Question: What do you call someone who has all the skills to validate, build, launch, market, and sell products? Answer: A unicorn. Just kidding! It’s just a full-stack product person. The term “Full-stack product person” is a relatively new term that piggybacks off the term “full-stack developer” – i.e a developer who can work on both the front-end and back-end of an application. A full-stack product person goes even one level higher (or is it deeper?) and can not only create their own products, but market and sell them as well. Their skills are incredibly vast. Not only do they have software engineering chops, but they can also write well,…

Call them what you want. Product specs, product requirements documents, feature specs, JIRA user stories…whatever floats your boat. Whichever terminology you choose, a document outlining your reasoning for building what you’re building and how you’d like to see it turn out is critical for the success of your product. We like to call these documents product specs, so we’ll stick with that for the remainder of the article. Product specs outline what you’re going to build, for whom, and why it’s important. They are especially important for product managers, founders, and other folks overseeing the development of a new feature from beginning to end. Btw, if you are outsourcing development you really need…

Can you think of a product you no longer trust? Maybe it’s one where what you purchased was broken for so long it had a serious impact on your time and ability to get things done? Perhaps you purchased something at a store where your credit card details were skimmed? Or could you have possibly bought something where the salesperson didn’t quite give you the full details you should’ve known to make a good decision? If any of these scenarios happened to you, you’ll probably avoid going back to those places or products for a very long time. Why? Because you just don’t trust them. Trustworthiness, while not a metric…

Repeat after me: JIRA is for developers. Not product managers. Yes, you can dabble in your developer’s tools and collaborate with them to answer their questions and get technical work done. BUT, when you need to get product management work done — their tools are not the tools you’re looking for. You need your own product management specific tools. But why? Why can’t I just use what they’re using. I mean, we’re already paying for them! Well it has mostly because development tools are not built for unstructured work. Structured versus unstructured work Developers do a lot of structured work while PMs do a lot of unstructured work. Developers often have…

Are you currently a project manager? Want to make the shift into the (obviously more awesome) product management space? Wonderful! I’d highly recommend making the shift. I was previously a project manager and now am a product director…let’s just say I don’t think I will ever go back to being a project manager. Product management is just too darn fun. Once you decide you’re interested in becoming a product manager, the big question becomes……how do you make the shift?!?! First: Shift your mindset The first thing you’ll have to do is shift your mindset from “projects” to “products”. While there may be facets of project management in product management, your time is…

I’m a huge fan of Notion. It is a great tool for text-related tasks and is supremely helpful in organizing product related thoughts, documents, and data. If you feel like Evernote has become too cumbersome, Bear is a little too simple, Trello doesn’t offer a whole lot of formats, and all-in-one product management tools are overkill, then Notion may be worth checking out for you. There are a few use cases that align perfectly with product management we’ll cover in this article. In particular, we’ll cover roadmaps, strategy docs, and internal documentation and how to create them in Notion. Roadmaps Roadmaps are a core tool of any product manager. Whether…

A PM has many roles. Bug catcher and collector should be one of them. Sometimes you catch a bug in your product. Sometimes automated testing picks it up. But a lot of the time, bugs are found by customers. How embarrassing. It’s like someone coming into your home and seeing a cockroach scuttle across the floor. Like a polite house guest who “chooses” not to see that spider in the corner of your guestroom, some customers may overlook bugs in your product if they don’t have a big impact on them. However, for serious bugs, a customer will likely reach out to the support team. In turn, your support team or…