really saying about themselves — and about you — plus specifics on their products, pricing, positioning, channels and delivery dates.