Product Management Insights

Personas are Great - For Wasting Time!

Michael Shrivathsan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:53:43 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts on this topic (here and here) from bloggers I respect a lot. This spurred me to finally get around to writing this post. This post is about using “personas” as a part of software requirements process. It’s not [...]

Use Case Template - Example (Requirements Management Basics)

Michael Shrivathsan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:26:09 +0000

In a recent post, I provided a definition of use case as well as an example. The example I provided uses a very simple format. In most real-world projects, teams find it helpful to use a more fully-dressed format. In this post, I share a template of a fully-dressed format, as well as an example [...]

Death of Product Management at SaaS Companies…

Michael Shrivathsan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:06:48 +0000

Last night I got an email from a company with the subject “Saas and the death of software product management“. And… with the subtitle of “Or, While You Weren’t Looking, Your Product Manager’s Job Became a Zombie”. The email said the following: The growth of the SaaS business model spells the end of product management as it’s been [...]

Use Cases - Top-10 Reasons for Using Them to Document Your Requirements

Michael Shrivathsan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:52:21 +0000

In my previous post, I provided a definition of Use Case along with an example. I also took a strong stance against considering UML diagrams as use cases. Matt Klein made a good observation on Twitter today on how use cases are often not used well when documenting requirements: Use Cases are important and very often not [...]

Use Cases - Definition (Requirements Management Basics)

Michael Shrivathsan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:48:57 +0000

A question that frequently comes up in my conversations nowadays is: What exactly is a Use Case? Let me try and explain it in this short blog post. Similar Posts: Use Case Template - Example (Requirements Management Basics) (1 comments) Use Cases - Top-10 Reasons for Using Them to Document Your Requirements (5 comments) Personas are Great - For Wasting Time! [...]

Why I Switched From Tweetdeck to Seesmic - And the Lessons for Product Managers

Michael Shrivathsan — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:54:27 +0000

An hour ago, I did something without much conscious thought at all. I uninstalled the Twitter client I used to like (Tweetdeck), and installed a new one (Seesmic). And there I went, merrily tweeting. Then, I caught myself and started thinking why I did that. The more I thought, the more I realized that there are [...]

Product Management - SaaS vs Traditional Software

Michael Shrivathsan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:18:21 +0000

Mark Kromer at TechProdo blog recently wrote a nice blog post titled SaaS Product Management: Is there a difference? In his post Mark poses the interesting question (applicable to a lot of product managers): I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved [...]

Product Management Blogs - Top-10

accompa — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:55:26 +0000

Here’s our definitive list of the top-10 blogs on Product Management. We’ve found that all of these blogs consistently produce posts that are useful to product management professionals. P.S. In case you’re wondering, we arrived at this list using a proprietary, patent-pending, 100% scientific formula. Hence it is infallible and is THE definitive list. Okay? [...]

Product Management vs. Product Marketing - 2 Departments or 1?

Michael Shrivathsan — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:59:09 +0000

Today, at the vast majority of software companies that have 500 or more employees, there are two separate but closely related departments: “Product Management” and “Product Marketing“. I believe this is a fundamentally flawed setup for today’s fast-changing markets - a setup that leads to confusion over roles, lack of ownership, unnecessary politics & poor morale [...]

User-Friendly Error Messages - A Good Example

Michael Shrivathsan — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:22:13 +0000

One of my pet peeves with most software is the cryptic, unfriendly error messages thrown up by so many of them. At Accompa, we try to make error messages in our own software as friendly and useful as possible. I think we still have a long way to go, but we work hard at it. I just [...]