Top Product Management Blog Posts: Week of June 23, 2014

Weekly PM Blog PostsLooking for some great reads on product management? Here is our latest roundup, of top PM blog posts from the past week. We hope you find them helpful!

  1. Stop (In)Validating: Start Refining Like a Gold Rush Prospector: Sebastien Secard explains the most common pitfall of lean startup practitioners and his experience with it.
  2. How do Customer Development and Product Management Fit Together?: Cindy Alvarez explains why customer development is not the secret to creating a great product, but rather a risk mitigation tool.
  3. The Product Thesis: Jason Evanish walks you through the product thesis: an easy way to communicate customer needs to design and engineering teams in order to build the right product.

Editor’s Note:
Want to know how Accompa helps product management teams at 100s of companies (from Fortune 500s to growing startups)? Check out FREE 30-Day trial of Accompa or Sign Up for a Demo.

Top Product Management Blog Posts: Week of June 16, 2014

Looking for some great reads on product management? Here is a roundup of our top blog posts from the past week. We hope you find them helpful!

  1. We Don’t Hire Product Owners Here – Rich Mironov talks about the importance of the Product Owner role.
  2. How to Cultivate Curiosity and Build Better Products – A great blog post by Teresa Torres on why curiosity is necessary in order to build better products.
  3. A Weak Value Proposition is a Symptom, Not a Disease – Nils Davis talks about the value proposition: how to write one, why it’s important and the benefit the value proposition has for you.

Editor’s Note:
Want to know how Accompa helps product management teams at 100s of companies (from Fortune 500s to growing startups)? Check out FREE 30-Day trial of Accompa or Sign Up for a Demo.

Making Drastic Changes to UI: Consumer vs. Business Apps

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…]

Product Managers: Why Making Drastic Changes to UI is User-Unfriendly

confused boyThis seems to be a hot trend nowadays at many software companies: Drastically changing the user interface (UI).

In fact, this happened recently to several of the cloud software applications we use internally at our company.

There are many reasons why companies do such major changes: Modernizing the UI, making it prettier, making it more social, making it look more like Facebook/Google+/etc.

While most of these goals are well-intentioned, I believe a lot of the companies are forgetting one important thing… [Read more…]

Product Management & Agile Development: A Real-Life Cautionary Tale (and a Free eBook)

ben-franklin-3I’m writing this post spurred by 2 things:

  1. A real-life story I heard from the VP of Product Management at a large tech company in California. He gave me approval to share his story, as long as I anonymized it & avoided any details specific to his industry. Many thanks to him for the approval.
  2. A very insightful blog post by Jeff Lash of Sirius Decisions & my ensuing Twitter conversations with Jeff, Roger Cauvin, and others.

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” – Benjamin Franklin

As some of you know, I regularly speak with Product Management executives at mid-to-large companies as a part of my job at Accompa.

About 7 weeks ago, I had a very interesting conversation with the VP of Product Management at a large tech company in California. Let us call him Steve (not his real name, I’m anonymizing it per his request).

Steve’s story is a cautionary tale for Product Management (PM) teams everywhere. While I’ve heard “lighter” versions of this story before, this story is very stark & so is good to learn from. Without further ado, here’s the story… [Read more…]