It is inevitable that you will need to stand up and give a presentation at some point during your career as a product manager. Some people dislike presenting more than others; that’s natural. Whether you love or hate the sound of your own voice, try some of the following tips to ease some of the stress of presenting.
I’m still hunting for a replacement firewall server and some low-power desktop machines, without necessarily compromising on performance. Mind you, I’m looking for a Linux-based firewall, not a gaming machine, so ‘performance’ may be overstating things. A quick hunt on the internet later and I’m amazed by how quickly the micro PC market is continuing to evolve. I thought I’d share with you a couple of the most desirable green machines I’ve found so far.
We product managers are a surprisingly upbeat bunch considering that we seem to spend a good proportion of our time making compromises. We very rarely get the opportunity to deliver everything we need in a product in the best possible way.
Product managers can be creatures of habit. Some habits are good and give us a consistent and diligent approach. Sometimes, though, we allow ourselves to be constrained by habitual thinking, inhibiting true innovation. What’s stopping you?
So much of being a product manager depends on successfully persuading and influencing others. Whether you’re presenting your product strategy, presenting a business case to the Board or talking with your customers, you need to know your subject matter: to demonstrate a good knowledge of your products and market to ensure that you come over as authoritative and credible.
When we start thinking about the requirements for a new product version, I bet we all make the same mistake when deciding what goes in: we guess solutions rather than find problems.
One of the roles a product manager or product marketing manager plays is to act as a translator between different groups of people. Sometimes this can be in a literal sense, if your responsibilities span different countries, but more generally this means translating between the market, Sales, Marketing and Development as a minimum.
Product managers are full of contradictions: if we’re not busting a gut to launch something, we’re trying to kill our older products off.
There is a popular myth that in order to protect its metalwork from the salty ravages of the nearby North Sea, the Forth Bridge needed to be painted to keep it proofed against corrosion. The task took so long that, by the time the painters finished one job, it was immediately time to begin over.
In the thrilling* conclusion to this lo-fi usability testing trilogy, we get down to the nitty-gritty of how to run the tests and how to interpret and act on the results.
* It all depends on your perspective
