About Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in product management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software used by Product Management, Business Analysis, and related teams.

What Product Managers Can Learn: Zendesk vs. Help Scout

March 24, 2014 By

SlingshotAt Accompa, we strive to provide the best customer service we possibly can. It is one of our key differentiators.

A big part of being able to provide consistently excellent customer service is having the right tools & processes. To this end, our Support team had been using Zendesk for several years.

But they switched recently to Help Scout. When I talked with them about it, I realized this switch had a very interesting lesson for product managers. In this post, I’d like to highlight this lesson. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing, User Experience Design

“Validating” Your Idea: Much Ado About Nothing?

March 17, 2014 By

shakespeareI recently read an excellent post by Roger Cauvin titled Stop validating, start falsifying.

Roger makes a compelling case in his post that the theory of “validation” that is uber-popular nowadays in Silicon Valley – especially in “lean startup” circles – has its flaws.

In this post, I’d like to share share my thoughts on this. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing

Sharing Product Roadmap With Customers: 5 Simple Ways

February 3, 2014 By

Uncle Sam: I want YOU to share your product roadmapIn last week’s post, I discussed the benefits of sharing product roadmap with your customers.

I also mentioned that we share our Product Roadmap with all of our customers. Wondering how you can do so too?

In this post, I will share 5 simple ways you can share your product roadmap with your customers – and start realizing the many benefits.

Let’s get started, shall we? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Roadmap

Product Managers: Share Your Product Roadmap With Customers

January 29, 2014 By

Pushpin on mapI read an interesting blog post yesterday written for customer success managers.

That post recommended customer success managers to share product roadmaps proactively with their customers.

I believe that idea applies equally, if not more, to Product Managers.

In this post, I’m outlining the reasons why… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Roadmap Tagged With: , ,

Making Drastic Changes to UI: Consumer vs. Business Apps

January 20, 2014 By

In last week’s post, I outlined why drastically changing the user interface (UI) is not a good idea.

We received some good feedback on Twitter about this (paraphrased):

Companies such as Facebook are doing drastic UI changes all the time. If it’s good enough for Facebook, isn’t it good enough for most companies?

This is a great question! In this week’s post, I’d like to share my thoughts on this… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design Tagged With: , ,
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