If you want to be a bad product manager, only spend time on the messaging over which you have control. Put lots of effort into designing nice brochures and press kits. Agonize over details on your web site. Focus on search engine optimization. Put a lot of resources into a nice trade show booth. These are the important elements of your marketing, and though people will always be saying things about your product in other contexts, since you can’t control them you should just not worry about them. If you want to be a good product manager, monitor customer perception of your product from all channels. You may spend a lot of time crafting your positioning statement, designing advertisements, putting together a newsletter, and creating brochures, but potential customers are finding out about your product from may different directions. In many cases, the avenues over which you do not have control can be much more influential in a purchase or use decision. It can be very easy to get wrapped up in the communication you are creating internally and totally overlook the other communication that exists. Blogs, message boards, and mailing lists are prime locations for discussions and opinions about…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just look forward in time to new enhancements and releases. What’s done is done, and you need to focus on what’s coming next. The important thing is what you’re working on to make the product better. It doesn’t make much sense to review the past because you can’t do anything about it now. If you want to be a good product manager, monitor and analyze the past, present, and future. Product management is not just about what’s coming next. While new releases and changes are important, it’s equally important to analyze the past and keep tabs on the present. My friend and fellow UX-turned-PM Chris Baum had a great insight he shared with me — product managers are one of the few roles in product development that need to look backward and forward at the same time. Most other members of the product development team are just looking forward. Developers are working on code to support new features. User experience specialists are conducting usability testing to refine the interaction of new functionality. QA is testing new builds to ensure they work properly. The project manager is looking at the project plan…

If you want to be a bad product manager, build your platform as you’re building your product. You know you want your products to work as a system (as described in Make Your Products Part of a System) and to do that you need to build a platform. The easiest thing to do is to build the platform at the same time you’re building your products. That way, you only have to undertake one project, and by doing it all at once you’ll make sure that you’ll include all of the requirements you need. Plus, you need to get your products out as soon as possible, and you don’t have time to wait while a platform is being built. By building everything at once you can save some time and get to the market faster. If you want to be a good product manager, build your platform, then your products. Making your products part of a system is a good idea and having a common platform is the easiest way to help everything work together and be part of one family. It would seem to make sense to build the platform at the same time as the product, but there…

If you want to be a bad product manager, put all your innovation emphasis on a few groundbreaking projects. Since you need radical innovation, these may be high risk, but that’s what innovation is about, right? You know that you need to innovate, and this is a perfect formula to make sure that you are focusing energy on the most beneficial innovations — those big new ideas that are likely to create the most value. If you want to be a good product manager, build a portfolio of innovation initiatives. Though many frequently think of innovation as being dramatic and substantial, most innovation is less groundbreaking and more about refining current ideas, processes, and systems. Focusing only on major innovation projects is more risky and neglects the real benefits you can obtain through incremental enhancements. Of course, some companies focus only on these minor improvements without looking at more dramatic and radical innovations. This is too conservative an approach, destined to leave you playing catch-up as competitors introduce major innovations. The key is to balance your innovation efforts. In Innovation: The Classic Traps, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School discusses the mistakes that companies make with innovation and “offers…

If you want to be a bad product manager, do anything you can to get publicity. It’s a crowded marketplace, and you need to “build buzz” and “get eyeballs.” Do anything you can to get attention, even wacky stunts that aren’t really tied to your product. Sure, it may not be too relevant to your business, but it will get PR, right? If you’re trying to drive traffic to your web site, use all the tactics you can to get visitors. Even if most of the visitors not necessarily exclusively in your target market, some of them are bound to be possible customers. If you want to be a good product manager, focus on getting the right kind of publicity. Often with marketing and public relations, people get caught up in what seem to be good attention-grabbing ideas, not realizing that they are not tied to specific goals or that some small short-term benefits will be outweighed by long-term repercussions. Too frequently focus is on the idea rather than the objective. Justification is provided because something is possible, without thought to whether it is the right thing to do. At ack/nak, Bob Corrigan gives his take on the old adage…

If you want to be a bad product manager, create as many different product support materials as possible. If you’re launching a new product or enhancing an existing product, you need to communicate what’s new or improved. To do this, put one set of materials together for your sales staff, another for customer service, another to provide to new customers, a different set for partners, and more versions for other audiences. There might be slightly different needs across the groups, so it’s best just to create each one separately to make sure they are tailored to the audience needs. This might take a bit more effort, but in the long run it will help make sure you are passing along the right information. If you want to be a good product manager, create a core set of product support materials and reuse them as much as possible. Tailoring your materials to different needs is a good idea, but is it really necessary? Are the different internal and external audience needs really as different as you think? Do you really need to create one FAQ for customer service, a different one to post on the web site, and a different one…

