22: Blow your own trumpet
As a product manager, people will take credit for your hard work – unless you trumpet your own successes!
Tag: behaviour
20: Leave work when you’re meant to
Here’s how to sleep more soundly at night and avoid setting unrealistic expectations about how much you can get done in a given amount of time
19: How to regain control of your inbox
Product managers just loooove solving problems and answering questions. Emails present us with an enticing list of both, which is why we find it so hard to tear ourselves away from them. I reveal how you can regain control of your inbox after the break!
17: Remember your manners
My folks brought me up to remember my manners. I consider I’ve perhaps taken this a little too far when I find myself apologising to people in London who have just shoulder-barged me into the path of an oncoming bus. But manners are important, especially for a product manager, where your success relies on the help of many others.
10: Give yourself time to think in a straight line
One of the many personal challenges I’ve faced in my working life was to overcome my natural tendency towards being erratic. I’m not talking about endearing (to me at least) eccentricities, more about practical things such as a rubbish memory for dates and poor time management. Throw in a crisis and I could generally be found running around with my head on fire.
What will your leaving speech sound like?
A good friend and colleague recently left our firm to take on a more senior product management role elsewhere. His boss and his boss’s boss stood next to him and gave him a glowing and sincere send-off, with the leaving speech striking that good balance between “we’re sad to see you leave” and “go out, excel and make us proud”.
How to get your sales team selling value instead of discounting
Does your sales team sell your products (like, in exchange for money), or does it give them away as generous sweeteners to guarantee the sale of something else that will hit their targets? Or to put it in another way, does your salesforce truly understand the value of your products and can it articulate the benefits to the customer?
Positive procrastination
Everyone but the most tirelessly(and tiresome) self-motivated has at one point or another procrastinated in the face of some worthy activity. I think I’ve found a way to use procrastination for profit and gain; read on to see whether I have…
4 key ways to spot a successful product manager
As a product manager, how do you know you’re doing your job well? This article outlines the problem with traditional metrics for product managers and offers some better alternatives for measuring success: communication, ideas, roadmapping, launch and end-of-life.
Questions you need to be asking
There are many questions you need to be asking to determine the best course of action or to analyse underlying motivations. Of them, I use the following three questions most often:
1. So what?
2. Why?
3. What’s stopping us?
