Are you leveraging contractors to help you accomplish what your Product Management or Product Marketing organization needs to accomplish? Contractors can be an excellent way for you to get work done without having to hire a new full-time employee.

Are you getting paid for the innovative products and services that you launch into the market?  Most companies are not.

Applying Lean principles outside the product team can be a real challenge for product managers at larger companies.

Mobile Product Managers are under constant pressure to focus on a great and intuitive user experience, add new functionality in an agile way, develop new apps quickly, integrate 3rd party functionality and ensure the security of corporate and PII data. That’s a tall order. Few people can pay attention to 3 priorities, let alone 5 totally different priorities.

Presentations to higher-ups are key to moving your product development strategy, and your career, forward.  As the product expert, you have the customer usage data to back up your decisions, but higher-ups have strong opinions based on years of experience, conversations with some customers, and what the loudest voice in sales just reported. What’s the best way to present the data that drove your decisions? How can ‘dry’ data be used to animate a story that drives management buy-in for your roadmap?  

To be an effective Product Manager or Product Owner you must have a solid foundational set of Agile skills. Yet most Product Managers and Product Owners have never been trained or certified in these. And even if they have had some form of Agile training, it is often engineering focused and doesn’t include the critical business and strategic thinking/planning and product leadership skill necessary to fully step up and lead an Agile team effectively.

A key value of Lean is to “optimize the whole.”  For product management, that means looking at the steps to go from idea to a generally available product that is delivering value to customers.  It also means optimizing steps before and after development. 

Join AIPMM Anthropologist Paula Gray as she concludes the in-depth webcast series focusing on Consumer Behavior.  This 3 part series has been a tremendous success as Paula has taken the time to unpack the somewhat mysterious buyer decision process.  Part 1 focused on the product purchasing process, part 2 focused on internal process that shape buying decisions. Now join us for the final installment where we will look at how cultural and societal rules, laws, conventions, customs and values also affect the consumer’s purchase decision.

Join AIPMM Anthropologist Paula Gray for part 2 of her 3 part, in-depth webcast series on consumer behavior. Part 1 focused on the product purchasing process. In part 2 we will look at self-image, memory, learning, cognition, beliefs, attitudes and communication and persuasion and how it all influences the consumer’s decision-making process.

The MVP (Minimum Viable Product), largely popularized by Lean Startup, plays a critical role in Lean product validation. It is the most important test to demonstrate that product-market fit has been achieved. Yet teams are often unclear what an MVP is and how to prioritize it versus other research options.

What drives a person's decision to purchase a product? All purchase decisions are made by people, either an individual or a group, but always people. This is one of the most crucial human behaviors to understand as a product manager and as a product marketer. Whether it’s in the design of a new product or keeping a current one competitive, understanding why your customers buy will help you stay ahead.
 

As a Product Manager the success of your product lives and dies by whether you have your sales team on your side or not. If they are pumped up about your product and you arm them and make it easy they will blow out your forecasts. But if you don't understand what motivates them and how to make them successful then your product, no matter how good it is, may fail miserably.

If you’re a working product manager pushing and prodding to coordinate and manage sometimes uncooperative cross-functional team members, you aren’t feeling very CEO-like.  What a dream that would be to command the power and authority of a CEO <sigh> until then our resident social scientist has some real world strategies for influencing, persuading and motivating people TODAY. 

As a Product Manager the success of your product lives and dies by whether you have your sales team on your side or not. If they are pumped up about your product and you arm them and make it easy they will blow out your forecasts. But if you don't understand what motivates them and how to make them successful then your product, no matter how good it is, may fail miserably.
Join us to learn how to fire up your sales team!

Account-based marketing (ABM): Is it really something new, or just another take on the “major account” or “key account” marketing and sales approach that large enterprise organizations have been deploying for decades? 

ABM is a strategic methodology that combines targeted, insight-led marketing with sales to increase mindshare, strengthen relationships, and drive growth in specific new and existing accounts.  That alignment of marketing and sales in close collaboration is one of the defining traits that makes ABM valued as an effective way to address individual account needs and develop personalized offers. 

Certified Product Manager.  It has a nice ring to it but why do you need it?  You’re already a rock star in your job, no chance of ever changing companies, and you’ll never be in competition or need to prove your level of mastery of product management best practices, right?

Product Marketing plays a critical role in successful companies, particularly those in verticals where the market landscape, regulatory environments and customer needs are rapidly changing. Given the critical role that product marketing plays in today’s complex automated marketing environment, what steps should organizations take to optimize their product marketing teams?

How do you drive innovation?  Through insights uncovered by new ways of looking at the world. Data, testing, and looking at the middle of the bell curve can only get you so far. So how do you break through the innovation barrier? By working with anthropologists.

Anthropology looks at the world, and how it relates to your business, in a different way than traditional methods of business research. It is grounded in the principle that to understand the world; you have to engage with it in an up-close, context-sensitive, experiential way. Customers are complex human beings, and it takes a deep understanding of the social sciences to delve into what drives their behavior, beliefs, and desires.  It takes that same deep understanding to translate those insights into actionable strategies and tactics.  The result? A stronger, more relevant brand that resonates with your customers. Brands that rise to capture their share of culture become fixtures in the hearts and minds of those customers.

Great Product Marketing is one of the keys to product and business success. Agile methodologies have positively transformed product development, but at the same time have created new challenges for product marketing. How can you do your best when your development team is constantly changing priorities, has no solid roadmap to rely on and doesn’t allow you to plan very far in advance? How can you make sure that your efforts are as effective as possible to achieve your goals and make your products successful in a competitive market environment? This webinar will teach you strategies and techniques for doing just that.

Being an impactful Product Manager requires you to lead confidently and understand how to work with other people’s confidence (or lack thereof). Confidence is the foundation for effective collaboration, innovation and influence. It reduces stress and increases resilience. Confidence is a not-so-secret but least understood ingredient to having a happy, successful work and home life.