If you want to be a bad product manager, keep your product development team uninformed about how your product is performing. Why would a graphic designer need to know about revenue? Why would a product support representative need information about competition? Why should an engineer care about market share? Those are things for you to worry about and for you to communicate only to those people within the company who absolutely need to know. If you want to be a good product manager, share information about your product with other stakeholders and interested parties within your organization. Product managers usually are the internal “face” of the product, and as such should keep others informed about the product’s revenue, market share, profit, competition, and future plans. It is important to connect what an individual contributor is doing on a daily basis to the bigger picture. Putting each person’s efforts into context can help align tactical efforts with product and organizational strategy. One of the best ways to keep everyone informed is with a “State of the Product” meeting. Similar to the State of the Union and State of the State addresses, a State of the Product meeting is an opportunity to…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t recognize achievements until the release is finished. The whole team should be aligned with the same end goal — completing the project and launching the product. If you celebrate achievements along the way, it sends the message that getting to the release isn’t what everyone should be focused on. Some people may think that this means that they have finished their work and can relax now. Why would you want to celebrate anyway — the project isn’t done yet? If you want to be a good product manager, celebrate accomplishments and milestones along the way. This simple yet often overlooked act can help bring the product development team together to recognize the work that has been completed and help motivate for the work still left to be done. With many projects taking months if not years, you need to have milestones along the way or else people will lose focus and the desire to keep going. Taking a break to showcase achievements can help connect each person’s work with the bigger picture, helping to put all of the efforts in perspective. It serves as a good checkpoint for where the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, insist on finding the perfect software solution to use in product management. Spend months and months evaluating different packages, comparing the features and evaluating their functionality. Finding the right tool is important, because it can fix all of your product management problems. The ideal software is out there and you will discover it if you put enough time into finding it. If you want to be a good product manager, find good tools that support your product management needs. Software that can help collect customer feedback, manage requirements, and plan roadmaps is beneficial to product managers. However, great tools can not make up for bad product management, and great product managers can do fantastic work without great tools. Sports provides a useful analogy for the utility of product management tools: product management software is to product managers what golf clubs are to golfers. Would Tiger Woods still be a good golfer even if he had a beat-up old set of golf clubs? Probably — maybe not as dominating as he is now, but he would still be one of the greatest. If I buy the same golf clubs that Tiger Woods…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t ever spend time working on things that are not product management duties. You’re part of a product development team, and each team member is responsible for his or her own area. You handle the product management tasks, the marketing person performs the marketing tasks, the designers and developers take care of their areas, the testers are responsible for their deliverables, and so on. Working with those other groups just encourages them to slack off and show that other people will bail them out if they can’t complete their work. Focus on the product management deliverables and push others to make sure they contribute their fair share. If you want to be a good product manager, help out when needed in areas outside of product management. Product managers should be more strategic than tactical and should avoid micromanaging members of the product development team, but on every project the time comes where team members need to assist with other areas. There’s a difference between diving into the details to fill in gaps that are not finished and diving into the details to change work that someone else on the team has…

If you want to be a bad product manager, immediately reject any bad idea. There’s no point in discussing an idea with which there are serious and obvious flaws. Putting any effort into them just wastes everyone’s time. Clearly communicate the problems with the idea, put it to rest, and move on. If you want to be a good product manager, encourage all ideas, even bad ones. You might be expecting the “there are no bad ideas” pep talk, but there are in fact bad ideas. Face it — some ideas are just better than others. However, just because an idea is bad does not mean that you should not even entertain the idea or spend any time with it. Accepting all ideas — even ones that appear to be totally awful and worthless to even think about — benefits your product in several ways: It establishes an environment in which people are encouraged to offer suggestions and comments. The idea that you think is horrible is one that the contributor thinks is brilliant. If you quickly shut that person down, how likely do you think that person is to contribute in the future? Customers, team members, and partners should…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just deliver the most-requested features. You need to be “customer focused” and provide features that customers want. Survey your customers, tally up the most-requested features, and provide those. Don’t bother wasting your time on things that aren’t mentioned as important by customers or are ranked lower. If those were important features on which to concentrate, they would have been rated as more important in your research. If you just focus on the aspects of the product that are ranked highest when you survey your customers, how can you go wrong? If you want to be a good product manager, identify compelling differentiators to include in your product. Every product needs to provide a certain basic set of benefits, but the best products solve unmet needs that customers could never have expressed. If you just build the most requested features, your product will likely not be solving any different problems than your competition nor solving them better. Over on Hitchhiker’s Guide to 650, Will Hsu describes this as Competing at the Margins – In many industries, especially online given the low barriers to entry, hyper competition has commoditized almost any “idea” that…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t give your sales staff a preview of product enhancements or new product launches. Their job is to sell the products that you produce, not to help create them — why would it matter what they think? Any time they spend talking with you is time that they’re not selling, and you don’t want to have a negative impact on their sales performance. Plus, if you did preview for them what you’re working on, they’d just go out and start selling that immediately, even though the work in progress may not be exactly what you’ll release. Since there’s potential to confuse or unintentionally mislead customers, it’s best not to show your sales staff anything until right before it’s ready for release. Of course, you will probably be doing so many other things right up to launch that you might not get a chance to show it to them until it’s already out the door! If you want to be a good product manager, engage your sales staff in the product development stage. They have good information to share — they’re on the front lines with customers every day. Sales representatives have…

