By Saeed Khan
In December, I asked you to provide some input and help influence our content this year.
There were several reasons for this, which I’ll get to shortly.
But as a bit of an aside, one thing that did surprise me (and I know it’s just coincidence but…), shortly after posting my request, I saw a blog post by Steve Johnson, entitled Most Annoying Blog Posts: 2011.
In it, Steve lists several bullets with descriptions of what he considers annoying blog posts.
It’s almost 2011 and many bloggers will start the year with their resolutions including:
- I haven’t been blogging lately but will post more often in 2011
- What I plan to blog about in 2011
- What do you want me to blog about in 2011?
- I’ll have a new look in 2011
Who cares?
Ouch! Bullets 2 and 3 (which I italicised) look almost exactly like what I did and planned to do.
But I do half-agree with Steve. If you tell people what you’re going to do, without asking them, then what’s the point? Similarly, if you ask them for input, but never share it, that’s quite annoying. But I asked, and now I’m sharing. And you know, sharing is caring, so how could that be annoying? 🙂
As I mentioned there were a few reasons for asking for your input.
- Blog readership has grown a lot over the past year. I’ve been posting what I thought were relevant and interesting posts (most of the time I hope), but I have no idea how relevant and interesting it is to you — the readers.
- Recently, Jim Holland and Prabhakar Gopalan have joined the blog as regular contributors. They bring their knowledge and experience and equally important, their bandwidth to blog on relevant topics.
- It was the end of the year and what better time to ask for input about what to do in the coming year. 🙂
OK…enough with the preamble, here’s what you told us and some feedback about your comments.
1. Who are you?
Not surprisingly, a large majority of respondents were product managers, but, some of you were also in product marketing, Sr. Management, Project Management and Product Evangelism.
There was a good mix of experience with almost an even split around the 5 years of experience mark.
2. What do you want us to write about?
I took the responses — the answers were open text and not predetermined choices — and categorized them into a number of buckets. Here are the categories (in priority order) along with some of the actual responses.
Best Practices
- Prioritization vs Portfolio Management
- Feature prioritization
- Analyzing the market
- How to engage with customers
- Business models
Organizational issues
- Improving the acceptance of the discipline of Product Management
- Working in large orgs: how to lead by influence
- Need for HR skills in leaders of PM groups
- Advocating (show hard value) for PM within the organization
- Managing Product Management teams
Career information
- Managing Product Management burnout
- How to move into Product Management
- How to have a successful career path in Product Management
- Tips for new Product Managers
Strategy
- Product strategy and portfolio management
- Separating product strategy from technical product management
- Linking strategy to action
Pricing
- Pricing and Licensing models
- Pricing strategy
- Managing pricing changes
Product Management in other industries
- Retail
- Consumer goods
- Finance
3. Some of your comments
There were some very good comments that were shared. Here are a few, summarized for brevity.
- More practical advice. Everybody loves practical advice
- Real-life product management cases studies highlighting challenges from both strategic and tactical perspective
- Advice column for Product Managers
- War stories..lessons learned along the way
There were other comments but they fell along similar lines. And finally one comment that deserves a response:
- As I work in a Scrum environment, I was surprised to see you announcing the last chance to influence what you will write for the whole next year. I would envision that as an ongoing effort
Good point. My response is that there’s nothing like a compelling event (or a sense of urgency) to get people to do something you need them to do. 🙂 But, your ideas and input are welcome anytime of year. Just use the Contact Us page and tell us what’s on your mind.
Also, we’re always looking for people who want to submit a guest post on a topic of interest? Do you have something you want to share? Please lets us know.
So there it is. Thanks for your input. Keep providing it whenever you see fit, and we’ll put some more content focus on these topics.
Saeed