FAST-FORWARD PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Customer-centric
Successful products are based on a deep understanding of customers’ problems and needs and the corresponding context, since customers’ behavior is nearly impossible to predict. Validating ideas and assumptions directly with customers is the best way to deal with natural bias and conflicting internal interests.
Tangible
Product development means to pick the right options out of countless possibilities. Tangible, concrete prototyping helps driving decisions and validating concepts with customers.
Iterative
In an increasingly complex and unpredictable world no idea is successful right from the start. Many iterations are required to find a relevant customer problem and a suitable solution enabling a sustainable business model. Fast and focused experiments help to learn heuristically and hypotheses-driven.
Exploratory
Narrowing down to a solution too early often leaves the best option uncovered. Customer-centric, focused iteration with tangible prototypes allow for quick validation of many ideas AND a fast market entry.
Holistic
A successful product is not only a sum of its features alone. It is based on a holistic service design that is driven by all functions of a company.
Profitable
A product without a sustainable business model is useless. Solutions must be technically feasible and economically viable within the given framework.
Blog
Business development – The evil force
Business Development is a fuzzy term with many definitions and roles in enterprises. In practice the following activities prevail: Acquisition of large, strategic customers Development of strategies and initiatives to let the company grow by vertical and horizontal differentiation Acquisition, the first role, is an important task for companies. But I simply don’t get why […]
Wasted potentials of agile product development
When asking product managers on the main principles of agile product development, you should roughly get the following answer: Cut the product in the smallest possible, viable and testable pieces (also called MVP). Deliver those, piece by piece (incremental), to the customer to learn as quickly as possible from real feedback from real customers on […]
Agility: Same same but different
Sometimes product managers are tempted to enviously look back to the good old times of waterfall. The world was still simple and easy. Product managers sat at their desks, documenting their plan in a PRD, then handed it over to the developers and before long the next PRD was written. In the meantime one was […]
Profile
Christian develops products in all sizes since 2008 – from single features to innovative business models. He has broad practical experience from projects with high and fast scaling products and international, cross-functional teams on basis of Scrum, Kanban, Lean Product Management, Lean UX, and Design Thinking, working for companies like eBay Classifieds, Charité, Bosch, kununu, XING, mobile.de, Zanox, Wer Liefert Was, Scout24, OBI, Meteo Group, DKB, mika:timing, and Betterplace.
Before founding his own company, Christian worked for the automotive supplier Hella as product manager and in the corporate strategy and planning department. He then moved on to eBay, where he was responsible for the marketing of eBay Motors. After that Christian worked on the strategic differentiation of mobile.de and was the responsible product manager for the development of the local marketplaces in Italy and France among many other projects. Based on this experience he took the product management lead for mobile.de and built up the user experience department.
