Product Management Technologies; Five Essentials for Strategic Product Management; Planning Assumptions for 2016

Jeff Lash

We’ve been busy at SiriusDecisions with a lot of new research and resources for b-to-b product management leaders and product managers:

The ABCs of Product Management Technologies
In my first post for the new SiriusDecisions Marketplace, I cover The ABCs of Product Management Technologies. This is a great overview of the landscape of tools and applications available for product managers, where I cover the four main areas of product management technology we are following at SiriusDecisions.

SiriusDecisions Marketplaceâ„¢ is a first-of-its-kind online destination for sales, marketing and product teams to learn from their peers and do research on technology and service providers. For those four areas of product management technology categories — Idea Management; Concept Testing; Planning, Prioritization and Roadmapping; and Product Engagement — it describes the category and its benefits, and also provides lists of vendors in each category.

If you are (or know of) a vendor in one of these categories that we don’t have listed, there’s the ability to suggest additions or edits. And, in addition to blog posts from SiriusDecisions analysts, we’re actively soliciting contributions from practitioners related to sales, marketing and product technology. If you have insight to share related to tools and technology for product management, we’d love to hear from you — you can learn more about how to contribute to the SiriusDecisions Marketplaceâ„¢ Blog.

The Five Essentials for Strategic Product Management
One thing I hear over and over from product management executives is that they want their product managers to “be more strategic.” However, often clients will have a difficult time articulating what it really means to “be more strategic” and product managers struggle with actually changing their behaviors without clear guidance. Our recent research piece on The Five Essentials for Strategic Product Management describes five sets of behaviors required for strategic product management, providing guidance for product management leaders who are trying to enable these behaviors in their team or product managers who are trying to develop these behaviors in themselves. You can download the piece and learn about the foundational behaviors of strategic product management.

Product Management: Planning Assumptions for 2016
With end-of-year rolling around, our eyes look to the future. Every year, we put together a list of key planning assumptions that product management leaders need to consider as they look to the coming year. Product management leaders are under increasing pressure to support a variety of objectives. By understanding critical new trends and focus areas for 2016, product management leaders will be equipped with the insight they need to make better, more informed decisions to succeed in the new year. The SiriusDecisions Product Management: Planning Assumptions 2016 outlines the major issues we see for product management leaders in 2016 in the areas of interlock, measurement, technology, organization/structure, and skills.

SiriusDecisions Product Management Webcast Series
Last month we launched a new series of SiriusDecisions product management webcasts and the response has been fantastic. These complimentary webcasts are focused on best practices for b-to-b product management leaders and product managers. The hour-long webcasts will cover some hot topics that we’ve been speaking about regularly with clients and we’ll share examples of frameworks and models that you can implement within your own product management organization.

So far we’ve covered Pricing and Packaging Best Practices and Adapting B-to-B Product Management to Agile. If you happened to miss them, don’t worry, since archived versions are available to view on demand.

Coming up next week — Thursday, December 10 — my colleague Lisa Singer and I will be talking about how to choose products to invest in when there is limited funding available (isn’t that always the case?!). The webcast on Offering Investment Scorecard is designed for anyone who is trying to get their organization to provide funding for a product, or anyone who is in the position of having to evaluate different business cases or investment proposals. We’ll cover The SiriusDecisions Offering Scorecard, which is a tool and approach to help product management leaders compare different product investments and objectively select the best opportunities to invest in.

We have other webcasts coming up as well — Strategic Product Management, Competitive Analysis for Product Management, and Product Investment-Decision Making — so learn more and register today.

What’s Hot on Twitter

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