Jock Busuttil's Blog: I Manage Products, page 39

How product managers can build a healthier relationship with the sales team

At some point, all product managers will find themselves wondering how they can build a healthier relationship with the sales team. I’ve written a guest post for the good folks at Mind The Product that offers some practical suggestions.

Have a read!

“How to Stop Common B2B Dysfunctions in the Product Team” on Mind The Product’s blog.

53: THIS is what product-market fit looks like

Product-market fit is one of those concepts that seems relatively straightforward in theory but ends up being elusive in practice. Finding your way to product-market fit is an iterative process reliant on lots of appropriate, good quality research and validation, also known as customer development. But what does product-market fit actually look like when you get there?

Oooh what a lovely bunker, you crazy survivalist, you (Credit: Aton Edwards CC BY-SA 3.0)

Let’s take a look at Trello. Unles...

52: It only takes one bottleneck

I’m writing about one hundred things I’ve learned as a product manager.

I was working for a month in Australia a little while ago. On my arrival I was initially really impressed by the slick service design of their automated SmartGate immigration process. Until I found myself back to having to fill in declaration cards with a pen, that is. It just goes to show that good design work can be easily undermined by one poorly thought-out step in the process.

(In a rare flash of common sense, I thou...

The £20 bottle of Blue Nun

To all wannabe e-commerce entrepreneurs: you no longer have any excuse.

I’ve been teaching a class of budding product managers. Because I have minimal imagination and a possibly unhealthy relationship with alcohol (I am British), many of the examples I’ve been using to get the class to try out some techniques have revolved around a wine-on-demand delivery product.

One particular student has decided there would be enough of a target market purely from thirsty, stressed-out product managers.

S...

3 ways to build a better sales team

The sales team: one of the topics about which product managers seem to vent most. The relationship between product management and the sales team can work well, but more often than not it’s a source of frustration for both sides. And if your company is in the business of selling products, it’s in your best interests to fix this problem. Here are three ways companies can build a better sales team.

The state of play

Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but I feel like I’ve observed bad sales behaviour more...

Should I start a bank?

If you’ve ever attempted to use a business bank account, you’ll probably already know that their customer service is Byzantine and could be more accurately called customer disservice. You’ll probably already know that their online banking services look like they were built by a committee of people who have never used the internet.

You’ll certainly know that if you make a slight cashflow slip, you’ll pay through the nose in fines, yet if the bank makes a ‘slip’ – or in this case, knackers thei...

How to show your team the benefits of experimentation

This is a little post about some ways to convince a reluctant development team that experimentation is A Good Thing.

In our New Year’s morning stupor over a restorative cup of tea, my friend Luke was bemoaning how difficult it was to impress upon his development team the benefits of experimentation.

Being the binary-minded bunch of people we all know and love, his developers wanted to do things The Right Way from the outset. All very commendable, except Luke knew his team didn’t yet have eno...

51: Assemble the right product team

The UK Government now has many digital teams based on the blueprint established by the Government Digital Service (GDS). I’ve worked in Ministry of Justice (MOJ) Digital, and in turn closely with GDS as a service assessor for the MOJ.

These government digital teams have a way to ensure their digital services and products are created in the right way. In this post I’ll share with you how they do this and explain how you can make it work at your organisation.

The ideal product team

According t...

Getting better at public speaking

I’m currently working to improve my public speaking, and I recently gave a talk on Digital Justice at Product Management Festival in Zurich. Afterwards, I asked a few people for some honest feedback, and jotted down how I felt I’d done. So this post is really a mini-retrospective with me reflecting on what went well and what I could do better next time.

I thought you might find it of passing interest also. With any luck, I’ll present better next time.

Very large screen + very small Jock

Digi...

6 simple rules of product management

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m usually based in the UK, where I run my company, Product People. Back at the end of July, Adrienne Tan and Nick Coster from Brainmates helped me to avoid a wintry British summer by asking me over to spend August in Sydney with them to create some brand-new training content for one of their clients. What was particularly interesting was that the training wasn’t intended for the practitioners on their client’s product team – it was to introduce everyone e...