All right, so I know what you’re thinking. Retrofitting Mustang II front suspensions are huge undertakings. Besides, I’ve already put in a Granada disk brake swap, done a suspension rebuild, and hacked in a BMW rack-n-pinion setup. Why change now? Three reasons: a) I’m thinking about putting a one piece front body in to replace [...]
I didn’t have access to a press when a batch of my zinfandel must was ready for pressing, nor was I much for spending hundreds on a press when my needs were pretty simple. Instead, I thought I’d experiment with a simple press that could be made in the shop.
For most home winemakers, buying the pre-toasted oak from your local brew shop or online store is probably perfectly adequate. I’m lucky enough to have access to free wine barrels that have already been used up by a winery. They’re perfect for using as oak chips in my own home winemaking. I’ll walk you through [...]
The most successful high-tech and software companies have an amazing culture and mechanism for creating and sharing organizational knowledge. Product management is often at the nexus of this knowledge storm – consuming information, processing it into useful knowledge, and re-distributing that knowledge to the organization. Cultivating these skills and pushing the creation of content is [...]
Product roadmaps are one of those central documents in the product management arsenal. They communicate future plans to stakeholders in a succinct, to-the-point format. There are right ways to create roadmaps and there are wrong ways – these are some recommendations on how to build an effective product roadmap. As I said, product roadmaps are [...]
I can’t site the study or the exact statistic but it’s been said that 90% of new products fail. Of the ones that make it to market, many never get used to the grand level originally intended. That’s crazy – why is this the case? It ultimately boils down to need. Many products are made [...]
I recently had to argue with one of our sales managers about a customer. It’s a common adage that “the customer is always right.” I don’t argue with this conventional wisdom but I strongly object to blindly following. The story goes something like this: at a product demo, the customer said, “I really need the [...]
One of the most essential tasks in product management is making a comprehensive assessment of your company’s or products business. There are dozens of ways to do this, but this is the way that I’ll typically tackle the assessment. These assessments are important because they give you (and the rest of the company) clarity on [...]
In short, a product manager is person responsible for defining the strategy and features for his assigned product(s). He does this by working with a broad constituency of customers, industry experts, and internal stakeholders in order to gain a complete understanding of the market opportunity and the products that will satisfy the needs of the customers.