Posted on

3 Mistakes Product Managers Make While Outsourcing IoT Product Development

Introduction

Project management isn’t just about managing projects. It is a collaborative effort of stakeholders, ranging from in-house teams to outsourced partners. In all fairness, the latter is a more complicated space since an outsider in a possibly different time zone has to access your data, processes, and teams. While outsourcing digital product development projects, enterprises have a long road to trek. Issues from lack of credibility to unclear objectives are directly responsible for a failed engagement and ultimately a sub-standard quality of end output. 

If your outsourcing partner is not performing as per expectations, the fault may be at your end. Here are the top mistakes that project managers knowingly or unknowingly commit while hiring product development partners. 

Posted on

How To Accelerate API Integration with Behavioral Emails and Developer Segmentation

Behavioral email is the keystone of user-centric platform integration — emails to developers are most effective when they’re based on how they used your platform. Not surprisingly, the concept of segmenting your customers into groups of similar behaviors or attitudes is a well established best practice in marketing.

MarketSherpa’s survey found that one of the most effective marketing strategies is to send emails based on the behavior of your customers. Familiar examples in the B2C world include, notification that a service was signed up for but registration wasn’t completed, receipt of collateral after a form submission, and invitation to check out after a shopping cart was abandoned.

Posted on

What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

Posted on

Product Manager: The Visionary Of Multiple Responsibilities

Learn how to manage multiple responsibilities.
You may also like: Fyre Festival: Lessons for Product Development

PM is not just a very important person from the C-suite. They play a crucial role in the live cycle of any product of the company and they are really supposed to wear suits, but they don’t. Product managers are responsible not just for the technical side of the product, but of its heart and soul.

The main difference of PM from any management position is the necessity to be involved in the product creation directly. The manager is not about producing, but about understanding the techniques and showing the direction for all the teams, as the PM should have the final image of the product.

Posted on

How to Distinguish the Abilities of A Product Manager from A Product Engineer

We're here to answer your questions!
You may also like: Product Owner vs. Product Manager vs. Project Manager Explained

Who’s a product engineer, anyway? It’s sometimes hard to distinguish between a product manager and a product engineer. In this post, we’ll have a try to figure it out.

Among one hundred and one job titles, the product manager is, perhaps, the most confusing. The truth is that various companies use various job title specifications, from the Strategic Product Managers to eCommerce or Product Development Managers or even all-in-one. Average people can hardly see any difference, but the professionals can.