If you want to be a bad product manager, publicize your launch date well in advance. Your customers need to know when they can expect a new product or product enhancements. They’re going to ask anyway, so you might as well just start publicizing it. Plus, if you get any pushback from engineering/development/production on the launch date, you can tell them that you have to make the date because you’ve already told customers about it. Having a launch date that everyone knows about is a great way to motivate the team to get the project done on schedule. If you want to be a good product manager, be very careful in how you promote your launch date. Obviously you want to let customers know about new products and new versions of products, but that doesn’t mean you need to publicly commit to a specific date months in advance of the actual launch. Over at brainmates, Fern Jones-Middleton offers five fantastic suggestions for Launching New Products Successfully, including: Don’t release a launch date in the market unless you’re 110% sure you’re going to make it. Your company can look pretty silly in the eyes of a customer if it’s not available…

If you want to be a bad product manager, include only those features customers have identified as necessary on your “must have” list. It’s hard enough to get all of the necessary features into your next release, so you can’t clutter it up with things that may be neat but are really not necessary. If customers haven’t asked for it, then it must not be necessary. Focus on providing those pieces of functionality that really must be included in the next release of your product. If you want to be a good product manager, include some “inspiring/exciting” features on your “must have” list even if they may not be “necessary.” There are a few reasons to have non-requested and non-”must have” features in your list of top items to add to your next release: Just because a customer did not ask for a feature does not mean it may not be a highly valued or used feature. There are many great examples of good additions to products that came from a need that was not articulated but observed by a user researcher, or a “crazy” idea from a brilliant engineer. Including just the “must have” features puts you in perpetual…

 يعتبر من أفضل الكتب في ادارة المنتجات أستفاد منه الألوف من مديري المنتجات حول العالم The Role and Operation of Product Management ( New product & cross functional role)   Planning Skills for Product Managers ( Marketing, Customer value & Annual product plan )   Product Skills ( Portfolio, strategic planning & financial side )   Functional Skills ( ex. Pricing & other marketing Techniques) Download here pm_handbook  

If you want to be a bad product manager, wait until questions are asked to answer them. Making people have to ask you a question to get an answer — rather than letting them figure out the answer on their own — is a great way to show your value as a product manager and show your “customer service” by actually responding. Plus, there are just too many possible questions that can be asked, so it doesn’t make sense to try to prepare. If you want to be a good product manager, anticipate the questions you are likely to hear and answer them before they are asked. Rather than having to scramble on your feet to come up with an answer, make sure that the question does not come up in the first place. This does not just apply to questions from customers — it is a general philosophy that can be applied to all areas of product management. Product managers get all types of questions from customers, sales, customer service, executives, and other internal and external stakeholders. Anticipating questions that may be asked saves you time, allows you to provide more consistent information, and makes you appear much more…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume everyone will use your product as directed. You include all of that documentation for a reason — step by step directions, a detailed manual, a Help section. That details how the product is supposed to be used. Blame your customers when you realize they are using your product in different ways. Tell them that they shouldn’t be using the product in a way it was never intended and actively take steps to prevent them from misusing it. If you want to be a good product manager, assume that people will use your product in ways you never intended and make it easy for them to do so. It is not a question of if people will find new uses for your product, it is a question of what those uses will be. Designing your product to support misuse and new uses can help market your product, increase sales, and reduce costs. One example of a product that should have been designed better to support misuse is the Nintendo Wii. While the Wii is a fantastic product, one flaw in the design was the strength of the wrist straps for the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, ask customers to tell you why they love your product. You want to know what you’re doing well so you can keep doing it. Make sure you understand your strengths and core competencies. Avoid discussing areas that might be weaknesses — you don’t want your customers to think about them. If they start voicing their discontent on specific aspects of your product or company, quickly defend yourself and change the conversation back to more positive areas. If you want to be a good product manager, ask customers to tell you why they hate your product. While it is inspiring to hear customers describe talk about how great you and your product are, not as much can be learned from this as can be learned from listening to customers complain. It may seem counterintuitive to ask customers to talk about things they hate. Product managers need to be helping to promote their products and make customers want to buy and use them, right? Of course, and the strange paradox is that by telling you about what they dislike about your product you can actually help keep those customers as customers. There’s a…

If you want to be a bad product manager, ignore issues and risks. Try to pretend they don’t exist and hope they go away. Don’t tell other people about them — especially higher-ups — since if they find out, it will make you look weak and like you can’t control your product. Downplay the likelihood of risks becoming issues, and downplay the impact of issues that have come up. You want to look like you know what you’re doing, and you can’t do that if people are focusing on all of the things that are going wrong. If you want to be a good product manager, identify and proactively manage risks and issues. Project managers know this, and product managers should too. Though this is most often the responsibility of the project manager, product managers can not just offload this on the project manager and remain removed from the situation. Rather than trying to ignore or downplay risks, product managers can work with project managers to confront these risks and issues head-on. Issues are anything that are impacting your product or project negatively, and risks are anything that has the potential to impact your product or project negatively. You need…

