The Prodify Blog

A few years ago there was a new phrase that made its rounds through the product management community:  “love the problem, not the solution.”  That is, make sure you’re solving a problem for customers, and have a deep understanding of that problem.  Focus on the problem over your product (the solution).  All great advice.  But I’ve seen teams struggle when applying it.  In this post, I’ll talk about 3 common issues I see with this concept.

Kano Model Overview The Kano Model is a theory developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano to categorize customer satisfaction of product benefits into different categories.  The key concepts include:

Collaboration is a critical skill for product managers, and in this post, I interviewed Juan Thurman, a fellow Austinite who has held leadership positions in sales, marketing and customer success at the likes of of B2B giants Twilio and IBM.  He offered 3 tips for product managers as they think about working with their sales teams:  

One of the most common questions we get from aspiring and new PMs is - what do you recommend I do to ramp up on the craft?  Here, my friends, is what we recommend (in priority order, of course).

Collectively, we've hired hundreds of product managers in our time.  So we thought it'd be good to share the 4 big buckets of traits we look for when hiring great product managers, and explain more about each (with examples).

One of the most common consulting engagements we do is market research interviews, and it usually comes up in when a company is:

While consulting with a client last year, one of the challenges I helped the team with was their process of planning and releasing new features.  In particular, they wanted to get better at:

I consider myself really lucky to have learned so much about the power of behavioral science in product design at both Opower and HelloWallet.  In fact, our Chief Behavioral Scientist at HelloWallet, Dr. Stephen Wendel, wrote a book on applying behavioral science to software products.  We used the framework he created to improve our financial wellness products, so I spoke about it last year at an Action Design Austin Meetup.  Here is a crash course summarizing one way to use behavioral science to encourage users of your product to get the most out of it

One of the most common questions we get when coaching product managers is: how do I create a roadmap?  There's a great visual we often reference to show 20 different prioritization techniques you can use to create a roadmap: 

Product management requires collaboration across many disciplines to make the product successful, so it's important to understand how those colleagues view you as a partner in achieving some common set of goals.  In general, I measure the performance of product managers in two dimensions: