The role of a product manager may differ largely, depending on the aspects such as the size of a company, its products, seniority, as well as prior education. As part of our Product Manager vs. series, we’ll explore similarities and differences between product management and other roles commonly observed in organizations. You can find the other articles listed here. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how product managers compare to business analysts…
Let’s face it: it’s 2020 and paying thousands upon thousands of dollars on Facebook ads simply won’t cut it. Ok, except if your target audience is politically confused boomers. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most creative channels and methods companies are utilizing to promote their product. Product Hunt Founded in 2013 by Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt is a platform that enables users to vote and utter their opinion…
While the Scrum concepts and techniques are fairly easy to understand, mastering their daily execution is very challenging. After all, changing deeply ingrained habits is nothing that we can complete overnight. Ultimately, we (as agile practitioners and participants) want to be able to recognize and eliminate behaviour detrimental to the agile way thinking and working. These bad influences are what we call anti patterns. This article will take an in-depth look at how we define…
Podcasts are all the hype nowadays. According to findings by Edison Research, over 50 percent of Americans above 12 years of age have listened to a podcast once. That represents a 122 percent increase from the year 2014 to 2019. Whether it’s during your commute to work or when hitting the gym, podcasts can help you gain a new perspective or simply distract you from your busy day to day. Product managers, being the…
“Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.” Ben Horrowitz Let’s face it: Product Management is tough. Really tough. You must communicate with a variety of stakeholders, manage (sometimes contradicting) expectations while convincing your team to follow your vision of a…
According to Owl Labs, 18 percent of the current workforce has worked in a remote setting. Globally, 52 percent of people work from home at least once a week. Not convinced yet? How about this: Upwork predicts that by 2028, 73 percent of all teams in a company will have remote workers. Companies that offer remote opportunities have 25 percent less employee turnover16 percent of all companies only hire remote workers In a world where…
“If you don’t appreciate your customers, someone else will.” Keeping your customers happy at all cost isn’t just some meaningless business advice, but should be at the core of any business operation. In fact, research shows that a 5 percent increase in customer retention can raise profits anywhere between 25 to 95 percent. Moreover, the likelihood of successfully selling to existing customers is somewhere between 60 to 70 percent. On the flipside, new customers are…
I’m sure you’ve heard it time and time again: convincing new customers to make a purchase is much more expensive than trying to convert existing ones. In fact, increasing your customer retention rate can boost profits anywhere from 25 to 95 percent. Furthermore, acquiring a new customer can be up to 25 times more expensive than keeping a current one. With prices for online ads constantly rising, it becomes more important than ever to keep…
Although more and more companies become comfortable with employing remote workers, folks in product management still seem to resent the idea of working with location-independent teams. The overarching conclusion is that product managers cannot influence their team members if separated by distance. So the question becomes: can a field focused on collaboration, such as product management, succeed when its members are location independent? Like most things in life, we cannot answer such a complex question…
As advocated by the Scrum Guide, the role of management is to “support the Product Owner with insights and information into high value product and system capabilities. Support the Scrum Master to cause organizational change that fosters empiricism, selforganization, bottomup intelligence, and intelligent release of software.” When organizations make the switch from traditional development methods such as Waterfall to Agile, managers oftentimes find themselves left behind while struggling to find their role in this new…
