Category: General

A Day in the Life of a Product Manager

Excited to present today with Ben Arnold for the Sioux Falls PMISD Community of Practice.

Learning to Live with Disappointing Everyone, at Least a Little…

Project management managers deal with having to manage project delivery across varied and sometimes competing stakeholders. Similarly, product managers are often working to manage against customer needs/desires, the demands of leadership, competing priorities and project delivery realities. This session will provide a high level overview of how the product management discipline typically differs from project management and will present a role-playing exercise that looks at problem solving through the eyes of a product manager. 

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Retail Question – Did You Find Everything?

Asking the question because I am curious and I am sure someone will know this off the top of their head.

Thinking about big box retail.  Some checkout clerks ask did you find everything you were looking for?  Some don’t.

If they ask the question and you say yes, they will actually take the time to have someone find that item and ring it up for you.

Is it really economically profitable based on that one extra item to make the checker wait?

What am I missing?

Chains Raise The Quality of Whole Industries

This is a great article about the value of substitutes in different industries.  As a product manager you should always thinking about what products are a substitute or a compliment to your product.  Even if the primary substitute is non-consumption, how do you have to build your product to get people off their couch and to make them take an action.

It is worth remembering that many unfashionable large businesses create value in ways that are often under-appreciated. No one will ever write gushingly about McDonald’s or Starbucks or PremierLodgeExpress. But what these large chains do is valuable, even if you never use them. They effectively raise what I call the ‘threshold of crappiness’ in the sectors in which they operate. To operate successfully as a coffee shop or a sandwich bar or hotel (or a minicab firm), you have to be at least as good as a chain or else you fail. This raises the bar for everyone. You can get better coffee in a truckstop now than at Claridge’s in 1990.

–Spectator

Asking The Right Questions To Build Strategic Relationships

Here is a great article from HBR about starting a new job or just trying to cultivate collaborative relationships:

During your first month in a company, take time to ask your boss these questions:

-How do you prefer to give and receive feedback and be kept informed?

-What are your most important goals for the year, and how do they fit into the company’s strategic objectives?

-What are the two to three most critical accomplishments I need to achieve within a year, and how will they be measured?

-What should I accomplish in the next six months?

-In what specific ways can I help you succeed?

–Harvard Business Review

Elephant Question – How to Find Entrenched Problems

This is a great article on how to be a patient change agent:

  • People don’t like hearing that entrenched problems are “totally fixable” (none of us do — not just those “other” people).
  • To you, the fix is “common sense”, but to outsiders it may be counterintuitive.
  • By definition, a problem that remains entrenched is not “totally fixable” (without a change in context, actors, intent, etc.) On paper it may be fixable. In context, it is not.

At a minimum, ask someone:

Can you describe an elephant in the room that I will quickly encounter, will think is totally fixable, but will be wrong? Why is the status quo difficult to change?

–Hacker Noon

“How to Write Human User Stories” Presentation

This presentation will tell you all there is to know about human user stories:

  • Tools you will need – customer feedback, customer interviews, personas.
  • Grouping customers into segments
  • What humans care about – performance, usability, and accessibility.
  • How to write user stories for virtual reality, augmented reality, and machine learning.

I would be excited to give part or all of this presentation to your team or organization.  Check out the PowerPoint Presentation and feel free to send any questions or requests to public@jayfisher.info

Leadership Track Speaker

I was fortunate to get to present at the Project Management Institute (PMI) South Dakota’s 2017 Professional Development symposium in the Leadership Track.  I got to talk about my favorite topic – how to understand customers.

Topic: How to Write Human User Stories

Jay Fisher, PMP is a Product Manager at MetaBank focused on creating software that builds relationships with cardholders.  Jay believes that the key to a successful project is creating user stories that connect the team to the customer.  After spending almost a decade working on new product development projects, Jay knows that building the heart connection requires focus and an agile responsiveness to surprises.  Jay has launched cardholder websites, mobile apps, and enterprise software in the consumer products and financial services industries.  He is a certified Project Management, New Product Development, and Pragmatic Marketing Professional. Jay holds a BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of North Dakota.

“How to Write Human User Stories” is a practical conversation on how to connect teams to the needs of the end user.  We will discuss using customer visits and personas to discover user problems and to make user stories more relatable.

Understanding user’s expertise level and usage frequency vs the types of complaining customers to show how to target user stories for maximum impact.  We will show how focusing on a well-defined customer can increase team effectiveness and bring novel solutions to light.

PMI SD: Symposium 2017 Leadership Track