Innovation sometimes appears between the lines In today’s world, we are bombarded with people telling us that we need to be productive all the time. We need to have a perfect calendar and perform meetings very effectively and the list goes on and on. All of this is very important. There are many hours during the day that being productive can improve your outcome and save you many hours of work. The question is what do you do with the time that is left. If you are productive a

What I look for in a Product Manager. Product managers have to be able to do many tasks across a wide spectrum. Usually, their strength comes from being able to be involved in many aspects of the product. In some of these aspects, they are experts and in others they are laymen and yet they still have to help their team get the maximum also in these areas. Regardless of whether they come from business, technology, user experience, psychology, or any other field they have to m

Express your thoughts and beliefs to become a better professional When people are thinking about self-branding, many times they imagine only the “external” benefits. A person investing in self-branding is considered sometimes investing only in being more known, extending their network, and extending their value in the market. Some people are not feeling comfortable with all of the above. They feel these “marketing” activities are not for them and they invent a lot of excuses

When your product is your team. Your Team is Your Product One of the hardest things for a VP Product to do, as the team of product managers under his lead grows, is to release control. As a VP Product, you need to trust your product managers to make the right decisions. You need to empower them. One of the best ways to do it is to understand that your product is no longer “the product”. Your product as the VP Product is the team of product managers, and in turn, they are resp

Why product managers should be an all-in-one deal and should be involved in everything (sales, marketing, support, etc). Should you split between inbound and outbound product managers? Or should a product manager be “full spectrum”? Inbound vs Outbound (PM vs PO) Sometimes companies split product management between outbound product managers that understand the market and discuss needs with customers and inbound product managers that understand the product and discuss requirem

Why product managers should be working in different markets and expertise and why companies should be looking for such product managers. Too many times, companies look for an exact match of a product manager’s experience with the company’s market or for a very technical product manager that can get very deep into engineering work. While these requirements are not bad by themselves, it is much more important to have a competent product manager than that product manager having

Take control of your career by interviewing your employer. Many have written about what qualities they are looking for in a product manager and how they recruit them. I promise to write my own take on this at some point. This time I want to take another angle. When I mentor product managers or talk with my colleagues, many times their greatest challenge is that the culture of their company ties their hands. They want to do great things but cannot move above the daily politics