Dean’s semi-definitive list of ProdMgmt Podcasts & Books “When you stop going to school, you’ve only given-up on formal education. When you stop learning, you given-up on living.” ~ George L. Peters, Sr. Not a week goes by now when I receive a request from an active or aspiring product person looking to up their product…
Author: Dean Peters
5 Reasons we need Group Therapy for Product Managers
Question: Is there any value in group therapy-like activities for product managers & product owners? I think there is. Here are 5 reasons, each supported several links as to why … followed by a personal call to action. 1. We snicker about it on Twitter Did you know laughter can alter dopamine & serotonin activity?…
Son of a Product Management Prioritization Menagerie
TL;DR — Folks, it’s a zoo out there, especially when it comes to feature prioritization. Below is yet another O’Rly bookshelf to prove my point … … so BEHOLD! 5 more ‘wild beasties’ that graze upon our prioritization process. Only this time, the creatures listed below are more about situations we find ourselves in rather than the various…
The High Costs of Unfunded Mandates in Product Management
“Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory” — Jello Biafra, 1987 Command & control-ism comes in many forms, one of its more frustrating manifestations for product managers is that of the unfunded mandate. The concept of the unfunded mandate comes from the politically-charged world of hierarchal…
Part of Being Agile means Charging Ground Balls
Baseball is a mesmerizing dance measured in increments of time & distance. In many ways, so is Agile. I’m truly enjoying watching the 2019 World Series. There are many reasons for my delight, but the biggest is watching the high-level of execution by both teams … while the players are having boatloads of fun. It makes…
WTF is ProdOps, and why should I care?
The new buzz word in #prodMgmt is #prodOps. It’s a real thing. I want to share my views before it gets overly commoditized. ProdOps is short for Product Operations. But what does that actually mean? Is it some re-packaged and monetized mishmash of DevOps + MarTech + RevOps + SalesOps + Pragmatic Marketing? Is it…
Tiny Features, In Release — yet another #prodMgmt parody song lyric
Yet another #prodMgmt song parody, this one inspired by both the practice of trunk-based development, and the song ‘Tiny Bubbles’ by Don Ho. And similar to other song parodies of mine, I sang the first verse of this as my own intro to my recent presentation on ‘Using Experimentation to Deliver Value at Supersonic…
JIRA-Slinging Ticket Monkey
I first penned JIRA-Slinging Ticket Monkey in a 2015 humor post. Little did I know how much it would resonate. Its intent was to reflect — in a very smart aleck way — the frustrations I was hearing from product owners who felt they were dancing to the monotonous tune of some organizational organ grinder. Over the past three-and-a-half-years…
Product Manager Exercise: Deliver better Glassdoor recommendations
TL;DR — How I might improve the recommender system used by Glassdoor so I no longer receive suggestions for ‘meat market manager’ positions. I’ve heard it suggested that search and recommendations are similar solutions, but not the same, as the latter sentiment serving as a call to action. I think some of my past interactions with Glassdoor…
6 Questions every Product Manager should ask about Data, Statistics, and Analytics
As product people, we all deal with a lot of data. Here are some questions I’ve learned to ask based on my work in full-text search products; regardless of whether I’m dealing with a search implementation, adoption analytics, or setting up statistical experimentation on a new feature of value. Six Questions to Ask Is it clean?…