July 8, 2015 / Posted in  Product Management, Technology

This is the best destination for great Product Management podcasts. Each expert goes into detail about their career as well as their Product Management discipline:

This is Product Management – hosted by Mike Fishbein

Toward the end of each podcast, Mike asks some standard product manager questions so you can see how each expert responds individually.

Notable guests:

Nir Eyal – Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. I also saw him speak at a Zurb event, he’s brilliant.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell – Author of Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology. She makes herself available on Quora for questions I found. I’ve learned a lot from her writing style; she’s objective, captivating, influential, and succinct.

Enjoy! And if this is helpful, shar...

June 26, 2015 / Posted in  Product Management

When starting any new product or business, there are always more things to do than you have time for. It can be downright overwhelming if you don’t stay organized. I use several different tools and documents to help move the vision forward and share with stakeholders. Some of the suggestions below might also help you with getting your product started.

The Pitch Deck

Whether you are looking for venture capital, a partner, or just capturing your idea – a pitch deck is essential. Even if you just want to build something for fun, a pitch deck forces you to examine why the idea is worth pursuing. There are a lot of different opinions on what should be in a pitch deck, how long it should be, who should it be geared toward, but for this example let’s create something simple...

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June 5, 2015 / Posted in  Product Management, Technology

This is hands down my favorite agile product owner video. Henrik Kniberg goes into detail about how to manage your sprints, stakeholders, and backlog. He talks about how to determine fixed scope and fixed timeline delivery estimations. He embraces challenges like how to manage your backlog when stakeholder asks exceed engineering throughput, and he provides tips on how to align stakeholders. If you’re in Product or even a developer, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time.

You won’t be disappointed!

May 5, 2015 / Posted in  Product Management, Technology

Product Management professionals have a lot of unique challenges which make the job interesting. An important Agile Product Manager skill is to effectively demonstrate how a feature will evolve, before it even exists. With Agile, a product is in various states as it grows from minimum viable experiment, to minimum viable product, to minimum marketable product to name a few. Product Managers need to communicate this evolution precisely, or else you introduce risk. Complex features with many dependencies make this more challenging. Once I learned (thanks Kevin Callahan) and implemented story mapping for complex epic size features, many of these challenges became a lot easier.

One problem with PRDs (product requirements documents) is that they show a lot of how something will look when i...

March 18, 2015 / Posted in  Cars

I’m happy to say the most annoying sound in the world is finally fixed. If you had the same problem as me, your interior HVAC fan would make a tiny, annoying squeal or squeak or cricket sound or noise or whatever you want to call it when on the lowest two or three speeds. It wouldn’t always squeak, but when it did it was annoying, especially since the car is usually so quiet and refined. You’ll be happy once you too eliminate your BMW X3 fan noise.

BMW X3 HVAC blower motor update:

Unfortunately, my first attempt to fix this failed. It turns out the true fix for this issue is photo documented here...