Yes, I will tell you what this skill is; however, do you think that you can guess it before I do? I’m sure that you can come up with the standard list of leadership skills that every product manager has (or at least should have): able to deal with pressure, able to lead people, vision, positive attitude, creativity, etc.
However, those would all be good to have, but none of them would be the #1 skill that a product manager needs to have. Give up? The answer is …

Ok, so first off that’s not quite true — we’re not really talking about 1,000 links. Although, in my own defense I think that the list will eventually get to contain 1,000 links to free (or almost free) product manager resources that are available on the Internet eventually. A title of “Almost 1,000 links” just didn’t seem to have enough zing…

Gosh – doesn’t the whole concept of subliminal advertising just sound naughty to you? I mean, I’ve always sorts lumped this type of advertising together with hypnotism and sorta figured that they were slightly immoral. You know, it can’t be right to get people to do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise, right?

On Saturday, June 19th, 2010, Dr. Jim Anderson delivered the opening keynote address for the first ever ProductCamp Chicago gathering of Product Managers.

Dr. Jim Anderson has been asked to deliver the keynote address at ProductCamp Chicago which will be held on June 19th, 2010, in where else but Chicago, Illinois.

So I just happened to be leafing through an issue of Information Week and I ran across an article that was talking about how IT is run over at Coke. In a nutshell, the article was a glowing review of the changes that Jean-Michel Ares has been making. However, what really caught my eye was a discussion about how Coke is running their product manager activities. It turns out that Coke currently has over 450 separate brands including Coke, Diet Coke, Minute Maid, …

Dr. Jim Anderson spoke to the IEEE’s Region 3 management team during their  Southeastcon 2010 conference. Dr. Anderson had been asked to speak about how the organization could increase its number of subscribers by engaging in active regional marketing and membership development activities.

As product managers, we have somehow convinced ourselves that our customers both want and need more choices when it comes to our products. This thinking has allowed us to heap on more and more choices for our customers to make: colors, pricing plans, features, etc. However, it just may be the case that the one thing that our customers really don’t want is to have to make more decisions in order to buy our products.

I can remember being something like 9 or 10 years old when I first learned about the Bermuda Triangle. I’m not sure where I first got my facts, but I’m willing to bet good money that it was that classic TV show with Leonard Nimoy called “In Search Of…” I didn’t sleep for something like a week after that.

I’ve recently had to sit through so many bad presentations that I’m feeling an overwhelming need to try to make the world a better place for Powerpoint slides to live in.