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Benny Reich

Thoughts on Strategic and Empowering Product Management

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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

Don’t Manage your Stakeholders from your Ego

Jul 1, 2018
4 min

Don’t Manage your Stakeholders from your Ego

Consider your stakeholders as valuable resources rather than obstacles you need to overcome. Let's Start with a Story A colleague product manager told me a story. She was launching a big change to a product that she was working on for several months, and when she talked with the product marketing manager he had a lot of concerns and demanded that she delayed the launch. He was not the only stakeholder that she felt was a challenge she had to overcome, but he was the one that

Make yourself "Redundant"

Jun 1, 2018
3 min

Make yourself "Redundant"

Heavily rely on your team to make daily decisions in order to help you focus on the long-term strategy. The Illusion of Importance As product managers, especially those that had been engineers before, you can sometime feel insecure in your position and contribution. This feeling may be enhanced due to many people not actually understanding the role of product management. If you transitioned into product management because you wanted to be the one making the decisions (the wro

Your Role is not to Write Requirements

May 1, 2018
5 min

Your Role is not to Write Requirements

Why product management role is so misunderstood. The Technical Aspect Throughout my career as product manager I have talked with many product managers from different companies, seen a lot of product management recruitment ads, and followed many product management discussions and lectures. I have found out that an alarmingly large portion of those product managers are focused only on the technical aspects of their job. Too many companies are looking for someone who can write P

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