Tag Archives: product owner

The Silent Achiever

Leave a reply

Here is a good article about the 7 Must Have Project Management skills. I really liked the way that it is laid out and I believe that these skills are Must Haves for a successful Project Manager. However, the skill No. 6 “Recognize and solve problems quickly” rang a bell. I do agree that a Project Manager should be able to see and resolve a problem quickly. However, what I think is a better skill to have is the ability to predict a particular problem or risk before it happens, work on it pro-actively and nip the problem in the bud.

The difference here is between a Hero and a Silent Achiever. Imagine two adjacent fields with dry grass and bushes on a hot summer day. On one, there is a fire caused by the extreme heat while on the other field, there isn’t. A Hero might be seen as one who goes in a helicopter, stoops low and douses the bush fire that is raging. The Silent Achiever is one who realized that the atmosphere is dry and hot, predicted the bush fire and cut the grass or sprinkled enough water on the field to ensure that the bush fire does not occur. So, for the casual observer, it seems to be Business as usual and the effort put in by the Silent Achiever is not usually noticed. Continue reading →

Product – The First P of Marketing

1 Reply

4 P of MarketingCompanies work hard day in and day out to carve out one marvelous piece of technology solution that will change their fortune. They give in over 100% for a path breaking product to mark their presence in market place. Yet most of them fail and many just manage to float. The success rate of new launched products globally is said to be less than 5%. Marketing has four Ps, Product, Pricing, Place and Promotion, of which the first P is core to the success of other three Ps. It is the responsibility of a product owner to lay utmost emphasis on this P, which is his product and all tasks associated to the Product. In this post, let us talk about the first P and in that, let us limit our scope to the software products. The attempt is to identify the critical aspects of a product that a customer would and should emphasis while evaluating a product for his or her need(s). Continue reading →

Product Manager – Are you going feature crazy?

3 Replies

I love discovering features in products, features are what define a product, right? As a product manager, one has the important responsibility to shape a product by carefully filtering through the thousands of feature requests from various stakeholders.

However sometimes there is way too much focus on building a feature rich product, especially in the enterprise space. It becomes very easy to end up feature chasing instead of focussing on producing a valuable and usable product.

It is useful to think about the following when adding new features: Continue reading →