Tag: Business

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. 

Advertisement

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