Before the testing and bug fixing, before the technical design and product plan, before the business and technical requirements, comes the Product Roadmap. And as we speak, Product Managers are asking themselves the question: "Just what is a Product Roadmap?" It's a good question, one for which I'm not sure there is any single answer to ...

Articles from Product Management Challenges have been published on a couple of websites recently. These sites focus on product management and marketing, and have useful information and links for Product Managers. One has a salary survey for Product Manager positions, and the other looks like a good place for exchanging information with others in your field. Click ...

Combine today’s overworked and understaffed software industry with a familiar phenomenon I like to refer to as “So much software to manage, so little Product Manager to do it” and you’ve got a perfect case for using Virtual Product Managers.

Virtual Product Managers provide the output of regular Product Managers, except they don’t exist as a single person. In fact, as far as the rest of the company is concerned, they don’t exist anywhere but in your head. But as someone providing product management, you can define and deploy Product Managers who are virtual in order to help you with your workload of endless tasks that could get done if only you had all the time in the world at your disposal.

What exactly is a Virtual Product Manager? It’s part of managing by influence, and the acrobatic art of getting things done through others. You create a Virtual Product Manager when you work with one or more people to carry out a function that a Product Manager, if one happened to be available, would normally do.

As an actual Product Manager, you act as the lever that boosts and focuses the efforts of one or more coworkers to complete a project, and then exert the effort to champion and drive home the result in the organization.

Read on for an example of a Virtual Product Manager and how to create one

As the software industry has developed from its infancy, companies have learned to provide very specific services around the core software product. They have gradually come to understand that these services - such as project management, implementation consulting, training, and software customization - are essential to the product's success. Companies that have pushed the envelope ...

Alyssa Dver is the author of the book Software Product Management Essentials Today's issue is devoted to an interview with Alyssa S. Dver, author of the newly published "Software Product Management Essentials, A Practical Guide for Small and Mid-Sized Companies." "Often, we Product Managers get so caught up in what we have to do, that we don't ...

One of the conundrums for Product Managers is that in many ways, their area of expertise is product management of a software application, yet companies increasingly require them to have experience in the industry that uses the software. There are good arguments for doing it this way, and equally strong ones for having Product Managers whose ...

Although most of us in the software industry use the term Product Manager like any other job title, positions that go by this name actually involve two separate flavors, or types, different enough that in any other area you would find two distinct job titles. Both flavors of Product Manager involve a considerable amount of ...