January, 2019

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How great Product Managers deal with technical debt

The Product Coalition

Learn to live without fear of technical debt, and learn the best way to pay it down As a PM, tech debt is the sort of thing that constantly looms over you. It’s always there, and it follows you around like a bad penny. Tech debt is all of the little things that aren’t quite right about your product behind the scenes. It’s all the workarounds that you’ve found to quickly make the product look and behave the way that it does.

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Importance of Product Lead Company Culture

The Product Guy

Excerpts from our conversation with The Best Product Person of 2017, Melissa Perri. Watch now and see why she is counted amongst the ranks of the best in product management. More to Come. The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group.

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Most Brands Hear from Less Than 1% of Their Customers

Alchemer Mobile

Customers are hard-pressed to leave feedback in any form, and the way digital customer feedback is gathered is often clunky, time-consuming, and distracting from the goal the customer came to accomplish in the first place. Because many brands struggle to gather customer feedback in proactive, non-intrusive ways, feedback typically comes from the smallest, most vocal group of customers.

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TEI 211: Most product managers are not using surveys correctly and how to fix that – with Matt Champagne, PhD.

Product Innovation Educators

Create more loyal customers by designing surveys people actually want to complete. Many product managers and product marketers are using surveys incorrectly. We like surveys because they are relatively quick and inexpensive compared to other tools, such as customer interviews. While they can help us confirm what we think are the needs of customers and provide customer experience information, they are not something most customers look forward to participating in.

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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

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Tips for Rewriting a Digital Product

Roman Pichler

See the Rewriting Effort as an Opportunity to Innovate. A digital product is commonly redeveloped for two reasons: It has accumulated too much technical debt or its technologies are outdated, but the product is still needed—be it to generate revenue, support other revenue-generating products, or automate business processes and increase productivity.

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What I’m Saying No to This Year—And Why

Product Talk

The hardest part of my day is saying no to things I shouldn’t be doing. I’m in a fortunate position. I have a thriving coaching business. I write a popular product blog. I get invited to speak at conferences. I teach at a university. I participate in an executive community. I design online courses. I organize my local ProductTank meetup. And I have an endless backlog of what I want to do next.

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Why So Many Products Fail to Create Value

The Product Guy

Guest Post by: Sherzod Abdujabborov (Mentee, Session 7, The Product Mentor) [Paired with Mentor, Dan Mason]. A story of one failure. The day we reached 200 daily users was a critical milestone – more a psychological one for me personally than anything else. Somehow it proved to me that we were moving in the right direction. We had built a platform tailored to the specific needs of the local market to connect small businesses with their customers – for restaurants to reach out to potential diners

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2019 Product Management Trends

Alchemer Mobile

The challenge of achieving product-market fit is what keeps most product managers up at night. And this time every year, product management professionals are putting yearly strategies together and seeking out resources to ensure their approach is on-trend. Product managers are tasked with tracking market changes and competition to ensure market fit and product evolution are competitive, and then delivering feedback based on learnings to the rest of the product stakeholders—but they don’t h

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Why Listening is Crucial to Product – and How to do it Better

Mind the Product

As a recovering product manager turned executive coach, I’ve found that there’s actually quite a bit of overlap between building and launching successful products and supporting individuals in gaining self-awareness and building leadership skills. In both worlds, it’s critical to understand the system, have a solid strategy, be able to provide ongoing support, and measure results.

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Your Guide to Product Management Interviews: Top Questions with Answers

Stand out in your product management interview with guidance from Priyanka Upadhyay, an experienced product leader and Stanford Online program coach. In this guide, Upadhay dives into five key competencies interviewers will likely want to assess. She provides sample questions with detailed answers spanning: Product strategy Product design Execution Market estimation Teamwork Confidently land the product management role you want by pre-empting what interviewers are looking for and demonstrating y

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TEI 212: Lean-driven innovation for product managers – with Norbert Majerus

Product Innovation Educators

Learning from 40 years of innovation experience. The principles of Lean-Driven Innovation lead to more value for customers and faster value capture (e.g., revenue) for organizations. The principles can be applied to any industry, but for our guest, they grew out of the R&D and product development practices at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Our guest is Norbert Majerus, who was the Lean Champion in Innovation at Goodyear, where he worked for nearly 40 years before recently retiring.

