You know that feeling when you are running late? Someone is waiting for you and you just cannot get there on time. You feel anxious. I bet your friend will let it slide a time or two — but customers are not so forgiving.
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There is a lot to juggle in the day-to-day work of building a great product. But even on the busiest days, forward-thinking company builders and product leaders are always on the lookout for opportunities for improvement.
Products get better fast when the teams that build them also use them every day. Of course, we use Aha! to set our own strategy and roadmaps. But we also use it for our marketing work — including this launch. And because marketing projects often have very specific deliverable dates, we needed a different way to see those activities. Aha! needed a calendar view.
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My compass is always pointing towards the next goal. Self-learning web development as a kid, becoming the first college graduate in my family, my passion today for mountaineering — I never stop exploring. There is always a more challenging summit to reach, so I like to push myself further and further in all aspects of life.
Last week, tens of thousands of ideas were submitted to Aha! Ideas Portals around the world. Some were good suggestions. And we are sure that some were stinkers. But even bad ideas are valuable to product teams. They give product managers insight into customer needs and problems. And product management teams are always looking to better understand what their customers really want.
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Lucky or wrong — if you only rely on your gut to make decisions, you have a chance of either being lucky or wrong. We know that using data (not your best guess) to make product decisions will give you an edge. Reports in Aha! help you organize, visualize, and analyze everything that is happening with product management. And when you need to see a lot of information at a glance, list reports are your go-to view.
I love learning about the origins of language and how it shapes the world. Reading the work of people from all different backgrounds provides unlimited perspectives and opportunities to grow. In college, I took every type of literature, writing, linguistics, grammar, and editing course that I possibly could.
What feature is next? How many new ideas came in last week? What is the status of a key Q3 goal? Exporting data and doing spreadsheet gymnastics each time you need an answer to these product questions is not efficient or effective. You need a better product management tool. One to manage and report on the team’s plans and accomplishments so you can quickly analyze data, make decisions, and drive your product forward.
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Your customers are not the only ones with great ideas. Your prospective customers are also a source of inspiration. And ideas from both groups are often shared with the support team when there is a problem or someone wishes your product did something differently. Unfortunately, these suggestions rarely make it to the product team for consideration, much less onto your roadmap. Instead, the ideas stay locked in your support application or worse — lost forever in an email black hole.
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I have always been interested in making, building, or fixing something. This interest led to a variety of summer jobs as I was working through school — from bartending to renovating houses. Each experience served me later on as a product manager. My favorite though, was my summer job working as a ferryman on the Helford River in Cornwall, England. It turned out this role had many parallels to product management.
It is impossible to move fast when you are disorganized. Seasoned product managers know this well. As your team grows and your product matures, the number of features in your product backlog gets bigger too. (Maybe too big.) And it is never possible to build everything. As a product manager, your job is to make sure your team is focused on the features that deliver against your strategic vision and goals.
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What is the hardest part of being a product manager? If you ask 100 product managers, they might just give you 100 different answers. But there is one common challenge we hear from customers — major product launches. Not a big surprise, really. Delivering a new customer experience is hard. And delivering it by a specified date is even harder. The number of details you need to keep track of can seem impossible. Read more…
SSO. Three letters with a lot of power for product managers. Seriously. The power to free you from an onslaught of emails. And the power to collect all the brilliant product suggestions from the various teams in your company — all in one place and without friction. Can SSO really do all of these things for a product manager? Combined with an Aha! Ideas portal it can. Read more…
If you are like any of the product managers I know, you do not spend much time sitting still. You are naturally curious and want to learn everything you can. Well, in June, we shared plenty of new articles to keep you on your toes.
I have always known that the pursuit of money for money’s sake will ultimately result in unhappiness. My parents taught me these values. The messages were clear — if you value something, work hard, and make informed choices, then you will create opportunities that deliver intrinsic value.