If you want to be a bad product manager, do not seek out advice from other product managers. The problems you are facing in your job are so unique that surely no one has ever encountered them before. Your product is special and different, and there is no way that someone else could provide advice. Even if there was someone who could help, you certainly couldn’t share any details because of confidentiality, security, and intellectual property issues. Plus, solving problems on your own is good for your character. You’re never going to learn if you’re always asking other people for help, right? If you want to be a good product manager, ask a good product manager for advice when you need help. So often, product managers get too focused specific tasks and day-to-day duties. They do not take the time to step back from trying to solve specific problems and think about whether they are approaching the issue in the best way. Think back to a product management challenge you had in the past week. Did you immediately know the best approach? Did you handle the situation perfectly? Were there resources you could have utilized, but didn’t because you were…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t escalate any issues to your boss. You don’t want to show that you’re incapable of doing your job, so don’t ask for help unless you really need it. If you do need help, make sure your boss knows all of the ins and outs of the problem, including the whole backstory, and don’t specifically ask for help — just communicate the story and see what he/she says. You don’t want to actually “ask,” you want to just explain what’s going on and see what the response is. If you want to be a good product manager, escalate issues appropriately. While there are many decisions for which you as a product manager are responsible and accountable, there will always be some issues that require escalation. Part of managing your relationship with your boss and managing issues and risks is knowing when and how to escalate issues. Escalating too many issues is just as bad as not escalating any. Escalate too frequently, and it will appear as though you are not competent in your job. Escalate too rarely, and others may have to help clean up problems that could have been avoided…

If you want to be a bad product manager, accept what you hear. Resign yourself to be constrained by what others tell you. Give up whenever you face resistance. Don’t push back when something doesn’t seem right. Just accept things as they appear, and work within those limits. If you want to be a good product manager, prevent yourself from getting lulled into complacency. The most powerful force working against product managers isn’t the competition or problematic customers or other groups within your company — it’s yourself. Product managers need to advocate what is best for their customers and their product. There will be situations where forces are working against you, where you hear phrases like It’s always been done that way It’s against our policy That’s not possible We’ve never tried that before We don’t know how I don’t think that’s a good idea It is very easy to forget what you are trying to accomplish and accept these answers. There will always be obstacles along the way, and you may need to fight for what you believe is right. This is a necessary part of product management and often may be crucial to your success. Do not accept…

If you want to be a bad product manager, create new products based on business desires and existing assets. If your organization is missing one key part of a product line, it needs to be filled. If a competitor has a product with which you can’t compete directly, you need to make sure you create a product to go head-to-head. If there’s a market that you would like to go in to, figure out a way to take existing assets and competencies and use those to create a product, even if it’s not a perfect fit for that market — it’s better than nothing, right? If you want to be a good product manager, create new products that fill customer needs that are not currently being met. Too often, organizations define products based on the company’s existing intellectual capital, competencies, and physical or virtual assets. While there might be great ideas for products that solve a market need, by constraining the product to what the company currently has, it prevents them from really coming up with a good solution. Other times, organizations change their strategy or create products based on markets they want to capture, even though it does not…

If you want to be a bad product manager, use conferences and trade shows where you are exhibiting as a time to sell. When prospective customers approach your booth, quickly greet them and go in to your product pitch. Demo all of the features and point out the aspects where you are superior to your competition. Push for a sale, a trial, or a specific follow-up before the person walks away. You’ve paid good money for your booth, after all, so you need to close some sales to make up for it. If you want to be a good product manager, use conferences and trade shows where you are exhibiting as a time to learn. One of the worst things you can do in a booth is to automatically try and sell to everyone who walks in, using the same standard pitch. Many people may just be casually browsing, and pitching to them is a waste of your time and theirs. Visitors likely have different levels of knowledge from your product, from those who have not heard of it before all the way to those who are about to make a purchase decision. The information you provide needs to be…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t evaluate your performance or attempt to improve. Assume you’re doing a fine job and leave it at that. You were hired for the job and you’re still in it, so you can’t be doing that badly, right? You’ve read some articles and part of a book a few years ago, so you’ve got the basics covered, and since you’re actually doing product management, that’s the best way to learn. If you want to be a good product manager, measure your effectiveness and work to improve. It sounds so obvious but is such an easy thing to miss. To a very small percentage of people, being a good product manager comes naturally. Most need to learn how to be good product managers and continue to evaluate their efforts and work to continuously improve. In her article Are You Decent? The Naked Truth About Product Management Performance, Alyssa Dver provides several suggestions for assessing your effectiveness as a product manager and improving. First and foremost, get feedback from relevant stakeholders: Talk with key people in all the functions you interact with: Engineering, Finance, Marketing, Support, and most importantly, Sales. Talk to your…

