I do a live product management training every Saturday morning on Facebook. This page collects all of them, in reverse chronological order. (To watch live, check out The Secret Product Manager Handbook Lab Facebook page and mark your calendar every Saturday at 9am Pacific time.)
We are experts in our product, and often in our domain. How do we overcome our expertise – the Curse of Knowledge – to discover new things about our market? In this video I give you simple techniques to get deeper insights in your market discovery interviews.
There are lots of frameworks for thinking about your product. Here’s one you might not have heard about (well, I’ve mentioned it on the blog a lot). It’s super-powerful and ties into the core framework of The Secret Product Manager Handbook. It’s called “The Three Laws of Marketing Physics.”
In these two videos I share some of the top tips I’ve found for making a difference in how effective I am – or anyone would be – as a product manager.
I’ve never been happy with the product management tools I’ve tried, with one exception. Let’s talk about my criteria for tools to help me out.
What’s the least you can do to be effective? In our world complexity and structures and rules abound. And most were put there for a “good” reason. But at some point those rules become straitjackets and you need to simplify. Here are some ideas for how to do that.
At a meetup recently, someone asked the question “how can I get my executives onboard with our agile transformation? They’re not convinced.” This video is based on my answer that night. I hope you find it useful not just for persuading your executives but also for thinking in a more holistic way about what you’re getting – or hope to get – from agile.
(A video version of this article, by the way.)
I always say that the product manager’s job is to find market problems, create solutions to those problems, and then take the solutions to market. In this video I share an overview of the process of finding market problems – arguably the most important thing we can do as product managers – as well as some things to think about as you do it.
As product managers, we need to persuade people all the time. Getting better at helping people make decisions (in your favor) should be one of your top goals. In this two part series (part 2 is below) I give some of the tips I find most useful. You can use these tips right away to become more persuasive.
More persuasion tips.
More on one of my favorite topics – risk and how to manage it as a product manager. Turns out it’s very important to understand how your customers understand risk. If you can reduce their perception of risk, you can charge more (or discount less). This video starts from my concept of “The Value Inequality” and then extends it in a cool way.
Understanding how your customers and prospects think about risk is critical to making more money from your product. Getting prospects to spend more for your product, get more prospects to buy, and beating competitors more are all fundamentally related to their perception of the risk/value tradeoff you offer.