Jock Busuttil's Blog: I Manage Products, page 40

Want a free copy of ‘The Practitioner’s Guide …’?

After my general giddiness the other week, I can reassure everyone that I have regained a modicum of the reserve for which Brits are better known :-)

Look what turned up in the post! Idiot to the left had to be returned to sender, however. http://t.co/NgZWUbEaAS pic.twitter.com/ITmj86qnUR

— Jock Busuttil (@jockbu) December 31, 2014

If you’d like the chance to get hold of a free copy of The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management, the publisher Piatkus is running a giveaway, so pop on over for...

Q&A: “What’s it like working as a product manager at a startup?”

I was recently asked a question – here’s the answer I gave:

“I have just been offered an awesome job as a product manager for a startup and although I studied UX design, I think it could be for me. Just wondering whether you could give me some insight into your day-to-day duties and what the role might entail when working on a product for a startup?”

Hello and well done on your job offer!

You pose a very good question, let me see if I can answer it coherently.

Being a product manager in a startup...

The Practitioner’s Guide… a best seller and selling out fast!

Wow. And furthermore, gosh.

I wasn’t expecting that.

The day after its launch, The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management was:

ranked at #1 on Amazon in Quality Assurance & Total Quality Management
#1 in Production & Quality Control
#1 in Balanced Scorecard
ranked at #2,800 in all paperbacks
and quickly burned through its available stock (more copies are now available)

Sure, the high rankings were only for a couple of hours, but I’ll take that :-)

Thank you to everyone who’s bought, reviewed and t...

The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management – out tomorrow

Happy New Year, everyone!

As you may be aware, I’ve written a book about product management. It’s really a collection of stories from my own experience and others’ about how NOT to manage products. So if you just follow my Golden Rule (to ignore or do the opposite of everything I suggest), then you’ll be fine. Probably.

Aaaannnyway, as the book is out tomorrow, today is your last chance to get a30% pre-order discount. So go ahead, have a look! (Or don’t. I’ve confused myself)

47: How I learned to stop hating job interviews

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned about product management.

I’ve never enjoyed job interviews. The inane questions annoy me most.

Credit: EatLiver.com

There are many potential reasons why I dislike interviews so much. Perhaps it’s because:

both I and the interviewer know we’re both being forced to dance around each other in some time-honoured tango of recruitment;
I never really know what the interviewer is looking for in a candidate and hate having to guess;
I hate having to wear a suit an...

Link of the Day: Data-driven products now! (by @mcfunley)

Have you ever found yourself asking why you spent AGES building a feature that nobody uses?

Dan McKinley (@mcfunley) uses war stories from his time at Etsy to show why adopting a data-driven approach helped them move from pointless science projects to building product features that really mattered.

(Also, he mentions a helpful experiment duration calculator.)

46: How to qualify yourself for a product management job

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned about product management.

If you want to work as a developer, you learn software engineering, computer science or teach yourself to code. If you want to become a UX designer, you learn about design and behavioural psychology. But what do you need to learn if you want to qualify for a job as a product manager?

There’s no undergraduate or post-graduate degree (yet) that fully prepares you to become a product manager. An MBA can get you pretty close, but i...

45: Three ways you’re DEFINITELY doing MVPs wrong

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned about product management.

If one were to heft a half-brick down Old Street in London, there would be high probability of hitting someone currently engaged in building a minimum viable product (MVP) of some sort or another. There’s also almost as high a probability that they’re doing it wrong. Allow me to explain.

1. The clue’s in the name, people

What part of minimum breeds such confusion? Minimum means the least amount – of features, time, effort – but...

Analytics & decision-making on Mind the Product

If you’d have told me that August’s ProductTank London on analytics and decision-making would be one of the most risqué to-date, I’d have struggled to believe you. The talks had everything – sex, drugs and racy pictures of hot plumbing action. Read on for an 18-rated recap.

If you’ve not heard of ProductTank, it’s a monthly meetup for product people to get together to hear a few talks and, more importantly, to have a drink and socialise with people who understand the difference between product...

Should the product manager and product owner be the same person?

I recently read the question on the difference between the product manager and product owner on Quora and ended up sharing my opinion – at length. So I’ve decided to publish it here for posterity. Needless to say, there are other answers and other opinions, all equally valid.

The product manager is charged with communicating the voice of the customer — and at the end of the day achieving customer and market success. Meanwhile, agile development teams demand that the customer representative (ak...