What is Product Management?

Jordan Bergtraum is a management consultant with over ten years of experience in the B2B SaaS industry, mostly as a head of product for various organizations in the legal, education, facilities management, and pharmaceutical spaces. He has been responsible for product strategy, UX, and teams consisting of product and project managers. In his ProductTank NYC Read more »

A friend, who’s recently become a product manager, asked me that recently. She’d inherited a technical product where the engineers already had a view of the direction and deliverables required. Even though it had been broken into phases, each phase was large in scope and involved a number of unconscious assumptions. During planning workshops the Read more »

Should product managers should have some tech skills. Should they know how to code, and how it would help them in their daily work? Read on to find out… Read more »

Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0. Since then he’s had his share of successes and failures in a storied career spanning the US and Europe, and in this entertaining and insightful talk from Mind the Product San Francisco he distills those 20 years into twelve key Read more »

Being a product manager encompasses many things, such as vision, organization, analysis, and communication. In my experience, there is one universal trait that permeates almost everything a product manager does, curiosity.  In product management, I define curiosity as a desire to fully understand a problem from all angles, to want to gather information from a Read more »

Prioritisation is a necessary evil of every product development lifecycle. Deciding what to build, where to focus limited resources and what customer segments to target are questions that face every organisation on a daily basis. With this being the case, why do companies prioritise so badly? Prioritisation is one of the most critical aspects of product Read more »

Let’s establish this right upfront: nothing beats a well-managed full-time in-house team of local developers. So why would you want to outsource anything? Doesn’t outsourcing come with a lot of headaches just for a bit of saving? As with anything complex, it depends. Outsourcing: Why and When? Are there enough skilled developers at your location? Read more »

In my experience, to succeed at data-informed product management you need to master “double-think” and be comfortable with two conflicting statements: “Be data-driven” and “don’t trust your data”. Blindly following data can lead to some bad things. Analytics products aren’t perfect – sometimes data capture gets messed up, and slight changes to code can cause Read more »

How do we all get to that point in product where we have caveats against multiple items on the roadmap—and more importantly what do we do to mitigate it?  Read more »

This is the introductory piece to a series of interviews with product managers. I am on a quest to find out what different product managers do, how their role compares to product management theory, what their daily struggles are, and how I can become a great product manager myself. Why am I doing this? I want to become Read more »