If you want to be a bad product manager, worry about your current competitors. They are the ones taking sales away from your product right now. Going forward, they are the ones you need to worry about most since they are already in your market. Your current competitors are products which potential customers already buy and use, and your focus should be on converting those people over to your product. If you want to be a good product manager, worry more about your potential future competitors than your current competitors. Understanding and monitoring current competition is an important part of being a market-focused product manager — you obviously need to understand the market. However, current competitors pose much less risk since you know who they are and can be on the lookout for them. The competitors who have the potential to blindside you and totally change your market are the ones who should be of more concern. Blockbuster Video was focused on competitors like Hollywood Video, smaller chains, and pay-per-view on cable and got blindsided by Netflix. Tower Records was focused on physical competitors like Virgin Megastore and online competitors like Amazon.com when they really should have been worried about…

If you want to be a bad product manager, have a low-cost strategy. Customers are price sensitive, and if you can deliver a product for less than the competition, you’ll be successful at generating more sales. Even if your product isn’t as good as the competition, if it’s cheaper, more people will buy it. If you want to be a good product manager, do not pursue a low cost strategy unless you truly are offering a commodity product that can not be differentiated at all from the competition. Instead, you should develop a strategy around differentiating your product from the competition strategy, and consider a low price to the customer as part of that strategy. Michael Porter’s generic strategies are the basis for the differentiation / low cost strategy discussion, and suggest that developing a low cost competency can be part of a cost leadership or segmentation strategy. Unfortunately, this has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, leading many to believe that low-cost is a strategy in and of itself, when in most cases it is not. In Porter’s model, low cost refers to the cost from the firm’s perspective to produce the product. Many instead believe that it refers to the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, answer a question even when you’re not sure of an answer. You don’t want to look like you don’t know about your product. If a sales rep asks if the product includes a specific feature, and you think so but are not sure, just tell them it does; if you’re wrong, you can always add the feature later. Make assumptions about aspects of the product that you’re not quite clear on. If you had to check with other people in the company every time a question came up you weren’t sure about, you’d never be able to get anything done. If you want to be a good product manager, do not be afraid to say “I don’t know.” Product managers should be informed and knowledgeable and have a good understanding of their product. However, there will always be questions that are asked — by sales representatives, by senior management, by customers — for which you are not positive on the answer. In those cases, rather than providing a half-sure, make sure you find out the right answer right away. Most product managers who make the mistake of answering questions when they…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t get caught up in all of the hype around the iPhone. Apple is a completely different company than yours and what works for them wouldn’t ever work for you. It’s a neat gadget, but nothing more. If you want to be a good product manager, see what lessons you can learn from the iPhone. Look past the hype and see it for what it is — a number of great case studies wrapped up in a well-designed and potentially revolutionary product. Only time will tell as to whether the iPhone is as important a product as the iPod or as trivial as the Mac Mini, though either way there are lessons to be learned. The iPhone is one of the biggest product launches in recent memory, and the product development aspects involved and marketing strategy is certain to provide fodder for case studies for years to come. Good product managers use everything as an opportunity to learn. Rather than dismissing the iPhone launch as irrelevant since it doesn’t relate to their industry or product, product managers can take away valuable lessons around what to do and what not to do….

If you want to be a bad product manager, keep answering the same questions over and over again. Part of your job is to be responsive and to answer questions from developers, sales representatives, and customers. Make sure you’re available and can help, since people appreciate it when they can get an answer quickly from a product manager. The more time you spend answering questions, the more credibility you will gain and the more they will appreciate you. If you want to be a good product manager, try to never answer the same question twice. Rather than just answering the question, see if you can do something to prevent the question from being asked again. Developers, sales representatives, and other internal stakeholders probably appreciate your responsiveness. After all, that makes less work for them! Instead of them having to try to find the answer themselves, they know you can just do the work for them. Answering questions is great for the person asking the question but bad for product managers because it is a drain on productivity. Of course these questions need to be answered, and building credibility is important, but there are much more efficient ways to accomplish both….

If you want to be a bad product manager, manage an existing product as if it was a new product. It doesn’t matter whether it’s been out for five years or whether it’s launching next week — a product’s a product. Make the decisions you think are right for the product, regardless of how long it’s been in the market, current customer perception, market penetration, or product history. You’re not responsible for decisions that your predecessors made. If there were bad decisions made in the past, you need to correct them, regardless of what impacts it may have. If you want to be a good product manager, understand that an existing product needs to be managed differently than a new one. Existing products have history, and this history needs to be taken into consideration in many decisions. The existing features, benefits, brand perceptions, past prices, and historical customer satisfaction are all aspects that need to be taken into account when managing an existing product. New products have the luxury of starting from scratch. There is an opportunity to build it right the first time, focusing on the right features, functionality, and benefits. Positioning and pricing can be determined irrespective of…

