A Blog - Practical Tips & Articles on High-Tech Product Management. No Highfalutin Theories!
At most companies – old or new, Fortune-500 or startup – most of the departments are looking out for the company. They’re doing things in the best interests of the company. Even optimizing everything to maximize the self-interests of their company.
Often, even the CEO and executive staff may constantly seek to maximize self-interests of the company. This is rational behavior, often encouraged by compensation models.
I believe PM teams should act differently. Here’s why… [Read more…]
Ben Horowitz is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was the CEO of Opsware before he became a VC – so he has real-world operating experience as well, and I follow his blog regularly.
I was reading one of his recent posts, which linked to a document titled “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager”. Ben wrote it when he was the Director of Product Management at Netscape. The purpose of the document was to share his expectations with product managers in his team.
Even though it was written during a simpler, happier time (1996!) – it is still very relevant today. Read on for the link to Ben’s PDF and my favorite part of the document… [Read more…]
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric introduced in 2003 by Frederick Reichheld in his popular Harvard Business Review article The One Number You Need to Grow.
NPS is quite popular among executives in multiple industries including high-tech. The biggest advantage of NPS is that it simplifies the objective of a business to creating more “Promoters” and less “Detractors”. This concept is much easier for employees to understand and act upon – compared to complex, hard-to-understand, impossible-to-act-upon metrics.
This Wikipedia article lists more pros and cons of NPS.
The question I’d like to raise today is:
Is there a similar “ONE number” that can be used to measure the performance of Product Management teams?
I believe the answer is “Yes” – read on for my thoughts…
I recently read an excellent book – “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky.
The book has a lot of great ideas that are very beneficial to those of us in product management – whether you’re a VP/Director of product management, or a product manager.
The book covers the general topic of “How to make ideas happen” and innovation. In this post, I’d like to share with you a really cool equation in the book – it’s directly applicable to product managers…
If you’re a Director/VP of a Product Management team or otherwise responsible for hiring PMs, there are many qualities to look for in candidates.
Analytical ability, communication skills, technical competency, ability to lead without authority, and organization skills are – and should be – at the top of the list.
But the one skill I look for more than anything else is this…
[Read more…]
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