The Critical Importance of Finding Time for Strategic Thinking and Planning
Learn how strategic thinking and planning can help your product team develop strategies to hit targets and align organizational objectives.
Blog ●5 min read
More from Jim Semick
The Evolution of Product-Led Growth
The evolution of product-led growth may seem to be a recent trend at software companies, but the underlying concepts have...
Blog ●6 min read
Taking the Leap: Why Product Managers Make Better Entrepreneurs
I’ve spoken with so many product managers who have a dream of becoming an entrepreneur or launching their own product...
Blog ●7 min read
A Product Manager’s Guide to Roadmapping as an Essentialist
This article tackles one of the areas that gets the most interest from product managers: how can they use an...
Blog ●11 min read
Lean Market Validation: 10 Ways to Rapidly Test Your Startup Idea
This article outlines the advice I gave students and includes updates on some of the concepts to my current thinking...
Blog ●6 min read
The 5 Top Trends in Product Management to Watch in 2021
The year 2020 shifted the world in fundamental ways. It changed the way we work, learn, play, travel, and socialize....
Blog ●7 min read
Your MVP is Not the Minimum Product
If you’re a product manager or part of a startup, you’ve likely heard about the Minimum Viable Product concept for...
Blog ●5 min read
Why Distributed Product Teams are Here to Stay
There is no going back to “normal” for product teams. The idea of simply translating what we did in the...
Blog ●6 min read
The Ultimate Motivation: What Gets Product Managers Out of Bed Every Morning?
No matter how much we love our career, we all have some days when we’d rather stay in bed. So...
Blog ●6 min read
The Essentialist’s Way to Building Better Products
“Am I working on the right things?” “How can I fit it all in?” I find myself asking these questions...
Blog ●7 min read
How I Learned to Embrace Uncertainty: Tips for Product Managers
I’ll admit it, in the past, I’ve wrestled with needing to control uncertainty. For years I thoroughly planned most everything...
Blog ●6 min read
Patterns of Pain: How Product Managers Solve High-Value Problems
The most successful product managers think of themselves as finders of pain, not finders of products. In my experience launching...
Blog ●6 min read
When to Declare Backlog Bankruptcy
A few years ago, I was the acting product manager at a startup, developing an enterprise software product. Building the...
Blog ●6 min read
The Most Under-Appreciated Product Management Skill
We write a lot about the skills that product managers need to be effective. The skills are wide-ranging, from ruthless...
Blog ●6 min read
Product Management 2019: Year In Review
What a year. There are so many changes happening in product management as I write this, and the evolution only...
Blog ●8 min read
What Your Executives Want to See When You’re Presenting Your Roadmap
As a product manager who now sits on the other side of the table as an executive, I’ve had lots...
Blog ●9 min read
How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome as a Product Manager
No matter how far into your career you might be, you’re never too old for imposter syndrome to make an...
Blog ●7 min read
Product Managers: Learn to Let Go
Sometimes it’s hard to let go of something after discovering it no longer works as you expect. Especially if it’s...
Blog ●8 min read
How to Foster a Culture of Gratitude
As we head into a new year, we tend to talk more about gratitude. We talk about what we’re grateful...
Blog ●9 min read
Getting to the MVP: 5 Tips for Launching New Products
If launching new products were easy, you’d probably be reading this post through your Google Glass or on an Amazon...
Blog ●8 min read
5 Ways to Become a Better Product Advocate Within Your Company
I recently did a webinar with Pragmatic Marketing on the topic of thought leadership for product managers. One of the...
Blog ●8 min read
Data-Driven Product Roadmaps: Choosing the Right Metrics
Developing an effective product roadmap requires more than a product manager’s intuition and vision, although those elements are crucial. But...
Blog ●9 min read
Product Managers: Are you a Thought Leader or Follower?
I was recently featured on a Pragmatic Marketing webinar about how product managers can become thought leaders. There was a...
