“Will this ship on time?” I bet your team is used to hearing this question. It should be simple enough to answer. But considering how many features and moving parts are in every release, it is not always a clear “yes” or “no.”
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Few things make us blush. But the thought of customers fighting over Aha! licenses? That turned our cheeks positively red. We are very grateful to serve many of the world’s best-known and largest companies. Some of our customers who use Aha! across multiple teams told us it was not easy to ensure that each group received their proper allotment of licenses.
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What is it exactly that makes product managers so busy? I know I often wondered where the day went when I was a PM. So, we asked the PM community on Roadmap.com to describe their work — in just one sentence. Responses ranged from “herding cats” to “turning ideas into businesses.” But there is one thing just about every product manager can agree on.
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I hope that you do not hold it against me. But I love my job. And I think you should too. This is why I spent the last year writing words of happiness — words of love. I wrote them for me and you. Roughly 64,000 words laid out over 236 pages in a book. It is called Lovability. It launched today and I am humbled that it is already an Amazon bestseller.
Marketing agencies get a bad rap. It can be said that they foster ruthless work environments aimed at one thing: racking up the biggest client spend bill possible. Well, I’m happy to provide a counter to that impression. My agency experience was nothing like that at all.
I feel fortunate to have been a part of four great SaaS product teams over the years. My experience has given me the opportunity to work on vastly different products that solved real problems. One thing each product and engineering team had in common — in order to ship great products and features, they were in sync.
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We know you learn about customer ideas from lots of different places. But it may be hard to figure out which ones you should prioritize on your roadmap. You want to invest in the ideas that will best serve your customers and have the most positive impact on the business. But which ones are those? Our integration with Salesforce is designed to help answer this question and capture all of the requests in one place.
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If you care about building a product that customers will love, then you likely found a lot to enjoy on the Aha! blog this month. That is because we announced our new book for company and product builders — Lovability.
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My first job as a programmer was working with a legacy Visual Basic 6 application. Although VB has always been looked down upon as a programming language, it delivered a fundamental lesson for me.
Remember the days before mobile maps — when you had to print out directions before you even got into the car? That is why GPS was so groundbreaking. Finally, there was a way to see where you were in real-time and quickly reroute when you got off track.
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An individual feature usually does not have a significant impact on your customers. But when a group of related features come together to deliver a new product experience — that is when you truly create something special. And you need a way to group all that related work together to represent a larger theme.
Product managers are a loud bunch. We are accustomed to leading and leaders are open with their beliefs. Perhaps that is why there are so many heated discussions about development methodologies. But no matter which one you follow, the intention behind it is usually the same — to get more done.
I have read and written a lot of product manager job descriptions over the years. One word every job has in common — “data.” Managing it, understanding it, presenting it. It is clear that data is vital to product management. You cannot have a successful product or business without it. But who wants to spend hours entering and manipulating data in spreadsheets?
You do not write a book to make money. That’s true for most people unless you are already famous. And I am not. You write a book because you believe a story needs to be told. And you are willing to struggle to tell it. I definitely have had stories to tell, but I never wanted to write a book. That contradiction makes sense if you understand the backstory.
February is a short month. But we packed 31 days of goodness into those 28 days. From product management to unpredictable bosses, we covered it all. So, whether you are a new product manager, an experienced developer, or a company founder, there is something here for everybody.
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