Insights
Perfecting The Product Launch
There are 3 Key Dimensions to Create a Perfect B2B Product Launch Imagine Apple missing a key launch date for a new iPhone? Unimaginable. Imagine then your own firms’ efforts to launch a product on time…
How To Deliver A Better User Experience
Validate Aspects of Your Business Case How many times have you had to validate aspects of your business case or your go to market plan, or confirm the context of a user story for a product before it’s…
3 Strategies To Motivate Your Product Management Team
Cultivating Product Management Talent This area can have a greater impact on the firm’s financial and market performance than any other job family or function. Unfortunately, not all product managers…
How To Succeed As Product Manager In A Tech Company
Product Management and Technology Companies. My first thought is that the word technology seems so overused that it’s meaning has been blurred. When people use the term, they can mean anything from an…
How To Look Like A Rockstar In Your Product Management Role
What does it really mean to be a Rockstar Product Manager? Have you ever compared a Rockstar and a Product Manager? Yeah, we haven’t either…until now. However, when we did, we learned how much these…
Perspectives on Product Management Job Satisfaction
I’ve been collecting data to find out if product managers are happy and engaged in their jobs. I was motivated to do so because so many product managers say that they don’t have the proper resources…
The Pros and Cons of Case Studies
Developing Case Studies for Product Managers When Sequent delivers workshops, they tend to draw upon a lot of personal observation, insight, and experience, and we encourage others to do the same. Part…
The True Price of Differentiation In Product Management
I have yet to talk to a company executive that doesn’t want their teams to produce more unique and differentiated products that meet customer needs. However, saying those words simply isn’t enough…
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Practice of Product Discontinuation
I recently remodeled my kitchen in my 15-year-old house. As I began planning the project, friends and family would joke with me (or some, perhaps more) about my reason for wanting to do this. Everything…
How Can Product Managers Become More Effective? Get Into The Flow!
If you’ve ever felt an unexpected sense of pleasure while performing a simple task like crunching numbers or cooking a homemade meal, you’ve probably experienced what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers…
The Crime Of Meeting Overtime (3 Ways To Optimize Your Meetings)
We all have meetings, sometimes many in a day lined up back-to-back, and we ask ourselves “When am I going to get my actual work done?!” What often makes this more frustrating is when the day you…
Product Management Strategy or Tactic?
During the deliver of one of our Product Strategy workshops during a recent quarterfinal rounds of the World Cup, some of the participants got into a heated debate regarding a match between Netherlands-Costa…
Why Good Product Managers Bring Bad Products To Market
A few years ago I was contacted by a product manager in crisis. His recently-released product was languishing, and he was racked with guilt. He told me that although he had put all of his efforts into…
Improving Product Management Requires Senior Leader Involvement
A senior business leader (and a reader of The Product Manager’s Desk Reference) recently reached out to me. He said that it was time to engage Sequent Learning Networks to deliver a Product Management…
What Product Managers Can Learn From “Think Like A Freak”
I have always been amazed by how deftly the TV series Mad Men dramatizes the tension between creativity and efficiency. A scene from a recent episode stuck with me for days. Let me set the stage for you:…