Download or read book EMPOWERED written by Marty Cagan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Download or read book Customer Lessons For Product Managers written by Jim Anderson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the end, it all comes down to what your customer wants to tell you about your product. However, how many of us have been taught how to listen to our customers? What You'll Find Inside: LET'S GO VISIT THE CUSTOMER, PRODUCT MANAGER ARE ANGRY CUSTOMERS A PRODUCT MANAGER'S BEST FRIEND? CUSTOMER LED NEW PRODUCT DESIGN: NOTES FROM THE FIELD YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE IDIOTS & YOU NEED TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO If only it was as easy as having our potential customers pick up the phone to give us a call and tell us what they'd like our products to do for them. That never seems to happen so product managers have to take a different approach. The good news is that information on what our customers want our products to do is out there - we just need to know how to find it. Visiting the customer is a great way to get important product information if you know how to ask the right questions. Additionally, we all collect tons of information on our customers and our products, but knowing what to do with it is another story. You wouldn't think that an angry customer would be able to help a product manager improve their product, but you'd be wrong. Angry customers will tell you in very clear terms what your product is NOT doing for them. Your ultimate goal as a product manager has to be to involve your customer in the product creation process. Since your customer is the one who best knows and understands what their needs are, the more that they can contribute to the design of the product, the better your chances of selling it them are. Finally, depending on how new or innovative your product is, your customers may not understand what it does or even that they have the problem that it solves. When you find yourself in this situation, you've got the job of educating your customer about not only their problems but also the solution that your product can provide them with. This book contains the answers that you need in order to better understand what your customers are trying to tell you. It's a matter of understanding how to listen to them and then how to understand what they have been trying to tell you. After you've read the book, you're going to be a product manager who understands what your customers are trying to tell you better than anyone else! For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at: www.TheAccidentalPM.com

Download or read book Product Leadership written by Richard Banfield and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s lightning-fast technology world, good product management is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it’s rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don’t? This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource. In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore: Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristics Best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company’s evolution Strategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders

Download or read book My Product Management Toolkit written by Marc Abraham and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some products a hit while others never see the light of day? While there's no foolproof way to tell what will succeed and what won't, every product has a chance as long as it's supported by research, careful planning, and hard work. -Written by successful product manager Marc Abraham, My Product Management Toolkit is a comprehensive guide to developing a physical or digital product that consumers love. Here's a sample of what you'll find within these pages: Strategies for determining what customers want-even when they don't know themselves Clear suggestions for developing both physical and digital products Effective methods to constantly iterate a product or feature Containing wisdom from Abraham's popular blog, this book explores product management from every angle, including consumer analysis, personnel management, and product evolution. Whether you're developing a product for a small start-up or a multinational corporation, this book will prove invaluable.

Download or read book Building Products for the Enterprise written by Blair Reeves and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you’re new to software product management or just want to learn more about it, there’s plenty of advice available—but most of it is geared toward consumer products. Creating high-quality software for the enterprise involves a much different set of challenges. In this practical book, two expert product managers provide straightforward guidance for people looking to join the thriving enterprise market. Authors Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines explain critical differences between enterprise and consumer products, and deliver strategies for overcoming challenges when building for the enterprise. You’ll learn how to cultivate knowledge of your organization, the products you build, and the industry you serve. Explore why: Identifying customer vs user problems is an enterprise project manager’s main challenge Effective collaboration requires in-depth knowledge of the organization Analyzing data is key to understanding why users buy and retain your product Having experience in the industry you’re building products for is valuable Product longevity depends on knowing where the industry isheaded

Download or read book The Influential Product Manager written by Ken Sandy and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive and practical guide to the core skills, activities, and behaviors that are required of product managers in modern technology companies. Product management is one of the fastest growing and most sought-after roles by job seekers and companies alike. The availability of trained and experienced talent can barely keep up with the accelerating demand for new and improved technology products. People from nontechnical and technical backgrounds alike are eager to master this exciting new role. The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer. Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don't know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product? This comprehensive entry-level textbook distills over twenty years of hard-won field experience and industry knowledge into lessons that will empower new product managers to act like pros right out of the gate. With teaching experience both from UC Berkeley and Lynda.com, the author boils down the most complex topics into principles that are easy to memorize and apply. This book methodically documents the tools product managers everywhere use to align their teams with market needs and organizational goals. From setting priorities to capturing requirements to navigating trade-offs, this book makes it easy. Not only will your product succeed, you'll succeed, too, when you read the final chapter on advancing your career. Let your product's success become your success!

