Cauvin

Introduction Why is product management important? Whether or not they employ product managers, companies make daily decisions about how to develop, market, and sell their products. As they make these decisions, companies typically face - or are trying to overcome - four general problems. The Problems   Products don't provide value to prospective buyers and users. Products that don't deliver value generally don't succeed in the marketplace. Value comes from solving problems that prospective customers face. "Cool" technologies and feature-laden products, if they don't help customers solve or avoid compelling problems, don't provide value that lead to usage or sales. Effective product management identifies a set of prospect problems that drive an overarching value proposition, and it empowers the entire product team to deliver and communicate that value.   Developers don't know what to build, and why . Developing ...

The following is a fictitious example of the type of conversation that could occur at many organizations claiming to use agile development methods. Joan is the VP of engineering at Trendy Startup, a rapidly-expanding company developing a suite of cloud storage products and services. Joan's organization uses the popular scrum development process to develop its products. Product managers and owners create user stories, allocate them to iterations and releases, and manage them in backlogs.  Quality assurance (QA) engineers write tests for the user stories, and developers implement the user stories.  Team members meet daily to review the previous day's accomplishments, agree on what they'll do today, and surface any obstacles they are facing. Joan is proud of her teams and their adoption of agile methods and practices.  She touts the Trendy Startup's development processes to her fellow executives and to prospects and customers. All members of her product teams hav...

Trying new things - especially new software products - can be both intimidating and time consuming. You face a challenge when introducing a product in the marketplace. The forces of nature are working against you, since almost everyone but " early adopters " resists trying new products. A major reason people resist trying new products is the learning curve. People simply don't have the time or patience to wade through pages and pages of documentation just to figure out what a product does, envision what it's like to use it, and how it would disrupt the way they live their lives. One thing you can do to minimize this obstacle to adoption of your product is to provide the shortest path. Providing the shortest path means minimizing the time and effort necessary for a first-time prospective user to obtain demonstrable value from your product. To provide the shortest path, you do some combination of the following: Make available a "quick start" guide that a pr...