What Product Management Teams Can Learn from Apple Stores

I read a nice blog post on the Harvard Business Review website by Rob Johnson who worked with Steve Jobs to create the wildly successful Apple Stores. The following quote caught my eye:

So the challenge for retailers isn’t “how do we mimic the Apple Store” or any other store that seems like a good model. It’s a very different problem, one that’s conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn’t ask, “How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?” He asked, “How do we reinvent the telephone?” In the same way, retailers shouldn’t be asking, “How do we create a store that’s going to do $15 million a year?” They should be asking, “How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers’ lives?” (emphasis mine)

This is a great point, and is especially important for product managers building high-tech products to embrace.

Here’s why… [Read more…]

The Best Source of Innovation?

The best companies (B2B) I’ve worked for during my career were highly innovative, and they continuously innovated. But the source of their innovation was not:

  • Whiz-bang Technology
  • Genius Personnel, or
  • Competitive Research

What was the source, you ask? Well, the type of innovation those companies practiced was… [Read more…]

Strawberries and Worms: A Parable for Product Managers

When I was a kid, I used to love Aesop’s fables – short stories with a moral. I even learned some valuable lessons from them, lessons that have helped me as I’ve grown older.

For this holiday season, here’s my little parable for those of us in product management and product marketing (it’s not a fable, it’s a parable!)

Drum roll please… [Read more…]

Product Managers: How to Make Products & Features Happen

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…

[Read more…]