Smart Tips: Product Management

Why we want deep customer insight - and 3 recommendations to get there.

Insightful customer interviews in 5 steps.

The Kano model divides customer needs into three categories, and is very useful for us product managers.

Create a persona to capture, summarize, and share your customer insight.

Understand your market segments - their size, growth, and key trends.

4 investigation areas to understand your most important competitors - and clarify your competitive positioning.

Create a product vision and objectives for your product, and track progress over time.

To find impact with our products - to go big - we need a product strategy. We'll do this in five steps.

Guidance on how to find and use KPIs as leading indicators of product success.

Create a top-level product roadmap to communicate your product evolution and highlight tradeoffs.

OKRs (objectives and key results) are a very effective way to focus a team's efforts on key business goals.

Discovery and delivery is a very powerful new product development approach. We'll look at 3 tips for running an effective discovery and delivery process, using Wag! dog training as our example.

Stage-gates is an organized, manageable process from idea to launch. It's thorough, but can be slow. We'll look at three best practices.

Testing product concepts is central to finding innovation and customer delight. We'll look at two examples: Wag! dog training and an i-team robotic vacuum.

4 steps to great collaboration with our engineering and technical teams.

Working with UX / product designers / industrial designers to find the zone of innovation and customer delight.

Grooming and prioritizing user stories are a critical part of our work as product managers. We'll look at best practices, using Reedsy book editing services as our example.

With product analytics, we track our users, visualize their interactions, chart trends, and use this to optimize our products.

7 recommendations for running product experiments to drive key metrics.

A value proposition helps us crisply, confidently articulate our target customer, the value we bring to them, and our competitive advantage. We'll use a product from Owl Labs as our example.

As product managers, we love our sales teams, but we struggle to support them. We'll look at five best practices for best collaborating with sales in this lecture.

We have great opportunities for revenue, profit, and share growth throughout the product lifecycle.

For product-led growth companies - like Zoom, Koan, and Slack - the product itself is the primary driver of new user acquisition, monetization, and growth. We'll look at 4 product-led growth best practices we can all incorporate.

To free up our team's time, we need to obsolete older, non-performing products. We'll talk about how to do this, using the Amazon Echo Look as our example.

As product managers, we need to influence the teams we work with - without having formal organizational authority. We'll discuss 5 ways to do this.

As product managers, we often struggle at two points along our career - getting our first product management job and moving into product leadership roles. We'll discuss best practices for both.