If you want to be a bad product manager, rely solely on technology to communicate with coworkers. With all of the advances in technology, you don’t ever need to be there in person. Between email and instant messaging, wikis and webcams, Skype and cell phones, you can keep in touch without ever being in the same time zone, let alone the same room. If you want to be a good product manager, communicate in person as much as possible. Technology advances are fantastic and have improved communications and business around the world. Many technologies allow product managers to be much more efficient and effective. However, technology is no replacement for in person communication, and can not provide many of the benefits from meeting face-to-face. It is common knowledge that only a small percentage of communication comes from alone — inflection and non-verbal cues make up a much larger portion. Certainly this is a benefit of meeting with team members and coworkers in person, though there are many others that are even more important: Improved efficiency: Simply put, it is much quicker to work with someone in person rather than over the phone, through instant messenger, or over email. An issue…

If you want to be a bad product manager, ignore ideas that have been tried before. If it failed in the past, it will fail in the present. Don’t waste your time even thinking about it or discussing it again. Focus instead on coming up with totally new ideas to try, and if none of those work, keep coming up with new ideas. If you want to be a good product manager, revisit ideas from the past to see if they are applicable now. “It’s been tried before, and it didn’t work” should be banished from the vocabulary of anyone in product development or management. Not only does this phrase implicitly limit innovation and creativity, but whether it worked or not is less important than why. Instead of rehashing the past, understand why something that was tried in the past was or was not successful, and see if anything has changed that would produce different results this time around. Have the needs of your customers changed? Are there new market dynamics at play? Are there new customer segments that have developed? Is new or improved technology available that could make the idea more successful? Are you pursuing a new or…

If you want to be a bad product manager, avoid confrontation with colleagues. You need to get along with your colleagues, and when a disagreement comes up, try to find a way around it as quickly as possible. Sometimes it’s just better to give in than to try and do what you think is right. Find the easy way out and if things start to get heated, immediately take a break or remove yourself from the situation. You’re not going to be able to design good products if you have team members always disagreeing with each other. If you want to be a good product manager, encourage healthy discussion, disagreement, and even arguments that can help make the product better. Confrontation is inevitable, and trying to avoid it is unhealthy and unproductive. A product development team without differing opinions is not exploring the full range of possibilities. Pretend that differences of opinion do not exist and not letting people express them will lead to frustration, alienation, and eventually even more conflict. The key to productive and “healthy” arguments is to keep them focused on the specific problem or issue. Gopal Shenoy writes that one of the 11 things he has…

If you want to be a bad product manager, highlight your individual accomplishments. Make sure everyone knows about your brilliant ideas, the great work that you did, and the decisions that you made. You did a lot of work and you should get credit for it. You are responsible for the product, after all, and you do “manage” it. How are people going to know about all of the work you did otherwise? If you want to be a good product manager, attribute product accomplishments to the entire team, not just yourself. Unless you did all of the analysis, created the design, wrote the specifications, completed the engineering and development, ran all the testing, and developed the marketing materials all by yourself (highly unlikely even in the smallest companies), your product is the result of work by a group of people. To play on the old saying, there is no I in product management. As the Cranky Product Manager notes: The product belongs to the entire team, not the Product Manager. Because the Product Manager might be the most visible member of the team (getting quoted in the industry magazines and giving presentations to the Board, etc.), the Product Manager…

If you want to be a bad product manager, solve each problem individually. With so many issues coming up during your work, the only way to make any progress is to handle each one on its own. Start with the most pressing issue, take care of it, and then move on to the next one. This is the most efficient and effective way of making sure you’re addressing all of the relevant problems. If you want to be a good product manager, look for solutions that will solve multiple problems. Efficiency in product management is not gained by addressing individual issues quickly but by looking for ways to solve multiple problems at the same time, or ideally before they come up. In some cases, these issues may initially seem totally unrelated, which makes it all the more important for product managers to keep an open mind to new ideas and be aware of many different areas in business and technology. reCPATCA (thanks to Brainmates for the tip) is a great example of an innovative solution to two separate problems — how to prevent spam on blog comments, and how to digitize books. Their solution allows a site owner to leverage…

If you want to be a bad product manager, treat product development as a democracy. Give everyone an equal vote in all decisions. You are part of a team after all, right? What kind of team would it be if people were excluded from certain decisions? When considering new features for your product, let all of the engineers and marketers and salespeople vote, and start working on the feature with the most votes. Let customers vote, too — you’re building the product for them so they deserve this opportunity. If you want to be a good product manager, rely on leadership rather than voting to drive product development. Of course, product managers can not and should not be dictators, and there are many things product managers must do to engage and utilize the entire product development team, like selling requirements to development and involving others in creating product plans. However, product development is not a democracy. There is no voting, and if there was, not everyone would get a vote, and not all votes would be equal. While it may be tempting to structure an open process by which stakeholders have the opportunity to provide input and are given a…

