I belong to a Facebook Group called Product Management Memes. It has over 4,300 members and is simply a meme stash for product managers, marketers, and corporate life. People post amusing stuff every day. There’s no self-promotion or spam, just entertainment. Here are 15 of the most popular posts from the past few weeks based […]
How many items are in your product backlog? 50? 100? 500? A favorite tactic for product managers dealing with stakeholder suggestions is to tell them they ‘will put it in the backlog.’ Unfortunately, many backlog items will languish in the backlog for months or even years before being prioritized for a Sprint. Many years ago I inherited the product management of a B2B SaaS Managed File Transfer solution. The backlog had over 300 items. On average we completed 8 items per Sprint. It would have taken us 3 years to complete all the items in the backlog, assuming no new items were discovered or added. Is Your Backlog Too Big? And are there some new techniques you can use to prioritize it?
On November 2, 2021, Zillow announced its third quarter results. While total revenues were up 88% in comparison to 2020, Zillow missed its guidance and announced that they were shutting down their largest revenue stream, Zillow Offers.. The news wiped off 45% of Zillow’s market cap in less than a week. Zillow also announced layoffs of up to 25% of their staff. The root cause has been laid at the feet of Zillow’s AI Zillow’s algorithms overestimated the value of the homes for which they paid. At the same time, Zillow was aggressively expanding its purchasing program, acquiring more homes in the last two quarters than it had in the two years prior. Zillow’s Offer algorithm leveraged Facebook’s Prophet Python AI library.
2022 is an exciting time to be a product manager. It is a great time to be at the center of new product development. Product managers at firms that IPO’d in 2021 like Snowflake, Doordash, Palantir, Gitlab, FreshWorks, and Coinbase are riding high. Unfortunately, products in the early adopter and early majority stage of the technology adoption life cycle only account for a portion of the product managers working today. An equal, if not greater, number of product managers work on products that are in the late majority and laggard stages of the TALC. These products account for more than half of all software product revenue in 2021. Late majority product management is tough, but some has to do it.
Understanding your competitors’ product line revenues is critical. Revenue information helps to put the relative strength or weakness of a competitor into the proper context. It helps product managers to make the best decisions about priorities, investments, and focus. It is relatively straightforward to understand the total revenues of competitors. Product line revenues are tougher. There are a number of techniques you can use to estimate competitor product line revenues
I was named a winner in the Product Management Today’s 2021 MVP Awards. My article Product Managers: How Do You Manage Middle Aged Products? was voted the winner in the ‘Other’ category. Thank you to all of the people who voted for me.
Key Bank Capital Markets has recently published its 2021 SaaS Metrics report – its 12th annual installment The study covers over 230 SaaS companies from around the world. It includes SaaS companies from $500K in ARR to over $200 million. It covers over 25 topics from SaaS revenue growth to revenue churn and expense trends
In July 2021 Sarah Frank, a rising freshman at Brown University, uploaded a 56 second TikTok video and disrupted 4,600 scientific research projects, Crowdsourced research has changed the landscape of academic and commercial market research. While the changes have been good, there are some dark aspects that need to be explored.
In 2009 I started a family tradition known as the Santa Hat Believer’s Club (SHBC).
The Software Equity Group has published their third quarter 2019 SaaS M&A update. It includes information about transaction volume, valuation multiples, and a host of other topics