Ah, pricing. Always a thorny topic for product managers as it’s one those more subjective areas of the job. I’d love to have some kind of oracular spreadsheet that foresees how much customers would be willing to pay for my new product. Ironically, I would pay good money for such a thing…
Tag Archives: market problem
“Why the heck should I upgrade?” – 4 things you’re probably missing
You expend a lot of effort getting people to buy your product and they’re happy with it.
Time passes.
You then go back to your satisfied customers and tell them what they have is now mediocre, so they have to move onto your latest and greatest product version. You see this everywhere, from washing powders to family cars, so it must work for enterprise software, right? So why are your no-longer-happy customers now chasing you with pitchforks and burning torches?
4 key ways to spot a successful product manager
How’s my driving?
As a product manager, how do you know you’re doing your job well?
Depending on your personal motivations you may want to know for your own satisfaction, to give your boss evidence at your next pay review, or to give your resumé some teeth for your next job. This article outlines the problem with traditional metrics for product managers and offers some better alternatives for measuring success: communication, ideas, roadmapping, launch and end-of-life.
Questions you need to be asking
There are many questions that a product manager needs to ask to determine the best course of action or to analyse underlying motivations. Of them, I use the following three questions most often:
- So what?
- Why?
- What’s stopping us?
So what?
Use this repeatedly to uncover the true benefit of something rather than simply features of the proposition. For example: