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Benny Reich

Thoughts on Strategic and Empowering Product Management

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Treat your Roadmap as a Compass

Dec 1, 2018
6 min

Treat your Roadmap as a Compass

How to effectively build and manage your roadmap and your stakeholders’ expectations. The Roadmap Challenge I recently participated in a meetup of very experienced product management leaders arranged by ProductX. We discussed roadmaps and the challenges surrounding them. Even though all of these product managers have years of experience it seemed like the challenge is still fresh as in their first days. The major reason for this challenge is that the roadmap is not just a too

Saying “No” when you want to say “Yes”.

Oct 1, 2018
4 min

Saying “No” when you want to say “Yes”.

It always gets down to priorities. Respect all Ideas As a product manager, if you do your job properly and make yourself approachable, you get a lot of requests and amazing ideas. You get them from your customers, your development team, your sales or marketing team, and hopefully from almost anyone within the company or outside of it. It is your job to create an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable to suggest new directions and ideas as well as feel very at ease to com

Product Management is about People and Trust.

Sep 1, 2018
2 min

Product Management is about People and Trust.

The importance of soft skills. The Technical Product Manager Junior product managers usually focus their learning on the technical aspects of the profession:· Are my requirements the best?· How should I conduct competitive analysis?· How should I price my product?· Is my writing good enough?· … Product management courses usually focus on the same things. The list of skills a product manager needs to master is endless and requires different knowledge areas such as user experie

Plan with Problems. Execute with Solutions.

Aug 1, 2018
7 min

Plan with Problems. Execute with Solutions.

How to build a roadmap while staying agile and lean, and why so many product teams do agile wrong. Bottom to Top Agile In many companies that make a transition to agile, the move is initiated by engineering, which is focused on execution and efficiency. The rest of the company (product management, project management, sales, executive team, marketing) might be left behind or only be partly included. Too many times, the whole agile process becomes “religious” and focuses around

Always Think MVP

Mar 1, 2018
5 min

Always Think MVP

Why you should always assume you are not going to make it on time. MVP vs MVE When developing a product or a feature, if you follow the lean methodology, you first need to validate demand. This means you apply the build-measure-learn cycle and try to ship a minimal viable product (MVP) to validate your hypothesis. In a lot of cases you actually start with a minimal viable experiment (MVE). It may be a brochure for a product before you even wrote your first line of code, or it