Product Management Leadership

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

Renowned business author David Magee fuses both the interesting history and philosophy of one of America's most well-known companies in this entertaining aid for business management. While other American businesses are crumbling under low-cost foreign competition, John Deere Company thrives by maintaining such ideas as building the best product, being open to change and innovation, listening rather than leading, and keeping virtuous business practices.

Scrum is the most successful framework for agile product development, and much has been written about how to follow the Scrum process, but the key to success is in the leadership skills of the product owner. Product Mastery explores the traits of the best product owners, offering an insight into the difference between good and great product ownership and explaining how the best product owners are driven to be successful.

Product managers are creators of vision, strategy, design, products, services, and, ultimately, value. They must be equally comfortable with everything and everyone they work with, including engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and legal, and of course, customers and partners. A well-rounded product manager has a deep understanding of the product and the market. They must see the forest and the trees.

Create a winning game plan for your digital products with Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age. Using a wide range of proven techniques and tools, author Roman Pichler explains how to create effective strategies and actionable roadmaps to help you maximize your chances of creating successful products. Written in an engaging and no-nonsense style, Strategize offers practical advice and valuable examples so that you can apply the practices directly to your products.

The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by stronger product marketing. Yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. It includes segmenting and targeting customers, positioning products vs. alternatives, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams. But great product marketing achieves much more: it identifies the best way to bring your product to market, accelerates your product's ability to penetrate markets over time, shapes what the world thinks about your product and your category, and inspires customers to tell your product's story.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you use design thinking to produce breakthrough innovations and transform your organization. This book will inspire you to: understand the transformative potential of design thinking; proceed from idea to product at lightning speed; iterate with rapid customer feedback; fail small and win big; create new products people love; lead design thinking teams more effectively; and open new paths to innovation at your company.

The new business management model begins with customer focus and ends with customer satisfaction. Companies intent on tracking their customers changing requirements and improving their services are encouraging their employees to interact with customers on a frequent basis. In an effort to learn more about what customers want, they have demonstrated that strengthening relationships with customers is critical to sustained growth and profitability.

The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders - users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book, Roberto Verganti offers a new approach - one that does not set out to solve existing problems, but to find breakthrough experiences. There is no brainstorming - which produces too many ideas, unfiltered - but a vision, subject to criticism.

This practical, easy-to-digest guide provides you with crucial tools to enable you to break into product management. Based on thousands of conversations with established product managers and aspiring product managers, this mythbusting resource arms you with valuable knowledge. We walk you through the lives of multiple kinds of product managers, set up your foundation for success, and break down the most popular questions that come up in the product management interview process.

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.

It’s undeniable that we’re entering a new era of remote work. While many leaders seek to run business as usual, why settle for the usual when remote teams allow us to work even better? The research shows that employees are more productive and engaged when they have the freedom to work from anywhere.

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!

If you're looking for an effective and proven approach to product management - one that recognizes that the majority of product managers enter the field with little or no training and must learn through trial and error - this is the book for you. Take Charge Product Management guides you step-by-step along the product management path with tips, tactics, and tools to make you and your products more successful.

How did Ford Motors use Lean development to pull off one of the most impressive corporate turnarounds in history? Largely by avoiding the mistakes that so many companies make when in a death spiral. They looked beyond manufacturing efficiency to change the very fundamentals of how they developed vehicles. In Designing the Future, Lean product development expert James Morgan and world-renowned Lean guru Jeffrey K. Liker reveal why so many companies have achieved only moderate success with Lean in operations, with a limited impact on their overall business.

Agile project management has grown in popularity over the past several years. Change is occurring so fast that many organizations are unable to keep up with the demands of a changing global world. Your ability to quickly change and adapt to your environment will make or break, not only your career but could be the deciding factor as to whether your company survives in the coming years.

Every dealer sells F&I products, and most dealers understand the importance of the F&I department in terms of its contribution to the bottom line. Unfortunately, F&I is not a regulated profession, meaning one doesn't need any type of state license to practice, and because of that there is very little formal education available. The actual management of the F&I department, product selection, and different types of participation programs are largely ignored, so most dealers, general managers, and finance managers must figure out these aspects in real time, on the job.

Proactive Risk Management's unique approach provides a model of risk that is scalable to any size project or program and easily deployable into any product development or project management life cycle. It offers methods for identifying drivers (causes) of risks so you can manage root causes rather than the symptoms of risks. Providing you with an appropriate quantification of the key factors of a risk allows you to prioritize those risks without introducing errors that render the numbers meaningless.

The Influential Product Manager teaches product managers how to behave at each stage of the product life cycle to achieve the best outcome for the customer. Product managers are under pressure to drive spectacular results, often without wielding much direct power or authority. If you don’t know how to influence people at all levels of the organization, how will you create the best possible product?