A summary of things you should know about The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management according to Jock Busuttil: Introduction In this episode Jock Busuttil takes a deep dive into hisRead More
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]]>In this episode Jock Busuttil takes a deep dive into his book, The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management, where he provides a roadmap for mastering product management and avoiding product failure.
In his book Busuttil shares real-life stories and experiences of other companies who are successful at product management and know what it takes to meet customers’ needs. The goal of the book is to help you improve product management skills, understand what a product manager does, know the difference between good and bad products, and increase the success rate of a product.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are new to the product management and looking for a step-by-step guide to creating, promoting, and selling a product that customers will love.
The main difference is that most product management books are telling you about the process and while there are values in those kinds of books I also felt the need to explain to the reader the realities of product management as well.
Each chapter is self-contained so if you want to read the five chapters in different orders you can.
First and foremost it has to be empathy, the ability to put yourself as a product manager into the shoes of your users, the customers, the people in your organization that help you create this fantastic product. And understand what their needs are over yours because ultimately you are not going to be the target market.
The purpose of chapter one is about understanding what exactly product management is and what it all involves. It’s thinking about this concept of bouncing what I call three rings which refers to a diagram that divides up the practices of product management into three main areas. The three areas are user’s experience, technology, and the business and in the center of it all is the product manager. Really what all that means is that you are balancing very different needs of the user experiences needs and problems with the needs of the business and then also bouncing that with the technology and the people who are building and creating that particular product. Product management is one of those things that a lot of people have heard about but not necessarily know exactly what that means.And then we talk a little bit more about how product management evolved over the last 60 or 70 years to where we are now. With that is understanding that people’s individual parts in product management aren’t necessarily direct. It comes down to product management is really about the fundamentals of understanding users and their problems and being able to solve them with a viable, sustainable, profitable product.
That takes us into checking to make sure you are on the right path. We talk about the problems and the questions that you need to ask about whether there is a market for that particular product. Product management is not so much about managing product but it’s actually about managing the people involved in your product. We go through a variety of different people you’ll be most likely working with such as developers and designers. And then we talk about marketing and sales and what tough jobs they have and understand that they each have their own interesting quirks. It’s important to understand that you are working with all different specialists and without them you’d never be able to achieve the product you have.
From there we go into thinking about success and failure. So even if you do the right things there is still always that chance that your product won’t succeed. There are a number of things to increase your chances of success but it doesn’t necessarily ensure success.
The last thing we cover in the book is time management which is one of these soft skills that is so important because you are juggling all these different things and you need to be able to organize yourself.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:05
“Good designers can take the complex and make it profoundly simple. Great designers will also stir your soul bewitch you with the beauty of their design.” – Jock Busuttil
I have been a product manager for over a decade and working in software for a few years longer. I have worked for a variety of different companies over the years ranging from small startups to huge multinational corporates and learned a great deal along the way. More recently I decided to branch out on my own and now running my own product management consultancy called Product People.
This was the book I wanted most myself when I was starting out in product management. Most of the books that were available told you about how to go about doing it but it didn’t tell you what it was really like. This book was a way for me to tell my story to others from someone who has actually been through the process personally.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Buy The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management by Jock Busuttil on Amazon today
Visit iManageProducts.uk to read more articles by Jock on his blog
Follow Jock Busuttil on LinkedIn and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Disruption by Design by Paul Paetz
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Innovative Entrepreneur according to Daniel Spulber: Introduction In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The InnovativeRead More
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]]>In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The Innovative Entrepreneur, where he shares the economic framework that addresses the motivation, advantages, pressures, consequences, and contributions of the innovative entrepreneur.
In his book, Spulber unveils an economic theory for innovative entrepreneurship that asks why people with new technologies start their own companies. The goal of the book is identify the costs that other companies incur to readjust their focus, and reveal the problems that arise in the market for new technologies.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a passion for creating new ideas and want to know the economical effects of creating their own company based on their ideas.
A lot of experts who do research on entrepreneurs really don’t think that entrepreneurs are that important. My book tries to show a little bit about why entrepreneurs are so important to our country, what they contribute and all along the way I think it yields some insights that may be helpful to individual entrepreneurs.
You can think of the book as a reference work or you can try and catch some of the highlights.
The number one thing that I would like the reader to takeaway is that innovation is a choice.
The book is organized around five major questions. The first big question that a lot of people have asked is what I call the question of entrepreneurial motivation. Why do individuals choose to become innovative entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs have choices; individuals have other possibilities for their time. They may have a day job or other careers in progress and they have to weigh the returns and rewards or their careers against the returns and rewards of choosing to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have other choices, they may have some money that they make investments with or pursue an education. They too have to make a decision whether they want to invest that money in the startup venture. Perhaps most importantly if they decide to be entrepreneurs they face another choice of whether to be a replicative entrepreneur or to pursue innovative entrepreneurship. One of the things that I point at as an answer to this important question is that I think individuals tend to make these choices in the context of the life cycle. In other words entrepreneurship is a way to build personal assets for the future while doing what you love to do. One way of understanding the entrepreneurship decision is not as a snapshot but it’s a major decision that falls within your life cycle decisions.
The second question is what I call the question of innovative advantage. And that is why does it seem that entrepreneurs are better at innovating than existing firms? This is important because a lot of people think that the big firm can do all the innovating. One of the many reason why existing firms can’t do it all is because they are faced with all kinds of inertia. It’s not just that managers are short sighted but rather the existing firm has to fund its existing business and it’s very hard to change directions particularly for big companies. The entrepreneurs have an advantage and that advantage is the key to my book. The advantage is that the entrepreneur is not a big organization or a small organization but they are often an individual and as an individual they have got the initiative. The initiative or personal decision can overcome any kind of inertia. Entrepreneurs bring change because they’ve got initiative and they can overcome the inertia that existing firms face.
