This month has been an especially interesting month, blog wise, for me. I’ve found many posts that I feel like I have to share with the rest of the product manager community and I just wasn’t happy with limiting it to a week’s worth. The blog posts this month really helped me through my weekly meditation. Every Monday morning I try and meditate about how I will approach the upcoming week. Questions always arise such as; how will I improve? How will I tackle specific issues, whether they’re technical or design, and how can I improve my team’s morale.
The following blogs really helped me understand certain concepts better, and helped me explain the concepts to others in a more useful manner. Ultimately that is what a product manager does. You take your ideas and explain to others what you’d like, and if you can’t do so in an easy to understand manner then you might as well not explain sometimes.
Agile Retrospective Exercise: Return of Time Invested
Louis Goncalves does a great job of explaining how to use the Agile process. I’ve never seen the Agile process explained in such a simple, easy to understand way, which to me is the most important aspect of a product manager. You’re position is to take all the technical information and make it easier for everyone else to understand.
How the Best Product Managers Discover $1B Ideas
A very interesting article for me, because I don’t know how much I necessarily agree. This blog posts claims that sometimes it is best to not always listen to your paying customers, block out all the noise and focus on the product you want. Personally, I’m a product manager that always tries to reach out to the target market. But then again, it is always important to listen to all of the perspectives.
Voice of Customers Challenge to Product Managers
As I just mentioned above I truly believe in customer feedback, and this article explains why you should do so. However, it also shows why you other product managers don’t always listen to their customers and why they can find the customer feedback as a nuisance.
LinkedIn puts Slack in its crosshairs with updated messaging platform
This article isn’t what my usual blog post that I like to share, but it is something I think is very important to share. What I like about this article is that it focuses on how a product should be constantly evolving. Many products tend to think they reach their peak, but this isn’t the case. It is important that products continue to develop, as LinkedIn has done.
The three engineers you meet in product management heaven
Natasha Awasthi has been on a role this month. This is the second article I stumbled across that I thought was good fun, and it just so happened is written by the same person. The three engineers that she describes are what everyone would like on their team. It’s important to remember that engineers are people too. This may seem not very serious, but it is. While this may be what you should aspire to be, you need to remember that everyone has their good days and bad days.
How Successful Product Managers Avoid Burnout
This might be one of the most important posts from this month. You can be the best product manager. You can fully understand agile, scrum, waterfall, and any other type of product design. You can be the best technical product manager. The second you burn out, it’s all useless. Brian de Haaff has some great pointers on how to take care of yourself in order for you to take care of others.
Your Checklist to Balancing Agile Development with UX
I’m a big believe in product management as it relates to customer design. In the end your product is useless if your customers and target audience do not understand how it functions. It reminds me of Microsoft 8. Microsoft 8 could have been a great product, but simply using the program was difficult to understand. Apple’s programs can also be difficult but they are a bit more intuitive. You must balance your product management with customer experience in order to have the complete product.