Excerpted from the CBInsights article.  Read the entire piece here: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder-letters/ Since founding Amazon in 1994, Jeff Bezos has run his company according to an unconventional set of core principles: don’t worry about competitors, don’t worry about making money for shareholders, and don’t worry about the short-term. Focus on the customers, and everything else will […]

Prioritizing Agile epics, user stories, and backlogs is something contemporary product managers have to do on a regular basis. In researching another topic I came across a great piece for Agile Product Owners by Daniel Zacarias entitled 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour. The blog goes into great detail about 20 different techniques Product Owners can use to prioritize their backlogs. It is a long read, but definitely worth it.

As a product manager, it is helpful to understand the relative size and success of your competitors. Public software companies are required to report their detailed finances on a quarterly and annual basis to the SEC. When it comes to private technology companies it is a little harder to determine annual revenues. There are fee-based subscription services like Pitchbook, Hoovers from D&B, and Privco. While these services are great, they are a bit pricey for the typical product manager. There are a number of free resources that offer revenue information for private tech companies. Two excellent free resources include Owler and Crunchbase.

I admit that I am a data junkie. I have found that data, both quantitative and qualitative, enables me to better understand key topics and trends. I am a voracious consumer of various periodic surveys. Recently, I read SalesForce.com’s third annual “State of Sales” research report. I believe that many organizations could obtain some significant benefits from sponsoring annual surveys amongst their customer bases. In this post I will talk about three specific surveys and how these surveys bring outsized benefits to their organizations.

20 years ago I learned a technique for analyzing product line sales transactions known as the moneywheel. This approach helps product managers understand the dynamics of sales transaction types for their product lines. It can also be used to estimate demand generation requirements for each stage of the sales cycle. This supports the development of effective and focused sales development campaigns.

The polite answer to this question is “no”. In some circumstances the answer should be “yes”. In this post I will discuss two situations in my career where we ended up “firing” thousands of customers but managed to increase revenues and profits at the same time.

This post focuses on leveraging Pareto Analysis in product management.  We will discuss how to use Pareto Analysis to understand product line revenue trends as well as customer support activity.  The results will help product managers to narrowly focus their resources to have the maximum impact on revenues, profitability, and customer satisfaction. The Pareto principle […]