When a product misses its schedule, struggles in the market, or fails to deliver the expected return, the natural reaction is to look at execution. Engineering was late. The launch was weak. Sales wasn’t ready. The supplier missed commitments. Sometimes those are the problems. But often, the real problem began much earlier. The customer problem was never understood well enough. The opportunity was attractive, but not attractive enough. The product concept contained too many a

Reuters recently reported that GE Aerospace plans to acquire Consolidated Precision Products for $11.75 billion, bringing an important source of highly engineered engine castings much closer to the business. The obvious interpretation is supply-chain security. I think there is a larger product-business lesson. A product company can identify an attractive market, understand its customers, develop differentiated technology, and generate substantial demand—and still fail to capt

This is a good summary of mainstream product management — and it also shows what is often missing. “Business goals” is doing a lot of work in one small corner. Product management is a business role. That means understanding where to compete, who will buy, why they will choose, whether the economics work, and how the product creates profitable growth. The strongest PMs connect customers, engineering, strategy, economics, and lifecycle — and turn them into business outcomes

You know you’ve been around a while when old patterns come back. Skinny ties came back.Bell bottoms came back. And I’m beginning to wonder if trying to inspect quality into a product is coming back, too. There’s a growing debate around AI-generated software. AI can generate code remarkably quickly. That puts new pressure on everything that follows: review, testing, integration, and validation. And the conversation often turns into: How do we test all this code? How much revie

Perry D. Wiggins recently wrote something in CFO.com that product leaders should pay attention to. Product investments run on more than one clock. I think there are three: Cost to Market → Time to Market → Time to Profit Time to Market matters. Every month of delay can mean lost revenue, missed buying cycles, more engineering expense, and more time for competitors to respond. But launch is not the reason the company invested. The company invested to create an economic return.

Manufacturing Dive recently reported nearly $2 billion in new U.S. manufacturing investment. The obvious story is capacity. The less obvious story is product strategy. A factory is not just a facility. It is a long-lived commitment to a set of assumptions about what customers will buy, which technologies will matter, where the company can compete, what cost structure it can sustain, and which capabilities should remain inside the business. Those assumptions deserve the same s

Ask ten people what a product manager does, and you may get ten different answers. One owns a backlog. Another defines requirements. Another spends most of the week with customers. Another runs a $50 million product line and recommends where the business should invest. Same title. Wildly different decisions. That is why I have become less interested in the title and more interested in a different question: What decisions are you actually responsible for? A backlog choice and

Frameworks are compressed experience. Twenty years of experience can make someone exceptionally good at making difficult decisions. But experience by itself is not intellectual property. Experience is what happened to you. Expertise is what you learned from it. Intellectual property begins when that learning becomes structured and transferable—when another capable person can use your reasoning to make a better decision. The progression is simple: Experience → Pattern → Decisi

Missing an advertised launch date costs more than an embarrassing schedule meeting. It costs credibility. Customers make plans around your commitments. Salespeople make promises based on them. Miss enough dates and both groups learn that your dates aren't really dates. There is a simple answer: Announce late. Then never miss. Keep the internal schedule aggressive. Manage it hard. But don't turn an internal target into an external promise until you have enough confidence to ke

Choosing the program with the highest forecast return is not portfolio management. It is spreadsheet management. When two programs compete for the same money, Portfolio Investment Arbitration uses four screens: Driving-force fit Strength versus weakness Product-line gap Replacement of a profitable product nearing end of useful life If two programmes still appear tied after those screens, the problem may not be the ranking method. The budget may simply be too small for the str

A product manager should know where the profit comes from. Product managers are often encouraged to obsess over customers. They should. But the company has another requirement: The product has to create economic value. That means a product leader should understand far more than features and roadmaps. Revenue. Price. Gross margin. Product cost. Development investment. Inventory. Portfolio complexity. Warranty. Channel economics. Supplier economics. Lifecycle. A technically won

Customers know what they want. They don’t always know what they need. That distinction matters in product development. If we simply ask customers, “What features do you want?” we’ll usually get an answer. But the answer isn’t necessarily the best product strategy. Customers experience symptoms. Product leaders need to understand the underlying problem. That’s why I prefer customer discovery that combines: interviews,observation,market data,competitive analysis,technical under

Every SKU has a cost—even when nobody can see it on the product P&L. One of the recurring problems I’ve encountered in product businesses is complexity. A new SKU rarely looks dangerous. Maybe it’s one more feature combination. Another regional variation. Another price point. Another legacy product nobody wants to discontinue. Individually, each decision seems reasonable. Collectively, they create a complexity tax. More forecasting. More inventory. More documentation. More te

Great ideas aren’t enough. Great strategy isn’t enough either. Over the years, I’ve seen organizations with excellent people, strong technology, loyal customers and plenty of ideas struggle to grow. Usually one of three things is missing. Ideas. Strategy. Execution. Ideas are the raw material. They come from customers, competitors, suppliers, technology and the expertise already inside the organization. Strategy decides which ideas matter. Where do we play?Which customers mat

An engineering release is not the finish line. Early in my career, I designed electronic products and later worked in product engineering and manufacturing. That experience permanently changed the way I view product development. A design can meet its specification and still be a bad product. Why? Because the real world comes next. Can manufacturing build it consistently? Can suppliers hold the required tolerances? Can it be tested efficiently? Can service teams diagnose it? D

Product management is business leadership. I’ve spent much of my career with the title Product Manager. But I learned many of the most important lessons about product management before I ever had the title. I learned them designing electronic products.On manufacturing floors.Working through production problems.Talking with suppliers.Watching products fail.Listening to customers.Trying to understand why one product made money while another—sometimes a technically excellent one