The third question my book talks about is competitive pressures. Does competition help or hurt innovation? A lot of people are worried that too much competition hurts innovation but entrepreneurs know that they are going to face challenges and I think it’s really important to have competition and competitive pressures.
The fourth question is about creative destruction. Why do we see creative destruction and why not just sell out and avoid the competition? There are a number of reasons for this and one is that I think often is it is very difficult to sell or license your idea to the existing firm. Another idea is that often the person who comes up with the idea has the best way of realizing it. So even though you might cash out, you might do much better doing it yourself.
The fifth and final question is what I call the question of the wealth of nations. How do entrepreneurs affect the economy? This is really important because I think we’ve forgot that. Right now big companies have a grip on regulation and they have a big influence with the government and essentially it’s made it harder and harder for the little guy to get going. Regulations tend to favor big firms and tax rates tend to penalize individual success and so on. Understanding the important contribution that entrepreneurs make to the economy will help motivate entrepreneurs and it will shed a little bit of light on the public policy’s that we need to open the door to startups.
“The innovated entrepreneur is the man on the spot.” – Daniel Spulber
I am a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University here in Evanston Illinois. I have been teaching entrepreneurship and all kinds of topics for a long time so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Entrepreneurs are so important because they provide the creativity, the drive and the initiative that drives our economy forward. I wanted to make sure that entrepreneurs themselves had a better understand of the major contributions that they are making to our society. I also wanted public policy makers and experts in the field to have a better understanding of what entrepreneurship is and what it means to our country.
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Buy The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber on Amazon today
Visit Kellogg.NorthWestern.edu to learn more about Daniel and his studies
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | Inside The Box by Drew Boyd | The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
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]]>Introduction In this episode Mark Hatch shares his book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, where he describes remarkable technologies accessible today and shares stories of how ordinary people have created extraordinaryRead More
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]]>In this episode Mark Hatch shares his book, The Maker Movement Manifesto, where he describes remarkable technologies accessible today and shares stories of how ordinary people have created extraordinary products from those tools.
In his book, Hatch explains and shows you how to create, innovate, and make a profit with nothing more than your own creativity, hard work, and a desire to make some change. The goal of this book is to help entrepreneurs take part in a new age of manufacturing tools which were once impossible to afford.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are very creative and innovative, but need an all-in-one resource for manufacturing new product ideas on a minimal budget.
Everything I thought I knew about innovation in launching a hardware company has fundamentally changed in the last decade. I had not seen anybody writing about the impact that it was going to have on the startup world. There is this confluence of trends that have come together in the last decade that nobody had really wrapped together in a single volume. So I felt that somebody needed to write it and given my position in the industry it made sense for me to do it.
Each of the chapter pretty much stands on its own. It is a fairly easy read in that I do a lot of stories to back up the reality that is occurring. There is nothing like giving examples that have already happened to convince the reader.
You no longer have to be a professional to change the world.
I start with my first day at a TechShop. It was very early on, we had only been open for a year when I ran into Jim Newton the founder of TechShop. Jim convinced me to come by and take a look at the place and given my background I was intrigued with this new retail platform that he had developed. I had talked to three entrepreneurs back to back and each of them had said they had saved 98% of their development cost and each are now worth millions. At the end of that day I realized I was standing in the future and because of the potential economic impact this would have in unleashing the creativity of the creative class there needed to be one of these in every single city on the planet. As I moved through my experience over the first three years I realized that this was having an impact everywhere. Then I also realized there was a gap on the current availability of books and discussion about the movement itself. I set about to capture the gestalt of the movement itself. So I came up with nine principals that basically makeup the manifesto itself.
The first principle is to make. Humans were designed to make, we have that opposable thumb and it’s ingrained in who we are. Just making things is a fundamental activity that humans get enjoyment out of. One of the things that makes making whole is the ability to share it and that’s the second principle. Often there is a giving component which gives meaning to these projects that are completely different than what you get when you buy something off the shelf. There is a play principle as well. A lot of the best projects turn in to the best projects because somebody comes at the project from a different angle. And then there are some really important things around participation that I am seeing emerge in a collaborative community. It is a lot more fun and affective to work in a space that has a lot of other people working away on their projects rather than doing it in your garage. The last two principles are support and change. Support is the call to action and why I call it a manifesto is that this platform is creating an environment where we can do innovation and change the world at price points that we’ve never seen before. And the last principle is to change. When you embrace this activity making it will change you in positive ways and its import to embrace that and encourage other people to change as well.
The reason we call this a manifesto and movement is because we are anticipating and expecting a significant portion of the population to change their consumer behavior, behavior around gift giving and attitudes around trade skills.
I am a former Green Beret, quite a while ago, but it feeds a little bit into the book. I was trained on how to participate and/or run a revolution. From there I did a startup and went back to school. I worked for about eight years at Avery Dennison manufacturing company and a year at Kinkos. All of this was before I began at TechShop as the CEO and Co-Founder.
I saw early on after I joined that there were small companies that were launching hardware startups for the lowest cost I had seen in my career. The average member there saved 98% of their developmental cost which fundamentally changes the access to be able to create hardware startups. A friend of mine, Chris Anderson, wrote an article called The New Industrial Revolution which inspired me. Chris took one angle at it and I wanted to write a book that would be open more to makers as well as a fairly easy read for policy analyst and startup junkies.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker
Buy The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch on Amazon today
Visit MarkRHatch.com to learn more about Mark and his book.
Follow Mark Hatch on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: One Simple Idea by Stephen Key | The Business Idea Factory by Serguei Netessine | The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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