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While software development teams have been moving toward agile methods for years, many product managers are only now becoming aware of it. An agile approach applies collaborative and continuous improvement concepts to software development. It emphasizes close collaboration between development teams and customers; frequent delivery of deployable code (in sprints); face-to-face communication with customers; tight, self-organizing teams; managing backlogs of user stories to reduce requirements chur
I'm often asked about my Y Combinator experience so I thought I would take the time to blog about it. I did Y Combinator the Summer of 2007 in Boston with two awesome co-founders. We built Anywhere.FM , a web music player that brought an iTunes-like experience to the web, and eventually sold it to imeem. So what is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is a new kind of seed stage venture firm.
I received a phone call at the beginning of the year from PM magazine. They wanted to interview me on my thoughts on how young members of a product team could grow in their careers. The questions they asked along with my answers are as follows: 1. What can young project team members do to climb the learning curve, make an impact and stand out in the eyes of their managers?
I have been always pinged and disturbed by this single question “Why is there suffering in the world?” In our country and probably every developing country it is not difficult to find small children in rags begging on the roadside; women in torn out clothes carrying their infant and begging for the sake of the infant; physically men, women and sadly even children begging.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
I can't count how many times in my career I've had to write a market requirements document (MRD) for a product that had already gone to market. It's sad, actually. Because when I've found myself asking fundamental questions like. Who are we selling this product to? How are we going to sell this product? What is the competitive landscape we're selling into?
What is the role of product management in an agile environment? Is the role of product owner something different? Developers often see product managers as technical resources. Agile seems to have made this orientation worse, with product managers getting pulled into deeper, tactical activities. But spending so much time with internal teams means less time spent in the market as a resource for strategy and business thinking at the product level.
What is the role of product management in an agile environment? Is the role of product owner something different? Developers often see product managers as technical resources. Agile seems to have made this orientation worse, with product managers getting pulled into deeper, tactical activities. But spending so much time with internal teams means less time spent in the market as a resource for strategy and business thinking at the product level.
Eighteen months ago, I was part of the founding team at a cutting-edge technology start-up. During the first few weeks, as I lined up and conducted dozens of prospect, industry, and expert interviews, the founder hired a talented senior engineering team, and the company was formed. Agile. Mostly by design, but partly because it just worked. While I didn’t have the challenge of undoing existing processes, since none yet existed, I did still have a learning curve.
Background. Barbara Nelson said in The Politics of Agile , “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.” Indeed, many Product Managers were taken by surprise at the speed of Agile’s adoption. And with the introduction of a new Product Owner role and its perceived overlap with the traditional Product Manager function, Product Managers have expressed some anxiety about the future of their role.
There are ten easily identifiable signs that can help forecast a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a checklist of deliverables created at the end of product development.
“The product shall.”. Market requirements typically define the problems your product will address using a formal, stilted language known to all technology people. For some reason, the verb shall be “shall”—not “should” or “will” or “must” or “it’d be neat if.” Maybe it goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments: You Shall Honor Thy Father and Mother; You Shall Not Murder; You Shall Not Steal.
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
Product management is an interesting career. We don’t code; we’re not necessarily engineers. And yet, we must communicate with and understand our development team. Our products are built under the guiding hand of technology experts. Imagine their work as a cloud—they take input from our companies, do something, and we get new product to sell. Product managers hover really close to that development cloud, and sometimes we feel like we’re actually in it!
Agile product managers (and their Agile development teams) are told to prioritize backlogs based on ROI. In practice, this isn't possible. Prioritizing for Profit is a better approach. By defining a core set of attributes that include stakeholder preferences, corporate strategy, and specific ways to increase profitability, product managers can create backlogs that support the company's longer-term goals as well as short-term development needs.
Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just delivery of software. In the Agile world, a new title is emerging -- the Product Owner -- which covers just a small subset of the Product Management role. While this makes sense for internal IT groups that have traditionally gone without Product Management, Agile product companies (that need to deliver customer revenue with their offerings) need full-fledged Product Managers to drive strategic activities
Sometimes it seems that agile development is an end run around effective product planning and market analysis. It also can undermine product positioning and roadmapping. Yet the benefits of a more responsive and productive product development team are too significant to ignore. Learn how the Splunk product management team is automating the Pragmatic Marketing Framework to feed continuous market-driven priorities into an agile development process, and then leveraging this automation for continuou
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.
