Glen Chen

During our last post of the PMs & Metrics series, we covered the details of the conversion rate. In today’s post, we’ll be going over another important metric that PMs should be familiar with – the customer retention rate. The customer retention rate measures the proportion of customers that have continued to use your product over a period of time. There are two key phrases here to pay extra attention...

Another age-old question in product management circles is whether PMs should have MBAs. At least today, an MBA can be a double-edged sword when it comes to recruiting for product management roles. In some cases, having an MBA can count against you, especially at startups where technical experience is valued more. In other cases, some companies with teams that have more of a business focus may look specifically for MBAs....

Need to get a complete understanding of what wireframes are? If you are interested in getting in the UX field, you will certainly hear a lot about wireframes. Wireframes are an important part of app, website, and product development projects as they are the foundation on which to begin building. They present a clear summary of the page layout, format, information architecture, user flow, and intended behaviors. All these pieces...

There are few professional fields I’ve come across as diverse as the product management field. In all my conversations with other PMs, I haven’t experienced one instance where the roles discussed were exactly the same. While this is great news for aspiring PMs because there’s something for everyone, it can also become a major source of headaches when deciding where to work. In this post, I want to highlight some key ways the...

In a previous post about quantitative vs. qualitative research, I briefly mentioned A/B testing as a type of quantitative research product managers should be familiar with. This post will cover A/B testing in more detail – we’ll take a look at what it is, why it’s important, how it’s done, and some examples. What Is A/B Testing? One example of A/B testing is testing changes on a page design against the...

I was re-reading the excellent Cracking the PM Interview recently and came across a great topic to discuss for this week’s post. Product managers manage products of all shapes and sizes, and it can be daunting for aspiring PMs just to figure out what sort of products might fit their strengths, interests, or even work-life balance preferences. I’ll be summarizing the 6 most common types of products that PMs manage and bring...

As a PM, what are some important metrics to measure for your product? In each post of this series, we’ll be covering a different metric, why this particular metric is important, and how it’s measured. If you’re a PM of a website, a product that’s sold on a website, or an app, one of the most important metrics to measure is the conversion rate. Simply put, the conversion rate is the...

I wanted to switch things up a bit this week and share some of my recent experiences as a PM in an innovation lab. What are innovation labs? These internal labs are typically found in larger companies with more bureaucracy. The point of the innovation lab is to strip all the process away, explore ideas that aren’t part of the typical product roadmap, and build a working prototype to validate...

Last week I had the opportunity to return to my alma mater to help out with campus recruiting. It was both humbling and eye-opening to realize that I was now on the other side of things – I’d originally gotten my product management internship (which led to my full-time PM offer) at that same job fair! While entry-level product management roles tend to be harder to find, in recent years more and...

The project has been funded, the team is assembled, and as PM you’ve written out feature stories based on your product roadmap. Now it’s time to talk specifics and figure out the amount of effort each story will take – will the team be able to complete everything in the given time frame? In agile development, an estimate is a unit of measurement of the effort required to complete a user story....

Starting off as a new product manager might seem daunting. There are so many things to learn in such a short period of time, and you’re expected to provide the vision and roadmap for your team almost right away. Tips For New Product Managers This post will cover some tips to help new product managers start off on the right foot. From understanding the market to meeting your team to...

One of the most important responsibilities of a product manager is feature prioritization. What is feature prioritization? Our last post covered story prioritization using sizing and estimation – in this post, we’ll zoom back out to the product roadmap, and with itself. Feature prioritization is planning out the order of features your team works on, based on your product roadmap. It’s important to prioritize features because you have limited time and...

Product management is such a broad field, with opportunities in companies of all shapes and sizes. I recently came across an excellent post about PMing at startups vs. PMing at large companies, and I wanted to share my own perspective, based on the points mentioned, on PMing at a large company. Product Management at Large Companies I think it’s very fair to say that larger companies, especially public companies, tend...

