Jan Bosch
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
There is a saying often used by people of more advanced ages that the days go slow and the years go fast. Although I am not of retirement age yet, I must say that I feel this year has gone by really fast. Normally, this is because little of significance happened, but at least in … Read more
One of my favorite sayings is that you can do anything in life, but not everything. This is sometimes hard to accept as it requires choices as to what not to do. And if there’s one thing most people prioritize, it’s optionality. Making choices that close off paths that were available to us up to … Read more
Humans hate uncertainty. Even saying “I don’t know” feels very uncomfortable for many. There are very strong evolutionary drivers for this as our prehistoric selves experienced existential risk whenever they entered situations with high uncertainty. As a consequence, we organize our lives to maximize certainty, ranging from the houses we live in, the jobs we … Read more
One of the most obvious principles of product management, and consequently the first one we discuss here, is to maximize the return on investment on the R&D efforts that we put in. As we’re a for-profit business, the goal has to be that we seek to maximize profit. This requires us to prioritize those R&D … Read more
