Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Product Management Habits

Leo over at zenhabits wrote a good post yesterday about "Groundhog Day Resolutions." His point is that New Year's Day does not have monopoly on being the day to start new habits and generally engage in life-improving activities.

Along these lines, I have laid out a plan for my team to make a monthly resolution to embrace a new Product Management habit. Some of these "tasks" we already do, but perhaps not on a regular basis or not as well as we could if we tried really hard.

Here are some of the habits on our list for 2009:
  • Weekly customer/potential interviews
  • Surveys to quantify feedback obtained in interviews
  • Win/Loss analysis
  • Validation process (ties in with surveys)
  • Create a positioning document for each product/persona/industry
  • Competitive Analysis (do it and store it all in one easy-to-reference location)
  • Work offsite one day per week

The trick with habits is that you can't create a bunch of habits at once. Leo would say that you should do one at a time. It is so true. The good news is that once you've got a habit down, it becomes second nature and you can start focusing on the next habit without losing the habits you gained previously.

One step at a time...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great blog! All sounds great. Especially like the weekly customer / potential interviews. Should be easy but always difficult to find time to prepare and go out to speak to customers. Something which would benefit a lot of companies!

Tabita said...

I'm glad you enjoyed it. It is definitely something you almost have to force yourself to do initially. And once you start listening to the market, it is so satisfying you can't believe it took you so long to get off your butt (or on the phone) and do it.