Tips for Interviewing Product Managers

February 10, 2011 By

One of my friends is a newly minted Director of Product Management at a mid-stage startup in silicon valley. I met him for coffee yesterday and we were chatting about how his new job was going.

He has managed Engineering as well as Professional Services teams in the past, but this is his first time managing a Product Management team.

He told me he thought product manager interviews are easy to fake, and even unqualified candidates can easily fake a good performance during the interview. This got me thinking… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing Tagged With:

Strawberries and Worms: A Parable for Product Managers

December 21, 2010 By

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…]

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

Why Product Management Should Champion Customers, Not Company

December 15, 2010 By

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…]

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

Good vs. Bad Product Managers (per Ben Horowitz)

October 12, 2010 By

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…]

Filed Under: Product Management Tagged With: ,

The ONE Number to Measure Product Management Teams?

August 28, 2010 By

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…

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management
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