Building on a post from last July about Incompatible Worldviews… Almost every Go-to-Market-side enterprise stakeholder I interview tells me that their product team is unresponsive: that folks rarely get anything back after submitting an (urgent, strategic, well-considered) ticket through the company’s agreed-upon enhancement request process. …

Stepping out of leadership challenges for a moment, here’s a practical topic that some product managers struggle with: is the next thing we’re working on a feature or a whole product? IMO, there aren’t any universal/magical answers, but assorted hints and indicators. BTW for this post: a is something that…

Almost every week, I have a conversation with executives at B2B software companies who don’t see a bright-line distinction between software license revenue and customization/implementation revenue. Or why this distinction is essential to their investors. But when I do product due diligence for SaaS-focused PE/VC firms, it’s the very first…

Product management doesn’t run Engineering; Engineering runs Engineering. And at least in public, Engineering and Product leadership need to be shoulder-to-shoulder, actively supporting each other at every turn. But there are some engineering team configurations that I see as problematic. So behind closed doors and where it won’t create political/organizational…

(aka Incompatible Worldviews) Enterprise Sales/Solutions teams see the world one customer at a time; Product/Development teams see cumulative market impact and aggregate technical demand. These are fundamentally in conflict… Apologizing in advance: I’m intentionally exaggerating the differences between two broad corporate groups: wildly oversimplified roles and attitudes and reward systems. …

There’s a pattern I sometimes see at software companies, particularly those targeting enterprises or on the long march moving their installed base from on-premise to SaaS. The go-to-market materials present a glowing picture of well-planned products, but underneath there’s a jumble of mismatched pieces and arcane product history and incomplete…

Everywhere I go, I see massive amounts of product waste: development work delivered on time/on budget that doesn’t drive sales or customer satisfaction or business improvement. Yet somehow we don’t see this waste, or mis-attribute it to engineering process problems. I’ve written a lot about the organizational and conceptual gap…

Most of our tools and processes around product/feature prioritization are heads-down analytical: RICE, opportunity trees, Kano, weighted 16-column spreadsheets, WSJF, Eisenhower, whatever. Our (hidden) assumption is that choosing the objectively best work is hard, but getting organizational buy-in is not so hard. …

My product leader coachees and I sometimes do calendar reviews. We look at their chock-a-block schedules, and talk about the struggle to address important things when faced with 7+ hours/day of meetings. …