
Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

The product manager’s mission is to achieve business success by meeting user needs through the continuous planning and execution of digital product solutions.
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
The product manager’s mission is to achieve business success by meeting user needs through the continuous planning and execution of digital product solutions.
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
from French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry6 that has helped me over the years: If you want to build a ship, don’t drum people up together to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work. Rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
three kinds of specifications: •Functional specifications (how the product should work). •Technical specifications (how the product should be implemented). •Marketing specifications (how the product should be communicated to users).
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
The most compelling argument4 comes from Marty Cagan, who says: Instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, [most organizations] use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA’ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to
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the product council (I was partial to Intergalactic Product Force, but for some reason that didn’t fly so well). Here’s how it works. The product council is made up of the VPs of every department in the organization: engineering, marketing, support, category, and so on. This body has a weekly meeting where we discuss the current product roadmap and
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The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring loyalty, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it.
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
For product managers to succeed, there needs to be an executive mandate and company-wide understanding that even though everyone gets a voice, product decisions ultimately reside with product managers.
Rian van der Merwe • Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World
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