If you want to be a bad product manager, avoid fixing the main problems with your product. Sure, you know that it doesn’t run as fast as it should, or that the amount of storage available is less than what customers really want, but there are all sorts of reasons why you can’t fix those problems. So, instead, just add some other features or upgrade another part of the product. It will take attention away from the parts that aren’t as good as they can be, and it gives your sales and marketing staff something to highlight. If you want to be a good product manager, address the main issues facing your product. If storage capacity is important to your customers and the inadequate storage capacity in your product is hurting sales and customer perception, fix it. Don’t pretend like it’s not a problem. Don’t explain why you can’t fix it. Don’t make some other upgrades instead. Confront the problem directly. If the issue is serious enough, it may even be appropriate to put off all other projects until the major problem is resolved. Imagine you are the product manager for a passenger car. The mid-level sedan has leather seats,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, ask for others to follow up and get more information for you. When customer service tells you about an enhancement that a customer suggested, ask them to follow up to get more information for you. If a salesperson forwards an email from a customer with a bug they’ve reported, make the salesperson track down the details for you. If you hear through the grapevine that a stakeholder within your company had a suggestion for a new feature, tell your source that you’ll consider the request when the send it to you directly. You’re a product manager, not a hunter — you don’t have time to chase down information like this. Plus, that’s the job of customer service or sales — to talk with customers — and if a stakeholder really thinks something should be added to the product, they should tell you directly. What do they think you are, a mind reader? If you want to be a good product manager, follow up on requests yourself in an effort to learn more. When customer service tells you about an complaint that a customer had, or if a salesperson forwards an email…

If you want to be a bad product manager, use the internal name for a project as the name you communicate externally. You already have the team bought in to the name, and they think it’s great, so why not use it with customers? Sales and marketing are familiar with it already. Plus, it was a project name that one of your executives came up with, and you don’t want to offend her by not using it when you’re communicating with customers. If you want to be a good product manager, choose the internal and external names for projects carefully. Naming products is an important but separate area that will not be covered here. Instead, think about projects specifically — new versions of a product, specific sets of enhancements, or major new features. It is important to come up with a good name for a project that can be used internally. Internal project names should communicate the vision and purpose of a project. They need to be distinctive and set the tone for the product development team. Calling the new quicker checkout system on your web site “version 3″ is fine but so generic as to be meaningless. Naming it…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t bother expressing your gratitude. Don’t thank team members and co-workers for doing what they’re paid to do anyways. They shouldn’t get used to being thanked for just doing their job. Don’t thank salespeople for providing feedback from customers. After all, you’re going to use that feedback to make the product better, which will just make their jobs even easier. Don’t thank customers who spend time talking with you. You’ve already given them a cheap t-shirt with your logo on it — what else do they want? They should be honored that you wanted to get their feedback instead of spending time with all those other customers you have. They should be the ones thanking you, right? If you want to be a good product manager, make sure to express your appreciation on a regular basis. There are a few reasons why you want to thank direct reports, co-workers, partners and customers: It reinforces behaviors that you want to see repeated. If a colleague provides tips to a new team member, finds and fixes an issue, or spends time documenting some suggested changes, thanking them specifically is the best way to…

If you want to be a bad product manager, confuse product management with project management. The words are so close because the two concepts are so similar. Product managers should manage projects since they need to ensure that the projects get done. They’re both management roles (right?) so the skills and experience are virtually the same. Project managers just get in the way and try to take control of the project away from the product manager. If you want to be a good product manager, learn the difference between product management and project management. Despite the similar names, there are big differences between product management and project management. Confusing them is common, even among those experienced in product development. Project managers are responsible for the successful delivery of a project — a one-time endeavor with a goal, scope, deadline, budget, and other constraints. A project manager will work to align resources, manage issues and risks, and basically coordinate all of the various elements necessary to complete the project. As they relate to products, projects can be undertaken to build a product, to add new features to a product, or create new versions or extensions of a product. When the project…

If you want to be a bad product manager, listen only to your customer needs when defining your product. You want to be customer-focused, right — so why would you take anything else into consideration? The customer is always right, after all. Everyone always says that you should focus on the customer and everything else will follow. If you want to be a good product manager, make customer needs the central but not the sole voice in product definition. While you need to create a product that meets customer needs, you also do not want to jeopardize the success of the product by ignoring all of the other important stakeholders. Some potential downfalls of listening only to your customers include: Customers might use your product but not want to pay for it. Your product could cannibalize sales of other products your company produces. Focusing only on current customer needs ignores the larger potential in new customers and new markets. Distributors and retailers may refuse to carry it because of the impact it could have on other products they sell. An example of the fourth problem: When digital video recorders first were available, there were two main competitors — TiVo and…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that domain knowledge is all you need to succeed. You know the company, the market, the competition and the customers because you’ve been involved in the industry forever. In fact, you used to be on “the other side” — as a customer, a vendor, or with a competitor. The knowledge that you’ve gathered over your years of service would be impossible for someone to gather quickly, and your domain knowledge is fundamental to your success in product management. If you want to be a good product manager, make sure to have the right amount of knowledge about the domain in which you are working. Product managers need to understand their market, and to do so requires understanding of the domain. For example, if you are developing software that is sold to police stations to track cases but you have very little knowledge of the law enforcement and the criminal justice system, you will likely fail. How can you understand unmet needs of your customers if you do not even understand their most basic goals and tasks? Domain knowledge provides product managers with the information to make the decisions that will…

