Jim Anderson

I'm sure that you've heard this before, but your audience is sizing you up once they lay eyes on you. Sure, we hope that they have good listening skills, but this may not matter. You've got somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds or so to make a good first impression.

If you have been out to a mall, driving in traffic, or attended a sporting event lately then you've seen that just about everyone had their faces planted into a mobile device of some sort. From a product manager point-of-view, this sure seems to be telling us that we need to find a way to get information about our product onto everyone's mobile phones. But how?

When it comes to sitting around the negotiating table, we're all equal, right? In a perfect world, the answer would be yes. We don't live in a perfect world and so the answer is a very solid "no". So what does this mean for us – do some negotiators deserve to get more?

I don't know about you, but I can't tell you how many times I've found myself in a situation in which I needed to share some information with my audience that was too big, or too strange for them to be able to grasp it. What's a speaker to do?

So right off the bat, let's get one thing straight: the Labrador Retriever is incorrectly named. It turns out that this breed of dog did not come from Labrador. (the northerly region of the Canadian province of Newfoundland). Rather, the breed comes from Newfoundland in Canada.

So what does a product manager need to do in order to make his / her product more profitable? As I suspect every product manager learned during the last global recession, cutting costs associated with your product is one important step. That's a nice skill to have on your product manager resume, but it's not enough. Once that's done, what comes next? How about raising your product's price? Great idea, but how does a product manager go about doing that?

There you are in your next sales negotiation and everything is flying along nicely. All of a sudden, wham! The other side goes and suddenly threatens you with something if you don't do or agree to one of their demands. Oh, oh – that "Dummy's Guide To Negotiating" book that you read last month didn't cover this situation. What's a negotiator to do now?

If an IT Manager picks up the paper, it seems like hackers are everywhere and getting into everything. Dare I say these modern day cyber pirates seem almost unstoppable? If it turns out that there is no way to keep hackers from breaking into the systems that your IT dream team is creating, then should a IT Manager really spend a lot of time and money trying to keep them out?

Pity the poor CIOs who gets the idea that what his IT department needs to do this year is to implement a process improvement project. It's not that these types of projects are a bad thing to do, it's just that all too often they don't actually work out...

As product managers we are always looking for someone to tell us how we could be doing our jobs better so that we can look even better on our product manager resume. The problem is that it's all too often hard to find someone who can give us good advice. Is it our boss? Our competition? Somebody that we bump into at a trade show? Or could it be the 90-year old former CEO of the successful Bergdorf Goodman retail chain of stores?