Most products do a lot. It’s tempting to try to sell all that functionality at once. But a lot of products benefit from having less as opposed to more. Yesterday [ … ]
Category: Ethan
Seth’s Advice for Product Managers: Quit Now
Seth Godin gives some advice to real estate agents. Allow me to paraphrase his advice for Product Managers: Here’s my best advice (everyone knows a product manager or two, so [ … ]
Marginal Utility
Marginal utility is a basic staple of undergrad economics courses. Typically the value of a good goes down as you consume more of it. As I discovered this afternoon, I [ … ]
Product Management versus Marketing and Development
Some good comments on product management from former colleague Cadman Chui over at Red Canary. From some followup comments by Cadman: I believe Product Management should reside neither in Marketing, [ … ]
Further Proof that Product Management is not Marketing
Via Valleywag: PCampSiliconValley. A BarCamp-style unconference for Product Managers. March 15th in Sunnyvale. I wish I could be there, but Valleywag is right: it’s tough to say “I’m going to [ … ]
It Pays To Stay Cool
From Wired, on the iPhone development process: A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more [ … ]
Why Choose This Feature?
Recently I finsihed reading Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, by Read Montague, a fascinating book about how the brain makes decisions. It brings neuroscience, biology and computer [ … ]
The End of Infrastructure
Yesterday Amazon announced Amazon SimpleDB, an on-demand database service similar to their EC2 and S3 services. With this final piece of the puzzle, Amazon has put an end to the [ … ]
Googlers
Via Product Beautiful, an article in Newsweek about Associate Product Managers at Google.
Transparency in Product Priorities
Product managers are always looking for better ways to get feedback from customers on which new features are most important. A few companies have embraced the “Web 2.0” model and [ … ]