Establishing Product Management; Product Management Tools

Jeff Lash

I’ve got a few exciting things going on right now so here’s a quick update…

Establishing a Product Management Function

Through my work at SiriusDecisions, I’ve been helping several organizations that are setting up product management for the first time. Interestingly, in most of these cases, the challenge wasn’t convincing the organization that product management was needed — the problem was exactly how to go about setting up the new function. My blog post Four Critical Steps for Establishing a Product Management Function highlights how to get the ball rolling in a situation like this. Many more steps are required to go from simply setting up product management to building out a best-in-class function, but following the steps I outline in my blog post will certainly start an organization down the right path.

Survey: Product Management Tools

What tools and technologies do you use for product management? How well do they work? I’m conducting a survey of b-to-b product managers and what applications they do (and don’t) use. The survey takes only about 5 minutes to complete, and everyone who takes this survey on product management tools will receive a complimentary copy of the forthcoming SiriusView report on Product Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping tools. Take the 2017 SiriusDecisions Product Management Tools Survey now!

Upcoming Speaking Engagements and Presentations

Here’s just a few of the places you can meet me in person in the next few months (more to come!)

Applying Agile to Marketing

One area that I’ve been involved in lately is with companies applying agile outside of their product development teams and specifically within the marketing organization. This is an interesting area for me, since I’ve been involved in agile development from a product management perspective for about a decade. Though this might be a bit off-topic for the more product management-focused readers of my blog, since this is a subject that has come up with several product management teams lately, I wanted to share a few things I’ve been working on.

On February 9 at 2 p.m. ET, I’ll be presenting a webcast called “Applying Agile: How It Can Help and When It Doesn’t.” During the webcast, I’ll share a framework for preparing your organization to evaluate and implement agile outside of product development – and within marketing in particular.

There’s also two blog posts I’ve published on the SiriusDecisions Marketplace blog that provide some more detail: “Going Agile” In Marketing – How Is It Different? and How Microsoft Applied Agile Marketing to Office365.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets that have generated the most interest recently; to get these in real-time, join the 7600+ others who follow me at @jefflash: