January 19th, 2010 — Product Management
Pretty simple, but I think it is worth noting what people are reading.
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January 13th, 2010 — Events, Product Management, ProductCamp
productcamp.org is your definitive source for all product camps.
There are five ProductCamps in the near future. While you are here, why not check out my events (or subscribe to the RSS feed) page for the most comprehensive list of product management events available.
In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing. At ProductCamp there are no “attendees”, since everyone is an active participant in some way: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, sharing their experiences, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn, share, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development.
Having attended six (!) ProductCamps, I can attest to the content and value you will receive from attending. I also encourage you to participate and volunteer.
ProductCamp Minnesota (Minnesota, MN)
Date: Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Location: Mall of America
URL: http://www.pcampmn.org/
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampmn
ProductCamp Atlanta 2.0 (Atlanta, GA)
Date: Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Location: GTRI Conference Center
URL: http://www.barcamp.org/ProductCampAtlanta
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampatl
ProductCamp SoCal (Irvine, CA)
Date: Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Location: University of California, Irvine’s Student Center
URL: http://www.productcampsocal.org/
Twitter Hashtag: #pcsc
Silicon Valley P-Camp 2010 (Sunnyvale, CA)
Date: Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Location: Yahoo! Headquarters
URL: http://pcamp10.weebly.com/
ProductCamp Sydney 2010 (Sydney, NSW, Australia)
Date: Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Location: Atlassian
URL: http://www.brainmates.com.au/?page_id=1812
Twitter Hashtag: #pcampsyd
ProductCamp Austin Spring 2010 (Austin, TX)
Date: Saturday, March 27th, 2010
Location: AT&T Conference Center on the University of Texas campus
URL: http://www.barcamp.org/ProductCampAustinSpring2010
Twitter Hashtag: #pca10
ProductCamp RTP (Raleigh, NC)
Date: Saturday, May 22, 2010
Location: Cambria Suites at RDU Airport
URL: http://barcamp.org/ProductCampRTP
ProductCamp Boston (Boston, MA)
Date: Saturday, May 22, 2010
Location: The Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
URL: http://barcamp.org/ProductCampBoston
ProductCamp Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Date: TBD
Location: TBD
URL: http://productcampchicago.eventbrite.com/
Have a Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, Innovation or other related event you want to promote? Contact me and I’ll add it to the growing list for others to see. Also, why not subscribe to the events feed. Tell other people about these events.
January 12th, 2010 — Product Management
Time to revisit a few topics from past years. First, here is a link to my product management resources post from last Summer.
So here goes, my lists for 2010.
Top 5 Product Management Blogs (in no particular order)
Honourable Mentions
Member of Hall of Fame
Top Product Management / Leadership Blog
Top Product Marketing Blog
Up and Coming Product Management Blogs
Agile – new category
I you disagree or think your blog is worth of mention add it to the comments.
November 26th, 2009 — Product Management, Strategy
I sometimes wonder what makes a person a ’strategic thinker’. What attributes does someone need to be considered a strategic thinker? I like to fashion myself as a strategic thinker. I know that in most situations, whether personal or professional, I will start to envision what the future will look like. I am not sure this is a distinguishing feature from anyone else. I suspect everyone, in some way, does mental scenario execution to gauge what the future might look like.
This page (link) provides some interesting attributes that assist in strategic thinking. These include using facts, working with boundaries, consequence and risk analysis and decision making.
There is no doubt that product management is a strategic role (or should be), but how do you put the right person in place when everyone will claim to be a strategic thinker. I am not sure there is magic recipe here, but having someone who has successful products in the past is a possible indicator they can repeat it. Not a guarantee though.
A lot of the work that product management should be doing helps one become a strategic thinker. All of those enhancements, win/loss reports, call reports are your facts. The boundaries are framed through your persona development and then consequence, risk analysis and decision making come out during roadmapping sessions and release planning.
Having all of these things doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a winning strategy, but it will give you some evidence to put in place a plan and allow you to think strategically.
November 2nd, 2009 — Book Review, Product Management, User Stories
by Jason Brett
As a <type of user> I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.
Whether you are new to story-driven software development or have been managing products or development with user stories for a decade, “User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development” (Mike Cohn) is a great read.
I’m personally new to writing user stories, so I dove into Cohn’s book from a relatively fresh perspective, and found the entire book highly digestible. Mr. Cohn makes no assumptions about the readers level of expertise or familiarity with Agile methods. At the same time, he writes in a way that gives the reader credit for being intelligent and purposeful.
The book is broken into 3 parts:
Part 1 covers the basics of user stories and so much more. Cohn goes into a well paced discussion of the roles of each member of the agile team at each step of the process. Not only does he dissect the stories themselves, commenting on size and scope of stories, but Cohn pays a great deal of attention to cataloging and working with an appropriate variety of user roles, working with user proxies, acceptance tests, and an exceedingly valuable chapter discussing guidelines of good stories.
Part 2 continues the examination of the user story from the perspective of estimating and planning, stepping deftly from release to iteration, taking care to discuss monitoring and measurement of the release and iteration’s progress.