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Lead Nurturing 101: How to get new customers beyond the free trial

Intercom, Inc.

Between 40% and 60% of people who sign up for a free trial of your software will never convert. What are you doing with the leads that don’t convert right away? If your answer is “nothing,” you’re leaving money on the table. By instituting a lead nurturing campaign sequence, you can guide those prospects through your buying cycle, from the moment they enter their email address on your website, to successful adoption of your product and beyond.

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How to Build Your Self-Confidence by Memorializing Praise and Rejection

Sachin Rekhi

I've had the opportunity to mentor a breadth of product managers through the years as well as entrepreneurs through my work as an advisor to early-stage startups. And in doing so I've spent countless hours working through product challenges, startup challenges, and everything in between. As I work more closely with each individual, their guard starts to come down, they start to open up, and ultimately become willing to share some of their biggest challenges, uncertainties, and fears holding them

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Problem Statement Definition

The Product Guy

How to distinguish what you should build from what’s reasonable to build. This discussion will cover validating problems with data, constructing hypotheses, and prioritizing what to test first. In a recent live stream from one of our mentors of The Product Mentor , Taya Page, lead a conversation on this topic. We are always looking for more product mentors from all around the world.

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Effective Risk Management: Balancing Safety, Compliance, and Opportunity

Effective risk management in product development balances safety, compliance, and opportunity. Risks can't be eliminated, but they can be mitigated through structured assessments, clear documentation, and expert guidance. Engaging specialists ensures efficiency, regulatory adherence, and product security while reducing costly oversights. A well-executed risk management plan includes frequent evaluations, defined assessment criteria, and a structured decision-making process.

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Why Finance App Success Depends on Customer Feedback

Alchemer Mobile

One of the most important tasks we’re faced with in business and in our personal lives is taking care of our finances, and mobile banking is already insanely popular across all demographics. According to Apptentive’s recent consumer survey , the majority of banks and credit unions offer mobile banking apps—and they are wildly popular. Specifically, 80% of respondents said their primary bank has a mobile app.

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What Does a Successful MVP Look Like?

Mind the Product

MVP is a phrase that startup people love to throw around. It’s an acronym that can be used as a weapon. Everyone believes their vision is really the Minimum Viable Product. You can use the phrase to batter your colleagues’ ideas. You can simply declare “it’s not really minimum” if you want to do something less than their vision, or declare “it’s not really viable” if you want to do more!

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TEI 210: Make time to accomplish what you need to today- with John Zeratsky

Product Innovation Educators

A simple framework for product managers to increase focus and eliminate distractions from your day. How would you like to get more done this year? That begins by getting more done today and our guest has the four-part framework for making that happen. This is not just another time management approach, but what the creators and authors of the Google Design Sprint found to be the practices to get more done.

Framework 159
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Build boring software

Intercom, Inc.

We’re conditioned to think from an early age that exciting things are the best. That attitude can extend to engineering, too. When trying to solve a problem with software, it can be tempting to build an exciting, complex solution. But that unnecessary complexity can lead to even more complicated issues. At our event Building Intercom in Dublin, I argued that when it comes to building software, we should avoid excitement and embrace boring.

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Enterprise ABM Marketing Tools: A Marketers Guide

Savvy B2B marketers know that a great account-based marketing (ABM) strategy leads to higher ROI and sustainable growth. In this guide, we’ll cover: What makes for a successful ABM strategy? What are the key elements and capabilities of ABM that can make a real difference? How is AI changing workflows and driving functionality? This Martech Intelligence Report on Enterprise Account-Based Marketing examines the state of ABM in 2024 and what to consider when implementing ABM software.

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Articulating Your Product Design Principles

Sachin Rekhi

Product management is fundamentally a leadership role in that you are ultimately responsible for leading a product development team to deliver a compelling product that resonates with your customers. The vast majority of what I've personally learned about leadership comes from Jeff Weiner , who I watched lead LinkedIn as CEO over the 4 years I spent there.

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Advice for Managers of Product Managers

The Product Guy

Excerpts from our conversation with The Best Product Person of 2017, Melissa Perri. Watch now and see why she is counted amongst the ranks of the best in product management. More to Come. The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy and The Product Group.

