Jan Bosch
We’ve already talked about exploration as an activity in an earlier post. We need to conduct exploration activities, of course, to find new functionality to add to the existing offerings and to identify new offerings to create. However, exploration is also a mindset and a viewpoint we need to take for the activity to even … Read more
Many, including those in R&D, may view technology as part of the R&D realm and outside the scope of product management. The thinking is that the product manager decides what needs to be built and R&D decides how to build it. In practice, however, the technology choices are so influential on the strategic options available … Read more
After having discussed principles, activities and scopes, we’re now moving on to the different viewpoints product management needs to consider. The coming posts will explore these. Specifically, we’re going to focus on stakeholders, technology and exploration. Stakeholders, as the name implies, are parties that have a stake in whatever is going on. In our context, … Read more
Thomas Edison, the alleged inventor of the light bulb (he wasn’t), famously said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The same is true for product management. We can explore and strategize all we want, but if we don’t act on the findings and the strategy, all these efforts are in vain. … Read more
Few words in corporate lingo are more overused than “strategy.” Frequently, problems in companies are attributed to the lack of a clear strategy. In practice, however, it often is the lack of alignment around the strategy. This tends to lead to a situation where there’s an official strategy in the documents and presentations and another, … Read more
Product management consists of multiple dimensions and so far, we’ve discussed the underlying principles as well as the scopes. The third dimension concerns the activities of a product manager or the activities conducted as part of product management by anyone in the company. These activities can be structured in many different ways; here, we’ll divide … Read more
Over the last decades, the interest in software ecosystems and business ecosystems has been increasingly strong. Many companies have observed the outsized success of the Apple app store for iPhone and are interested in achieving a similar situation for themselves with a large set of complementors building extensions to one product and having it act … Read more
To state the obvious, product management is about managing products. Often, the product manager is described as the CEO of the product, expected to decide on everything that touches it. In practice, things prove to be significantly more complicated and product managers often spend a considerable part of their time on stakeholder management. Previously, we … Read more
The word “feature” is used in very diverse ways in the companies I work with and means different things to many. In some companies, it represents the key differentiation that we offer to customers and that helps us stand out from the competition. In other companies, a feature is a nice-to-have but rather irrelevant chunk … Read more
Normally I try to be very careful with predictions. As Yogi Berra so eloquently said, prediction is hard; especially about the future. When looking at the folks predicting the stock market, the data shows that their accuracy is about as good as random, or even worse. For example, at the end of 2022, many predicted … Read more