At my company, I frequently hear the term “MVP” being used by PMs, developers, and designers alike. What exactly does this mean, and why is it so important for agile software development? MVP stands for ‘minimum viable product’. It is a development technique in which a new product gets just enough core features for it to function. The goal of the MVP is to quickly get feedback from customers and...

A common thread around product management involves how technical a product manager should be in order to be effective. In this post, we’ll describe the two viewpoints to this age-old question and cover steps you can take to develop your technical foundation. Do Product Managers Need a Technical Background? You don’t really need to have a technical background in order to be a successful product manager. That said, there are...

There are quite a few agile development methodologies that lean companies use today. Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) is a popular one that I’ve had the most experience in, so I’d like to give a quick primer to what ATDD is, some of its benefits and drawbacks, and a simple test example. What is ATDD? ATDD is an agile development methodology that emphasizes close discussion and agreement among developers, product managers, and...

As a product manager who works with software engineers, you will definitely witness the various ways code is tested upon completion. Testing the end product is absolutely essential to making sure the user doesn’t run into a buggy experience and the feature doesn’t break another part of the product or site. In this post, we’ll be going over a basic introduction of a couple of types of testing and how product...

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had the opportunity to attend Opticon 2015, a huge conference for the experience optimization and testing community. Hosted by Optimizely, the event was a gold mine of information on A/B testing, personalization, and website experimentation. This mini-series will contain summaries of some of the most helpful breakout sessions I attended. As data becomes easier to gather and all-the-more important in decision making, product managers should...

Apart from the day-to-day responsibilities, PMs must learn the skill of partnering with stakeholders. Stakeholder management is a highly underrated skill that’s often overlooked in favor of the immediate things, but truly great product managers are masters at communicating well to stakeholders and making sure that stakeholders are on board with the product vision and delivery plan. What are stakeholders and why is it so important to make sure they’re...

Recently one of my co-workers shared an excellent article that explains what exactly a product manager does. I think it’s one of the clearest and best articles I’ve read about managing a product, and if any of you are interested or even curious about product management, I’d highly recommend checking out “So you want to manage a product?” on Product Coalition. I wanted to share some quotes from that article...

The launch celebration is over, the product is live, and there’s finally time to take a (quick) breather after weeks of intense work. But what happens after a product launch? The product manager still has a large role in maintaining a product after it launches, and this post will provide a high-level overview and cover several aspects of the post-launch phase. Retrospective Perhaps one of the most important immediate steps to...

One of the most important aspects of delivering a solid product is making sure a lot of research goes into the effort. Given the limited time and money a project has, it’s essential to understand the aspects that should go into your product for the best possible end-user experience. In this post, we’ll be going over quantitative vs. qualitative research, including their differences and when to employ each kind of...

The role of a product manager is multi-faceted and product managers often work with many different groups of people in a company. Of course, the extent to which product managers work with other groups depends on individual companies, taking into account factors such as the size of the or the company’s focus. In this post, I hope to provide an overview of the groups I’ve personally worked with in my...

If you’ve been following the PM world even for a bit, you’ve probably come across the age-old question of how technical product managers should be. In many software startups and larger technology companies, technical backgrounds have become a strong requirement for PMs. However, this is not an absolute rule and there are valid reasons why PMs do not have to come from engineering backgrounds in order to successfully deliver products. This post...

In many companies, the product manager and the UX designer roles go hand in hand. This week’s post is an introduction to the UX designer role, how it’s similar (and different) to the product manager role, and how the two work effectively together to deliver a great product. Before we start to dive deeper into the two roles, let’s first explain the role of the UX designer. User experience (UX)...

Today we’ll be going over the basics of one of the most important tools a product manager can have. A user story is part of the agile methodology and communicates a product requirement in an easy-to-understand way. As opposed to traditional specs that group product requirements into a giant list, user stories are short and sweet descriptions of features written from the perspective of the person who wants the new feature or capability....