Product Conversations

The conversations around starting a new job are often around what you do for the first 90 days, but what happens after? This Product Conversation: May Wong hosts product people at various stages in their career to talk about their first year at a company, to dig deeper into those organizational contexts to know what makes the individual successful, but also how we can make the team as a whole more successful! Panelists: Steve Johnson, Vivek Bhatt, CPA, Monali Agarwal, Claudia Cornali-Motta, Graham Reed Live and on-demand after: Friday, Nov 8, Noon EDT.

Too often, conversations on product management silently imply software product management. But there is a whole world of product management beyond software. Product management for services. Product management for consumer products (the OG Brand Manager). Product management in Government. Product Management in hardware and industrial products. Product Management in not-for-profits. In Product Conversations continual quest of learning, this week's livestream is going to focus on Product Management Beyond Software. What is the most common misperception of product management beyond software? What challenges do they find similar to software product management? What challenges do they feel are different than software product management? Are there methods and ways they have adopted/adapted from software product management? What can software product managers learn from product management beyond software? Tune in as Grant W. Hunter leads a conversation of these questions and more with a panel of: Steve Johnson May Wong Dutch deVries Adrianna Tan Jason Weber Join us this Friday, October 25 at 12:00 pm ET to listen to the conversation and be part of the conversation in the comments.

It is that time of year, leadership teams are putting their budgets and plans together for 2025. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it is a topic we get a lot of interest in from product leaders. But, what role does (or more so should) product management play in the budgeting process? We had a great Product Conversation with Clifton Gilley on annual planning were we touched on this, but this week we go all in on budgeting for product leaders. What factors do you consider when creating a budget for your product organization? How much flexibility do you have while building a budget? What role should product leaders have in the higher level budgeting process? What should a product leader taking part in a budgeting process for the first time be thinking about? We are looking forward to a great conversation on these questions and more on Friday, October 11 at 12 pm ET. Grant W. Hunter will host a panel including: May Wong Marlon Davis Puneet Mulchandani Derek Bluestone SuiLin Yap #productmanagement #budgets

On our Product Conversation with Rich Mironov earlier this year, he mentioned how important having a community of mentors is to the maturity of product management in a region. He noted this is one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is a leading place for growing and developing product managers. You could add strong product management communities in Boston, NYC, Austin, and Atlanta as key contributing factors to the strong technology communities in those metro areas. At Product Conversations, we decided to lean into this. What can our community of product leaders learn from those who have been doing it for decades. How has product management changed over the decades? For the better? For the worse? What lesson(s) from decades ago could product leaders of today benefit from? Is there anything from the past that could predict the future of product management? For this conversation Grant W. Hunter will be leading the conversation with an amazing panel long-time product management leaders including: Steve Johnson Rich Mironov Barbara Nelson Pamela Schure, MBA Tune in for the livestream on Friday, September 23 at 12 pm ET, and join the conversation in the comments. #productmanagement #decadesinproduct #productleaders

From our "Business Role of Product Management Conversation" Sogol Fathian talks about the importance of focusing on the problem we are solving, not just from the technical or design lens, but also from the lens of how it makes money for the company. #productmanagement #businessroleofproductmanagement #strategicproductmanagement

From our "Business Role of Product Management Conversation" Scott Sehlhorst talks about economic language being the lingua franca of product (shout out to Don Reinertsen). If we are going to make an investment, we need to talk about the expected return on that investment. #productmanagement #businessroleofproductmanagement #strategicproductmanagement

From our "Business Role of Product Management Conversation" May Wong talks about how the business role of product management starts with actually knowing what your business is. Your business is your product. #productmanagement #businessroleofproductmanagement #strategicproductmanagement

From our "Business Role of Product Management Conversation" Jason Vincelette talks about the difference between direct (serving a customer in the market) and indirect (serving an internal customer) product management. #productmanagement #businessroleofproductmanagement #strategicproductmanagement

The origin story of product management goes back to Hewlett-Packard learning from the Brand Manager role at Procter & Gamble. Product Management started as a business and strategic role, focused on managing the business of the product. Over the past 15-20 years years, we have seen the growth of the Agile Industrial Complex pull many product managers into a more technical and tactical role. (And perhaps create many positions with product management titles, not really doing product management work). We often see product managers being responsible for backlog grooming, project management, design, and in some cases even engineering (or at least engineering management). This week's Product Conversation is about the Business Role of Product Management. How can product management become more strategic and business oriented? What are the main blockers preventing this from happening? What does a business focused product management role look like? Join us on Friday, September 13 at 12:00 pm ET when Grant W. Hunter will be facilitating a conversation on The Business Role of Product Management with: Steve Johnson May Wong Scott Sehlhorst Jason Vincelette Sogol Fathian #productmanagement #businessofproduct #productleadership

From our conversation on PRDs, John Cutler talks about how teams that are doing well organically figure out their own network of artifacts, without having to label anything. They just use it. Checkout the full conversation with May Wong, Nils Davis, Krishnapriya PS, and John on the Product Conversations page under past events. Tune in weekly for new topics, great panels, and amazing conversations on hashtag#productmanagement and hashtag#productleadership.  Join the conversation in the comments.