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Benny Reich

Thoughts on Strategic and Empowering Product Management

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Trust vs Commitments

Nov 25, 2020
3 min

Trust vs Commitments

Consider getting rid of time estimations The never-ending battle Time estimations are one of the major points of conflict between product management and development teams. It takes a lot of time to make good estimations and even then they are usually wrong. I have not encountered many people who could make really good estimations. There is a reason for that. Estimating software development is really hard. One of the really interesting cases about time estimations is the Denve

Are you willing to pay the price

Jul 18, 2020
2 min

Are you willing to pay the price

What are you willing to sacrifice to get to your vision Many of us have a vision of where we want to get to. I am going to focus on a vision of a product, but I can easily take this into a vision of your career or even your life. The principles are very similar. Most of us when we try to break the vision into steps focus on what are the things we need to do. What are the steps that will help us execute the vision? Sacrifices The truth is that in most cases we should actually

Dare to not be Productive

Jun 5, 2020
2 min

Dare to not be Productive

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

The Qualities of a Product Manager

May 7, 2020
7 min

The Qualities of a Product Manager

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

How to Write Fewer Requirements

Dec 31, 2019
5 min

How to Write Fewer Requirements

Free your time to be more strategic Requirements are overrated In Are Requirements Overrated and Your Role is not to Write Requirements I explained why writing requirements should be a minimal task. I talked about 3 major reasons why it is good for everyone: Your time is valuable. Every minute you spend in perfecting the details of a solution, for a problem you already know you need to solve, is a time you don’t spend trying to find the next one. Smart creatives. In How Googl

Technical Debt vs Product Managers

Dec 4, 2019
3 min

Technical Debt vs Product Managers

Why should product managers involve themselves with prioritizing technical debt? When it comes to technical debt many product managers do not like to get involved. They see it totally as the domain of the development. Most of the developers also do not want product managers involved in technical debt decisions because they feel that product managers care only about features. To solve it, many organizations decide to allocate x% of the development resources to technical debt a

Why Product Managers should care about Development Culture

Nov 6, 2019
4 min

Why Product Managers should care about Development Culture

Make sure your tools are optimized. As product managers, we focus on many things including strategy, execution and mostly connecting strategy and execution. When it gets to development culture many product managers feel it is not their problem because it is the domain of the VP R&D. While this is true, I do not think that as product managers we can ignore the development culture. The development culture shapes the rhythm of execution and its quality playing a major factor in

What is the Product of the VP Product?

Sep 30, 2019
4 min

What is the Product of the VP Product?

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

Prioritize Yourself

Sep 1, 2019
2 min

Prioritize Yourself

There is no such concept as no time. It always gets down to priorities. Prioritizing Others If you ask product managers what are they responsible for, you will get various answers depending on the character of that product manager and the company in which they are working. Different product managers in different companies handle different tasks and different responsibilities based on their beliefs and how the company sees them. But there is one thing a product manager is alw

The All-in-One ProductManager

Aug 1, 2019
2 min

The All-in-One ProductManager

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

The Versatile Product Manager

Jul 1, 2019
4 min

The Versatile Product Manager

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

Is Scrum Agile Enough?

Jun 1, 2019
4 min

Is Scrum Agile Enough?

When people forget the goal and focus on the method. Too many times people confuse agile and scrum. Agile is a concept with principles that helps us develop software better, validate it as soon as we can, and bring value to our customers faster. Scrum is just one of the software development frameworks that implement agile and there are many others including Kanban, extreme programming, lean software development and more. Scrum is a valid and very popular framework for agile d

Is Product Management like Parenting?

May 1, 2019
3 min

Is Product Management like Parenting?

Love your Product. In a recent lecture I gave, I compared product management to parenting. While I was still preparing the lecture, I heard a similar comparison in a Product X conference I attended. It was a lecture given by Paz Davidovich named “Product managers? Congratulation! You are mother and father!”. Combining my initial thoughts with the additional inspiration, below are some reasons why the two can be compared, how the analogy can help you become a better product ma

Launch a Podcast like a Product Manager

Apr 1, 2019
4 min

Launch a Podcast like a Product Manager

Bring product management into everything you do. Half a year ago an idea was slowly blooming. I should do a podcast about product management. Like any other thing I do, in order to bring it from idea to launch I approached it like a product manager. Start with Why The first thing I had to ask myself was why do I want to have a podcast. As Simon Sinek says: you should always start with why. In my case it started from the same reason I started my blog or I started mentoring. I

Reverse Interview

Mar 1, 2019
4 min

Reverse Interview

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

Product Management Blog Retrospective

Feb 1, 2019
2 min

Product Management Blog Retrospective

What I Learned from a Year of Product Management Blogging. Write your Passion There are many reasons why people start writing blogs. The most common is the need to promote a business. In my blog, this was not the case. I started writing a blog about a year ago in order to express my thoughts. I noticed that when I mentor or consult people, I often repeat the same concepts, so I thought it may be good to put that out to the world. This enabled me to not be constrained by the n

Are Requriements Overrated?

Jan 1, 2019
3 min

Are Requriements Overrated?

Why I don’t write long specifications. From Waterfall to Agile In the dark ages we all worked in waterfall. We planned everything months ahead of time. We had to write very detailed requirements in advance, review them and plan accordingly. It resulted in slow reaction to changes and many obsolete requirements. With the move to agile and the preference of working software over comprehensive documentation (see the agile manifesto) there is less demand for such long specificati

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

Mentoring 101.

Nov 1, 2018
8 min

Mentoring 101.

Step by step product management mentoring. In Mentoring Thinking I explained why it’s good to become a mentor. This time as a special tribute to Product League, a product management mentoring program run by volunteering product managers contributing to the community, I am giving tips on how to approach your mentoring. While I am referring mostly to product management mentoring, most of the advice is relevant for any type of mentoring. Many of the below sections appeared first

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