Watch Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams. Download the Webinar. Download the Webinar. Download from iTunes. Download the Slides. Get Notified of Webinars.
How would you like to ship something every week? Agile software development methods can produce dramatic productivity improvements but can also create havoc for Sales and Marketing teams. Frequent product releases can often surpass the ability of organizations to absorb the changes in a manageable way. This can result in new product capabilities that should be emphasized being lost in the chaos of getting the product to market.
Your developers have gone agile. They want a backlog and user stories. Executives want a roadmap with a longer view. How do you connect strategy with execution? What happens to the roadmap and requirements when you go agile? Attend this session to find out what product managers need to provide to their agile development teams. Watch Agile, Roadmaps, and Requirements: Are they mutually exclusive?
In May 2008, I authored an article that discussed the day-to-day challenges facing the Product Manager in the Agile world. In that article, I remarked that the debate surrounding the role of the Scrum Master and Product Owner was worthy of a paper all of their own. A colleague of mine called my bluff the other day by asking me “ What’s the issue with Scrum Masters and Product Owners?
Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting
Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical
It has been exactly a year since I started this blog, as it was one of my new year's resolutions for 2009. So how did I do? Well, I'd say it went as well as a typical new year's resolution: highly motivated at the beginning with great progress in the first half of the year, then the consistency started to lapse, with eventual abandonment towards the last quarter of the year.
Despite my post last week on the Shortcomings of Google App Engine and my decision to move away from it as a viable platform for upcoming projects, I have been impressed with the overall architecture and design of their experimental Task Queue API. Google throughout its years has been a leader in interface design and that has been reflected not only in the UI of the products they have built, but the countless API interfaces they have published.
As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Google App Engine. I love the vision and truly believe its the first real platform-as-a-service as opposed to the other dominant cloud platform Amazon AWS. While AWS has significantly moved the industry forward with on-demand virtualized instances and cloud storage, it has not developed a fully scalable runtime environment comparable to Google App Engine.
Several months ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture Clara Shih gave at the Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. Clara has spent the last several years at Salesforce leading their social networking product strategy as well as developed Faceconnector , the first business app on Facebook that made it easy to integrate Facebook profile data into Salesforce CRM tools.
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.
In a departure from my usual focus on startups, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on my most recent experience in jury duty. I was selected as one of twelve jurors for a murder trial against a defendant who was accused of beating up his girlfriend and throwing her out of her apartment window in San Francisco in 2005. After an intense 2 week trial and jury deliberation, we today found the defendant guilty.
Andrew Chen asked me to write a guest post on his blog about some of my experiences monetizing music at imeem. I wanted to share it here as well. Introduction. In its search to find the most effective way to monetize user’s time spent listening to music, imeem has become one of the early innovators in the nascent online audio advertising space. From the process of designing, testing, and iterating on imeem’s unique audio ad product, I wanted to highlight 5 key lessons learned that are applicable
As today marks my first day as an Entrepreneur -in- Residence at Trinity Ventures , I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how to formalize my process for starting a new venture. Every startup goes through phases including brainstorming ideas, selecting evaluation criteria, performing due diligence on top ideas, picking a winner, deciding on a corporate structure , putting together the team, evaluating funding options, and more.
As more and more offer providers enter the incentivized CPA and direct payments space, there is a clear need for a way to easily test different offer providers and optimize between them. At imeem , I was responsible for evaluating, signing up, testing, and optimizing the various offer and direct payment providers that were leveraged as part of the imeem points virtual economy.
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.
While I am a big believer that entrepreneurs should spend the majority of their time focusing on getting a quality product to market, one piece of overhead that should never be overlooked is incorporating or forming an LLC prior to product launch. To some this is obvious. Of course you setup your corporate structure before anything else. But to hackers and hobby programmers this may not be their first instinct.
Before moving on to a new phase in my career, I always like to reflect on the previous experience and put together key takeaways that I can leverage in the next opportunity. It's that time again as this past Wednesday was my last day at imeem. As some of you know, imeem acquired Anywhere.FM at the end of 2007. Since then I've helped to migrate Anywhere.FM, develop the imeem Media Platform , and contribute to a variety of monetization projects.
Despite the over 200 music startups that launched in 2008 , I am disappointed with the lack of startup innovation in the space. While many of them definitely nailed building something people want, most failed to make something people will buy. When developing a startup, figuring out a viable business model is as important as producing a compelling product.
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