Blog ●5 min read
The 5 Ways to Know if Your Product Idea is a Winner
Thousands of new products launch every month. Yet only a fraction of those gets enough traction to be considered successful....
Blog ●8 min read
Help! I’ve Been Handed a Bad Product Strategy
On our blog we often discuss the challenges of being a product manager. One recurring theme is that although you...
Blog ●8 min read
Product Management Trends You Should Act on Today
Tools, technology and talent to develop innovative new products are more abundant and accessible today than they’ve ever been. Even...
Blog ●6 min read
iPhone 7 Launch Day: Are Apple’s Product Teams Still Innovating?
Criticism can uncover important truths. This is one reason that product managers have such a difficult job: Sometimes the only...
Blog ●6 min read
Aligning Sales and Product Teams on Your Roadmap
One of the biggest challenges product managers face is working with diverse stakeholders and managing their conflicting priorities. You’re pulled...
Blog ●4 min read
Agile Roadmap Planning: How to Balance Long Term Uncertainty
At ProductPlan, I frequently get questions about agile roadmap planning. How should you balance long-term strategic planning with short-term agility?...
Blog ●7 min read
How a Public Roadmap is Helping ProductPlan Customer GOV.UK, and its Customers
A few years ago the UK government’s publicly available online information was spread out across hundreds of individual and disconnected...
Blog ●6 min read
How to Become a Better Public Speaker: Public Speaking Tips to Use Today
Public speaking isn’t usually included as a required skill in a typical product manager job description. But it should be....
Blog ●6 min read
Looking for a Product Management Job in 2016? 5 Trends you Need to Know
Like you, we have now seen a dozen articles predicting the top trends for product managers in 2016. Yes, we...
Blog ●3 min read
Customer Spotlight: Henry Schein Inc.
Henry Schein, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to dental, animal health and medical...
Blog ●1 min read
10 Lessons for Pricing SaaS Products
Pricing is such a core part of a SaaS product’s business model that you need to get it right. In...
Blog ●4 min read
How to Choose a Great SaaS Pricing Model
It’s a brave new world for pricing software-as-a-service products. Gone are the days of simply setting a per-seat fee and...
Blog ●4 min read
The Best Way to Price SaaS Products
Pricing SaaS products presents unique challenges—and opportunities—for product and marketing teams. In the past few years, I’ve had a hand...
Blog ●3 min read
Why Product Teams Should Care about the Internet of Things
No doubt you’ve heard of the coming Internet of Things (IoT) and how it’s going to change our lives through...
Blog ●2 min read
The Empathetic Product Manager
Empathy. You’ve heard it’s an essential skill for product managers, marketing managers, and UX teams. But how can you put...
Blog ●4 min read
7 Steps for Testing if Your Product Will Fail
Recently I spoke to a class at the UCSB Technology Management Program about market validation and failure testing –...
Blog ●2 min read
Product Managers: Is Your MVP Truly Compelling?
More product teams are taking advantage of the Minimum Viable Product concept—deploying products early to customers in order to learn...
Blog ●3 min read
How to Avoid Putting Dead Weight Product Features On Your Roadmap
A few days ago I had lunch with the product team of a mid-sized software company, and one of the product managers...
Blog ●4 min read
10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers
A few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic customer insights. But knowing the right questions to ask during customer conversations and...
Blog ●4 min read
Why Agile Teams Need a Product Roadmap
“We’re agile, so why do we need a long-term product roadmap?” I hear this question regularly. At first blush, the terms agile and product...
Blog ●3 min read
Benefit versus Cost: How to Prioritize Your Product Roadmap
Deciding which initiatives to include in your future product releases can be daunting. Product prioritization is even more difficult when there...
Blog ●4 min read
Should You Flip Your Product Roadmap Process Around?
If your product team is like most, you have software for capturing issues, managing requirements, and tracking projects. After all,...
Blog ●2 min read
