Why building a shared understanding is critical for building successful productsOne way to guarantee that your product will fail is to create a culture where nobody knows what they’re supposed to be building and why. Engineers build whatever they want, designers have...
How to Keep on top of Trends that Matter to Product Managers
Of all the different trends that product managers need to be aware of, technical trends are some of the most difficult, since the space is constantly evolving and no one is ever sure whether a new technology is actually going to become widely adopted, or whether it’s just another flash in the pan.
How to Read API Documentation
Equip yourself with the ability to speak confidently about API integrationsAPIs and product management Product managers are not engineers. But there is an expectation that product managers are both technical enough to to have conversations with engineers and to...
5 No Code Automation Worklows for Product Managers
How to leverage no code automation tools to make day to day life in product more efficientNo code automation tools are big business, with the sector growing into a multi billion dollar industry over the past few years. But despite the impressive growth in the sector,...
How to Nurture a Culture of Product Innovation
You may have sat in a room or on a call where the agenda is innovation and whilst everyone is sharing ideas, one or two ideas sound so outlandish that the person sharing it laughs to themselves about it. These are sometimes just bad ideas, but they’re also often the source of true innovation.
Modern ways to create Product Requirements Documents (PRDs)
It’s helpful to think of your requirements as contextual vs. functional. For the purpose of this post, we’re going to focus on mainly functional requirements, assuming that your product strategy and roadmap are agreed. But that doesn’t mean that your functional requirements documents won’t acknowledge – and link to – your wider strategy, too.
How to Send Internal Product Updates Stakeholders Will Read
If you’re ever tasked with writing internal product updates, here’s a few ideas on how you can spice them up so that your stakeholders feel energised and excited the next time you update them on all the wonderful work the product team is doing.
SaaS Pricing Models for Product Managers
6 ways to price your SaaS product using leading SaaS businesses as inspirationPricing a product is a critical part of product management; it’s rarely something product teams will or should do themselves and will typically involve a blend of product, marketing and...
How to Write a Product Vision Statement
It goes without saying that your product vision should ultimately link back to your product’s overall value proposition. Sure, it doesn’t have to be explicitly obvious that your vision fits within a specific industry domain, but it makes no sense to come up with a vision so random that people feel confused by the mismatch between the vision statement and the company.
5 Visual Design Principles for Product Managers
This summary is for product managers and tech workers with no formal design skills who want to brush up on their design sense and learn some basic design principles, so that they can have more confident conversations when working with design teams.
How to Make Cross Functional Teams Work
Getting the most out of groups of multi-disciplined team members'Cross functional team' is really just a fancy way of saying groups of people with different skill sets working together to achieve common goals. And that’s what business has always been about. Despite...
How to Build Better Internal Tools
Celebrating the unsung heroes of the product world The unsung heroes of the product world are the product managers and teams who work on internal tooling and non-customer facing parts of the product stack. Sure, internal tools aren’t necessarily the sexiest thing to...
Scope Management is Product Management
Defining the boundaries of your first iteration using the scope box modelWhere does the scope of a new product feature start and end? For product teams, figuring out where to draw the line that determines what should constitute the first version of a new product or...
Visual Communication templates for Product Managers
Holding people’s attention is difficult. But adding visuals into the mix will help.
The 5 types of Product Differentiation
How to fight your natural instinct to copy othersThe allure of copying competitors The gravitational pull towards copying competitors is real. In crowded markets, the more competitors, the more certain we are that what our competitors are doing must be the right...
Presentation skills for Product Managers
How to excel at the activity we dread the mostSince product managers have no direct managerial responsibilities over team members and no tangible outputs in the same way a designer or developer might be able to say ‘here’s what I built this week’, PMs must instead...
How to Create a Product Content Strategy
Content is perceived as something that can be slapped onto a design at the end of the product development process. But in the best companies, content is the design process, not an afterthought. A product that has invested in heavily integrating both design and content into the overall experience oozes quality. You can feel it.
Technology Skills for Product Managers
The most useful technical concepts to understand when working with engineers.
Why Product Features Matter
Feature factories is the term people use when they’re working at a company who’s idea of product strategy is putting a spreadsheet together with a shopping list of items that need to be delivered with a few dates slapped next to them. But as real as these frustrations are, it’s also worth asking: what if features actually do matter?
Component Oriented Thinking for Product Managers
Components mean many things to different members of a modern product team. For a product manager, using components means building reusable pieces of value which cut down future development time and leads to shipping more value faster.