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How great Product Managers contribute to great engineering cultures

The Product Coalition

Great engineers leave when they are no longer excited by an opportunity. These engineers are in demand, they have other companies constantly knocking on their doors, pitching them exciting opportunities, as well as money, in an attempt to convince them to leave. Given that cutthroat environment, how do we, as product managers, contribute to a strong engineering culture?

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Goals for 2019 – A Product Manager’s New Year’s Resolutions

Mind the Product

It’s a new year, and while the date changing on a calendar doesn’t really have some magical power, it is a nice reminder to slow down and reflect. Many of us will think about the personal goals we want to achieve this year, our businesses will be setting plans and strategizing how to make this year the best one yet, and we’ll be looking at what behaviors in ourselves we might want to change ( no really, I AM going to eat healthier this time!

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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Duke Heninger, Partner and Fractional CFO at Ampleo & Creator of CFO System

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Duke Heninger, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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Why Mobile Customer Feedback is Your Big Missed Opportunity

Alchemer Mobile

Collecting and making sense of mobile customer feedback isn’t a walk in the park for product managers and marketers. There’s a big analytics challenge in pulling in the right sources of information and prepare the right views for leaders and product owners to consume. It can take months to set up a first version and years to get it right as sorting through feedback from different customer segments is difficult, especially as the size of your customer base grows.

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Understanding your ideal customers and how to sell to them

Intercom, Inc.

We’ve thought about this truth a lot during the last few months at Intercom as we’ve been going through our annual planning. As part of the process, we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing who we should be selling to these days, and how we should be selling to these customers. The process of defining your positioning strategy is not a one-and-done deal – in a crowded marketplace, it needs to be an ongoing exercise.

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Are Requriements Overrated?

Ask Benny

Why I don’t write long specifications. From Waterfall to Agile In the dark ages we all worked in waterfall. We planned everything months ahead of time. We had to write very detailed requirements in advance, review them and plan accordingly. It resulted in slow reaction to changes and many obsolete requirements. With the move to agile and the preference of working software over comprehensive documentation (see the agile manifesto) there is less demand for such long specifications.

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Hot Potatoes: How to handle the thing that causes everyone else to quit

The Product Guy

Being a Product Manager is never clear, and never simple. It’s easy to have projects we love, but what happens when the worst, most convoluted project gets dumped in your lap? This talk goes over things you can do to stabilize a project while staying sane. In a recent live stream from one of our mentors of The Product Mentor , Felix Sargent, lead a conversation on this topic.

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B2B eCommerce, Self-Service Portals, and PIM Trends for 2024

In 2024, B2B customers expect better quality and service with streamlined experiences that match consumer-grade simplicity—no long calls or meetings required. Our B2B eCommerce Trends Report, surveying 400+ B2B professionals in the US and Europe, reveals how eCommerce has become vital to top companies’ strategies. The report shows how leaders are leveraging eCommerce to break data silos, unify channels, and deliver the personalized experiences that customers demand.

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The Misunderstood World of Product Growth

The Product Coalition

Growth is walking the fine line between innovation and profit, and the risks are often overlooked. Relentlessly growing a product seems like a no-brainer. The upside is obvious: more revenue, more customers, more money for research and development, and so on. When it comes to growth the downside is often overlooked. The truth is there are a lot of trade-offs that are being made, and often those trade-offs are leaving products or businesses exposed to lurking risks.

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5 Tips for Product Managers to Ensure Success on Every Project

Mind the Product

As product managers our job description is pretty simple: to make all of our software development projects succeed. In fact, I would go so far as to say any failures or successes of the team are failures or successes of product management. While the product manager is not the manager of the team per se, they are in charge of all critical elements that lead to a team’s success and need to own that responsibility.

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Sales Presentation Techniques That Improve Discovery

Product Management University

There are many cases where salespeople are forced into giving presentations before adequate discovery has been completed. Here are a few sales presentation techniques that will yield valuable buyer motivations without formal discovery meetings. The Playbook: The best sales presentations are the ones that create a relaxed environment for the buyers. The more relaxed they are, the easier it is for salespeople to uncover their real buying motivations and communicate stronger value propositions.