I attended the Pragmatic Marketing‘s Practical Product Management and Requirements That Work seminars as part of my continuing skills development at PGP. As my work with PGP has been my first product management gig it’s been tough to know if I’m really focusing on the right things, especially in the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants world of startups. If nothing else, the seminars both served to re-focus my thinking, and provide some assurance that, yes Virginia, being a PM is always a work-in-progress, no matter where you’re working.
The course pointed to a number of resources that I thought I would share, including a large number of business strategy textbooks for specific topics:
- Distinctive Competence: Differentiate or Die
- Market Research: The Market Research Toolbox
- Market Problems: Contextual Design, Voices into Choices
- Technology Assessment: The Innovator’s Solution, Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy
- Competitive Analysis: The Marketing Playbook
- Market Sizing: Blue Ocean Strategy
- Product Performance/Operational Metrics: The Art of Profitability
- Business Case: The Art of the Start
- Pricing: The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, The Price Advantage
- Buy, Build or Partner: Outsourcing In-a-Box, Intelligent Business Alliances
- Innovation: The Art of Innovation, How Breakthroughs Happen
- Positioning: Positioning
- Sales Process: The Channel Advantage, Customer Centric Selling
- Personas: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
- Requirements: Software Requirements, Extreme Programming Installed
- Design Resources: www.useit.com, The Design of Everyday Things, Don’t Make Me Think, About Face 2.0, www.cooper.com
In addition to pointing to two different articles (On Reqs and Specs, Writing the Marketing Requirements Document) on the Pragmatic Marketing web site, the instructor also pointed to Joel’s excellent article on Painless Functional Specifications.
I’ll be wading through some of this material over the coming weeks. Overall, I was pleased with the course – highly recommended.