Finally, in Part 3, the Cohn ties everything together with an in-depth example and a well organized discussion of a variety of topics that naturally emerge in a business environment when applying user stories to an agile development framework. He spends a chapter specifically on user stories with Scrum, and another excellent chapter on “A Catalog of Story Smells.” This chapter provides a great reality check for anyone trying to detect and deal with potential team challenges when user stories may seem to be at the center of the discussion.
What stands out to me most about “User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development” is not only it’s apparent status as the definitive work on User Stories, but it’s effective introduction to Agile software development from the Product Management perspective. This is a book that I think exceeds its purpose in that regard.
I read this book as an experienced product manager who is new to Agile and Scrum. It has been an invaluable resource to me in that role. What I appreciate even more about Cohn’s work is that after reviewing the table of contents for this review, I can see myself re-reading the book annually (for at least for the next couple of years) and gleaning new insights to help strengthen my process and products.
No matter what your role in an Agile organization, be it product manager, product owner, scrum master or marketing manager, I suspect this book will provide significant insights into your company’s development process that can do nothing but serve you well.
Jason Brett is a Product Manager at Silverpop Systems, Inc, Founder of ProductCamp Atlanta, and currently sits on the board of the TAG Product Management Society. Jason should blog at his own website http://www.jasonbrett.me, but rarely does. You can, however, follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jbrett. Be sure and leave an @ reply to say hi!
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November 1st, 2009 — Leadership, Personas, Pricing, Strategy
Next thing you know it has been 23 days since your last post. Oddly my subscribers have risen. Thanks for reading! There is lots going on in my life and reading and writing has sadly slipped below my capacity to process. I am hopeful that will change in November, but my travel schedule for the month is already pretty full. We shall see. Generally when I am lost for blog ideas I have a book review to do, but the current book (How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer) is a bit heavy and proving to be a slow read. The upside, I am learning lots about brain activity.
Random Bits:
1. I want to acknowledge a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago about authority vs. influence. His premise was that authority doesn’t exist. Authority alone is not enough to lead and that even in a position of leadership influence will still rule the day. I agree.
2. Regarding personas, I continue to see them not being used. You will lose the battle without them. Also try your best to ignore this post, except for the comments.
3. Regarding vision, I continue to see either no vision or poorly defined visions. You will lose the battle without a vision, largely because it is the key component to strategy. No vision, no strategy. Here is a good blog on product visions.
4. The price of your product is determined by the value it provides, not the cost.
5. Please visit my list of product management events. It is the most comprehensive list of events targeted towards product managers anywhere.
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October 7th, 2009 — Roadmaps, Strategy
| Seems to be a hot topic this week, there has been many discussions about strategy and roadmaps. Is it roadmap update season already? Steve Johnson said: “Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.” OnPM said: “re:Roadmap: R a hi-level *plan* based on what is known today. May include strategy (good or bad) but may not.” OnPM also offered up a couple posts to read: What’s the deal with Product Roadmaps? and Agile/Scrum and Product Roadmaps. It seems from the discussions and comments that the general consensus is that if you open PowerPoint, plot out a timelines and insert features into the timeline, you might have what is considered by some as roadmap, but not a strategy. It also seems that most agree that your roadmap is your strategy. So what is missing? What information do you need in your roadmap to make it a strategy? |
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September 24th, 2009 — Leadership, Product Management
 Leadership is a frequent topic of discussion within the product management community. You won’t find much of a debate on the topic of whether product management is a leadership position, but you will find much discussion on the depth of the leadership. The discussion will span across whether product management should have people management responsibilities, whether they can be accountable for key performance indicators or just generally how to be a better leader.In a recent webinar , David Locke suggested he though the product manager role was more accurately as titled as Product Leader. Perhaps David can comment as to why he thinks this title might be more accurate. He discusses this in the webinar around the 44 minute mark. The product management leadership angst generally occurs when it appears like a lack of authority is blocking your plan. The reality is that your powers of influence are probably lacking. If you know me (actually maybe no one knows this), I love word definitions. I look up one word a day, mostly due the fact that I had a history of not reading very much. I am reading much more now. Anyway, here is how the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines authority and influence. Actually they have a few different definitions for each word (of course they do), but I thought these were closer aligned to product management than the others.
From a product management perspective, I typically get nervous if you are managing a product and people. The people distract from the time that the product requires and not managing people will generally preclude you from the authoritative leadership you might be seeking. The power of influence is perhaps the most important tool in your professional toolkit. It should be a skill that you are constantly working to improve. It blends in a number of your personal traits including likability, compassion, empathy and understanding. But it also requires that you put the effort on your end to be able to justify anything you might need. People can be more easily led if you use market-, fact-or customer-based evidence for your requirements. I tell people that product management is 90% leadership and of that 100% will be by influence and supported by all your market sensing activities.
Again, I defer you to the two experts on the topic of product management and leadership: Image Source: Bonner Center for Service and Learning |
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Stewart is a promoter, evangelist and recognized thought leader of product management best practices.
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Twitter: stewartrogers |
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LinkedIn: rsrogers |
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