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The Complete Product Manager
Being a great Product Manager in tech is more than shuffling roadmaps and writing user stories. Great PMs are first and foremost masters of their market: the segments, the customers, and their needs, and they spend a great deal of time talking to customers themselves and conducting field research. Great PMs are the walking embodiment…
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Messaging and Chat are the next big channel for Growth
Growth is about finding new channels. Messaging in general as a channel is young and fresh – and there will be a goldrush very, very soon. Services like Slack and Facebook Messenger are following the lead set by the asian chat successes like Line and WeChat in turning chat into a platform that allows access…
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OKRs: How we use OKRs to empower teams
I did a presentation at the ProductTank Berlin February event last night. My slides are available here. I’m happy to chat more about OKRs, and how we work. Contact me!
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Amazon Kindle and the Perfect Product Vision
In the recent fantastic piece on The Verge covering interviews with the top brass behind the Amazon Kindle, the ultimate product vision behind the Kindle series of eReaders is articulated beautifully. From the article: For Amazon, paper is more than a material for making prototypes. It’s the inspiration for the Kindle of the future: a…
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Product Manager in the middle
The Product Manager isn’t just a middle-man. If you’re a PM, and your answer to every question is: “I don’t know, I need to go and ask ___”, then I’m afraid you’re doing something wrong. You might not be able to give engineering estimates, but you should know your team and your technology well enough…
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Kickstarting Potato Salad
In case you missed it (although the tech press have had little else to report on today, it seems), some guy launched a kickstarter project with the ambitious goal of raising $10 to make a potato salad. (Link) The project description: “I’m making potato salad. Basically I’m just making potato salad. I haven’t decided what…
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Microsoft: Services Everywhere (not Windows Everywhere)
I came across two interesting pieces of Microsoft news today. Firstly, Microsoft have bought the company behind a Visual Studio plugin called UnityVS which enables developers using the cross platform game engine, Unity, to write and debug their Unity programs directly within Visual Studio. Unity has support for all the major mobile operating systems, and…
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Amazon Dash is another great example of un-bundling the smartphone
The newly launched Amazon Dash device (link) is a single-purpose hardware device that allows users to scan the items in their fridge or pantry that they’re running low on, and an order is automatically sent to Amazon’s fresh grocery service. I find it very interesting because it is representative of how you can now build…
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What the Whatsapp deal can teach all Product Managers
There are lots of lessons behind the curtains of the $19 BN Whatsapp acquisition by Facebook. There’s lessons about the scale and value of social, about the continually evolving mobile platform. There’s of course the rags-to-riches story of the founders going from food stamps to being billionaires in just a few short years, and a…
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A Very Simple Model for expressing a Customer Value Proposition
There are many frameworks available to help product teams develop and express a customer value proposition. One of my favourites is this Value Proposition Canvas, which was based on the canvas from the creators of the Business Model Canvas. Expressing the proposition on this canvas is a great way of forcing you to think through…