If you want to be a bad product manager, keep changing your mind about the strategy and direction for your product. The market is dynamic and you need to be able to adapt rapidly. We’re living in an “agile” world and product strategies need to “be agile.” What works one week might not work the next. People who complain that the product direction is always changing are just stuck in the old way of doing business and need to learn the new ways of working. As a product manager, you need to be able to change your mind on a whim and have the whole team react. If you want to be a good product manager, set the vision and direction for the product and make changes only as needed. Of course you need to be able to adapt it as the market changes, but this is something that should only be done sparingly and after careful consideration. Having clear and concrete objectives that are universally understood by all of the people involved in its creation and upkeep is essential to its success. As a contributor to a project, there are few things more frustrating than the direction of the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, just start being a product manager. Obviously you were hired or promoted or appointed for a reason. The fact that you were given the job should be evidence enough that you’re qualified to be a product manager. Don’t worry about training, education, best practices, or any of that stuff. You’ve sold products, built products, marketed products — so managing them is practically the same thing, right? If you want to be a good product manager, you need to work at it. Very few people are just naturally good at product management. In fact, very few people are just naturally good at anything. Most things in life require skills, knowledge, experience, and hard work to succeed. Unfortunately, that basic truth does not seem to carry over to product management. Too often, people are simply put into the position of being a product manager without any experience, training, mentoring, or support in the role. You would never hire a software developer who had never written a line of code and expect them to be productive from day one. You would never promote someone into an accounting position if they had never been an…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that people who don’t agree with you are irrational. You’ve presented your argument at least once, and if they still don’t understand, they never will. What are they thinking? They must be nuts! Since you’ll never get through to them, they must be irrational and you need to go around them to still do what you were going to do anyway. If you want to be a good product manager, seek to understand the other person’s point of view. Product development inherently involves conflict. There may be conflict between what end users want and what purchasers want. Your sales staff may disagree with your marketing group. Product requirements you put forward will likely encounter resistance from your engineering team. Designers and architects will disagree on key points. Successful product managers are able to work through these conflicts. Avoiding them is impossible; instead, efforts should be put towards addressing them productively. One of the most useful approaches when dealing with conflict is to assume you are wrong and the other person is right whenever there is a disagreement. Even if you are 100% sure you are right, putting yourself in the…

If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t worry about the details of your product. Sure, that one section of the web site won’t work with Firefox. Okay, there’s a few extra pages you have to click through when you register. Yeah, the carrying case sometimes can break if you’re holding the product incorrectly. But people don’t care about that — you’ve got such a great product that they won’t worry about these little issues at all. They’ll totally forget about those small things when they realize how incredible the product is. You’re so far ahead of your competitors that, no matter what bugs or defects you find, it doesn’t matter. If you want to be a good product manager, sweat the small stuff. Overlooking the details is dangerous for a few reasons: The sum of many small problems may equal a big problem. One defect or idiosyncrasy will not ruin the experience of using a good product, but when you add up enough of those little issues, they can become substantial. A web site with one minor bug is not noticeable. Two bugs that disrupt someone’s experience is annoying but tolerable. As the number of problems grows,…

If you want to be a bad product manager, try to get everyone to agree on features. It should be easy to get all of your various stakeholders to agree on what features the product should have. If you can’t get them to agree, how are you going to have their support for anything you do? Sure, everyone has wildly different ideas about what the product should include, but it shouldn’t be too hard to come to agreement in a meeting or two. It’s your job as a product manager to make sure everyone is okay with the things that you’re adding in to your product. If you want to be a good product manager, get everyone to agree on goals. Even with just a few different people involved in the creation of a product, there will be divergent views as to what the product should include. Each person will likely have their own “pet” feature that they would like to see included. Their desire may be for a legitimate reason, like a customer support representative lobbying for a change that would reduce unnecessary support calls or a business development manager asking for features to help get certain partner agreements…

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume your customers are not aware of your competition. They may not even be aware that there is any alternative to your product, so why should you mention one? If potential customers think you’re the only option, then they’ll have to use your product. Comparing your product to the competition or even mentioning them automatically puts that idea in their head. You don’t want to remind them that there are alternatives, since the more they hear about alternatives, the more likely they are to use those products. If you want to be a good product manager, realize that customers will be comparing your product to others. You certainly do not want to focus all of your product development and product marketing efforts on comparing your product to the competition. However, in almost all cases, potential customers will have several options to choose from and you need to address how your product is different (and better). Depending on your market and how your product is positioned, you may choose to address this issue differently. The choice about whether to specifically mention a competitive product, for example, or how to approach differentiation depends…