Valuable Insights

Human brains are wired for stories — it is how our memory works. Our brains are made for capturing experiences and emotions instead of facts and figures. As a product manager, utilizing storytelling techniques will make your ideas more memorable and resonant with your audience.

No matter where you are in your product development schedule, it’s never too soon to tackle product launch tasks. This blog will help you mitigate risks and increase the likelihood of hitting your desired launch date with the support of the most credible customer references.

I have worked as a Product Marketer for a long time and over the course of my career I’ve had the pleasure of working with many wonderful Product Managers. I’ve found that the role of Product Marketing is a bit nebulous and the definition of it changes from company to company. Oftentimes, the responsibilities of PMs and PMMs are intertwined and overlapping. There are many areas that I’ve seen PMs own in one company and PMMs own in another. For the purposes of this blog I will focus on areas where both PMs and PMMs can contribute including competitive analysis, customer feedback, pricing and sales enablement/training.

With this month’s theme, we're going to go meta and talk about product-managing…yourself. In other words, leveraging your internal customers’ unmet needs to uniquely define your personal brand within your organization (and perhaps industry as well).

“It” being the promotion or new role you’re hoping to land soon. It’s an important question to ask and one many who are looking to advance their careers don’t stop to think hard enough about. Sure, you’re confident that you’ve mastered the key skills and you certainly have the right “product” mindset. You’re constantly learning, keeping up with industry trends, and you even have a mentor. But. Have you shifted your perspective? Have you started to think and act as a <insert new title here>? Have you started to think about how you would approach situations you’re facing today as a <insert title here>?

There are several traps that Product leaders face when launching their new product, and if not properly managed, they all lead to slow customer adoption, lower revenues than expected, internal and external friction. Find out some ways to structure your product launch to avoid these pitfalls.

The customer interactions that occur during product discovery are incredibly valuable, not only for product managers, but also to product marketers. These precious interactions can reveal a treasure-trove of customer insights. When it comes to product discovery, it pays for the two product leaders to work together.

There are some simple shifts you can make in the way you do your job, and some changes you can make outside of business hours, to tip odds in your favor. In this blog post we’ll walk you through three suggestions to put your mind at ease in this layoff-happy world.

Product Managers can engage a Product Coach as an essential mentor, akin to a personal trainer for PM careers. Guiding through challenges, integrating advanced technologies, and offering personalized insights, they're not just advisors but game-changers in the realm of product development.

Regardless of your experience or education, there is always more to learn. In this article, we outline a number of different product marketing and management educational options, ranging from podcasts and newsletters to advanced degrees.

Product Discovery applies techniques well suited to AI capabilities such as User Journey Mapping, Predictive Analysis, and Idea Clustering. The product manager must quickly apply these and similar techniques to prioritize ideas that have the best chance of delivering value and continue to do so at a sustainable and improvable pace. If you’re not accelerating your Discovery process already, you’re falling behind your competition. Artificial intelligence will give you the capability to more rapidly evaluate new ideas.

Product leaders must be deliberate about AI in their product strategy, identifying the most critical problems to solve and determining whether AI is the right tool for the job. They must also ensure that the use of AI is aligned with the company's vision, target audience, and risk appetite, and value proposition. In this blog, we explore how you can leverage the power of AI to transform your product strategy and stay ahead in today's rapidly evolving market.

In this blog, we explore the similarities and differences between product managers and product marketers through the eyes of a veteran in each role. We share insights about the role, skills, career path and the occasional misunderstanding. We promise that no marketing assets, PRDs or feelings were hurt in the process of making this interview!

As product managers, it is important not only to excel at managing your products or portfolio – it is also critical to excel at managing yourself. In this post, we will lay out a few tips and ways to think about “productivity-managing” the most precious resource you have: you!

Cross functional initiatives provide a great opportunity to advance your career by showing off your communication and leadership skills to a wide audience. The seven communications skills described here are designed specifically for product managers and product marketers who want to maximize their opportunity. Master these skills and you can enhance your reputation as a strong leader and reliable partner within the organization.

May’s BPMA theme is “Who is your user?”. It is critical to understand who is ultimately using your product and what matters to them in the process of using it. This means that an important area of your expertise is knowing how to identify, capture and share this customer knowledge.

A guide for product managers and marketers looking to begin/improve on their personas. Personas can be a daunting task and while there are lots of guides for how to build personas, there aren’t many with specific examples to use as a jumping-off point or as a layer. In this post, we’ll look at the key types of technology adopters identified in Everett Rogers’s “Diffusion of Innovation” and popularized in Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”, before exploring how each group represents a “unique physiographic profile - a combination of psychology and demographics that makes its marketing responses different.” As such, they form a great basis for personas, with a few modifications.

As you get your new product or revised pricing ready for introduction, you’ll want to create a set of tools that salespeople can use to respond to price objections without your assistance. Your objective is to minimize the number of price objection inquiries you receive, otherwise, your business will not scale. Also, self-service tools make salespeople more efficient and increase their confidence and competence with customers.

Learn about accessibility, accessibility compliance, and why accessibility is vitally important to product managers.

A good roadmap depends on the right sequence of features. Which features will you deliver first? What features will follow? When should you pivot? Which features can wait or even be dropped from your roadmap?

Product roadmaps can be influenced by many different types of biases — but they don’t have to be. As the owner of the roadmap, your duty as a Product Manager is to be as objective as possible. In this blog, learn some easy-to-implement practices to collect and use customer evidence as data to inform your decisions.

By actively seeking out and considering stakeholders’ input, organizations can make informed decisions that are better aligned with stakeholders’ needs and priorities. Decision-driven stakeholder management designedly connects stakeholders with evidence, facts and data to assist in key product management conclusions.

In searching for product managers, companies often put much emphasis on technical skills. Yes, they are needed to some extent, but simply having technical skill not define a great product manager. Find out the top 10 characteristics of great product managers in this post.