Download or read book INSPIRED written by Marty Cagan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

Download or read book Product Development Lessons for Product Managers written by Jim Anderson and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a product manager without a product? Nothing. That's why it's so very important that when a product is being developed that the product manager be involved. Now exactly how best to go about doing that is an entirely different question. What You'll Find Inside: TRACKING YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOUR PRODUCT IS ON TRACK OR IN THE WEEDS? A NEW WAY FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS TO DISCOVER BREAKTHROUGH PRODUCT FEATURES ADVANCED JOB MAPPING FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS The process from having an idea for a product to actually having a product is a long and treacherous road. So many things can go wrong that either cause the schedule to have to be extended or cause a product with the wrong features to be developed. A product manager needs to discover ways to stay involved in the process while at the same time not slowing things down. That being said, a product manager is not a project manager. There can be a number of similarities between the jobs, but a product manager is responsible for so much more than a project manager. The difference between the roles has to be understood and communicated to everyone who is involved in the creation of the product. The good news about product development is that it is something that has been done many times at other firms. By taking the time to study their successes and failures product managers can learn what they need to be looking for in order to detect development issues before they derail a development project. Creating a way to map how a customer performs their job can provide the input that is needed for a development program. It can be all too easy to include or exclude features from a product that the customer will feel strongly about. Taking the time to understand how your customer will use the product that you are developing is the key to creating a successful product. This book has been created to pull all of these ideas together into one place for product managers. By reading the book you will be able to discover just exactly what the role of a product manager should be during the product development process. By doing this, you can ensure that when it's all done, you'll have a product that your customer will want to buy. For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at: www.TheAccidentalPM.com

Download or read book The Four Steps to the Epiphany written by Steve Blank and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book. Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success. If your organization is starting a new venture, and you're thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Essential reading for anyone starting something new. The Four Steps to the Epiphany was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

Download or read book Cracking the PM Interview written by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How many pizzas are delivered in Manhattan? How do you design an alarm clock for the blind? What is your favorite piece of software and why? How would you launch a video rental service in India? This book will teach you how to answer these questions and more. Cracking the PM Interview is a comprehensive book about landing a product management role in a startup or bigger tech company. Learn how the ambiguously-named "PM" (product manager / program manager) role varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great PM resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the interview: estimation questions, behavioral questions, case questions, product questions, technical questions, and the super important "pitch."

Download or read book Escaping the Build Trap written by Melissa Perri and published by O'Reilly Media. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

Download or read book Why High tech Products Drive Us Crazy and how to Restore the Sanity written by Alan Cooper and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alan Cooper calls for a Software Revolution - his best-selling book now in trade paperback with new foreword and afterword.

Download or read book The Product Book How to Become a Great Product Manager written by Product School and published by . This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nobody asked you to show up." Every experienced product manager has heard some version of those words at some point in their career. Think about a company. Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? What does a product manager do? Based upon Product School's curriculum, which has helped thousands of students become great product managers, The Product Book answers that question. Filled with practical advice, best practices, and expert tips, this book is here to help you succeed!

Download or read book The Right It written by Alberto Savoia and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible, prescriptive, and widely applicable manual, Google’s first engineering director and current Innovation Agitator Emeritus provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed. Millions of people around the world are working to introduce new ideas. Some will turn out to be stunning successes and have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others successes will be smaller and more personal, but no less meaningful: A restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that tells an important story, a local nonprofit that cares for abandoned pets. Simultaneously, other groups are working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some will fail spectacularly and publicly: New Coke, the movie John Carter, the Ford Edsel. Others failures will be smaller and more private, but no less failure: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause too few people care about. Most people believe that their venture will be successful. But the law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after launch—regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. Combining detailed case studies with personal insight drawn from his time at Google, his experience as an entrepreneur and consultant, and his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure: “Make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right,” he advises. In The Right It, he provides lessons on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype). Groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical, this essential guide delivers a proven formula for ensuring ideas, products, services, and businesses succeed.

Download or read book The Founder s Mentality written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing—and Avoiding—the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external—increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What’s more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further—and can actively lead to decline. The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a “founder’s mentality”—behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder—to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers: • An insurgent’s clear mission and purpose • An unambiguous owner mindset • A relentless obsession with the front line Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, The Founder’s Mentality demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds—not just start-ups—and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader—not only a founder—can instill and leverage a founder’s mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.

Download or read book Making It Right written by Rian Van der Merwe and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Product management is one of the most exhausting, exhilarating, stressful, and rewarding careers out there. It's not for the faint of heart. It's for people who want to move mountains. It swallows some whole, but others derive endless invigoration and passion from the pace and the impact and the glory and the huge potential for failure as well as success. There's no other job like it, and this is a book to help you make it your job. The role of a product manager goes by many different names - and if that's not reason enough to be confused, some companies define product manager completely differently from how it's understood elsewhere. We sometimes get stuck in our quest to define the damn thing, but in the case of product management, it's effort well spent, because it's quite the jungle out there.

Download or read book The Other Side of Innovation written by Vijay Govindarajan and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills. In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done--rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin? In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps: 1. Divide the labor 2. Assemble the dedicated team 3. Manage the partnership 4. Formalize the experiment 5. Break down the hypothesis 6. Seek the truth. The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.