Ask Benny | Blog

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

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Benny Reich

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

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Product Management is about People and Trust.

Benny Reich

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

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Plan with Problems. Execute with Solutions.

Benny Reich

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

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Don’t Manage your Stakeholders from your Ego

Benny Reich

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

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Benny Reich

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

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Benny Reich

Feb 2, 2018
5 min

Own your product management on-boarding

How to enter a new product management position in a new company. Congratulations, you just landed a new product management position. Whether it's a VP product or a product manager or it's a small or big company, you are expected to adjust quickly to the role. In many cases you are expected to do it by yourself. If you are lucky, there is someone in the company that has thought about your on-boarding, but many times, especially if this is a small startup, there isn't. I have j

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