last highlighted date: 2023-11-15
Highlights
- What he laid out in his 800-word memo was a simple and concise description of “Brand Men” and their absolute responsibility for a brand – from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. Uniquely he outlined that the way to do this was through thorough field testing and client interaction.
- Note: first pm job
- McElroy later became Secretary of Defense and helped found NASA, proving all product managers are destined for greatness, but he also advised at Stanford where he influenced two young entrepreneurs called Bill Hewlett and David Packard.
- Tags: people
- The Hewlett-Packard Way this policy is credited with sustaining Hewlett-Packard’s 50 year record of unbroken 20% year-on-year growth between 1943 and 1993.
- Tags: company
- two important principles any modern product manager will recognise: Kaizen – improving the business continuously while always driving for innovation and evolution and Genchi Genbutsu – to go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.
- Note: kaizen
- FMCG
- Note: fast moving consumer goods
- As the role moved into the tech world, however, this separation from the development and production of the product was untenable. Most of the newfangled companies in the tech world were inventing whole new industries and they couldn’t just rely on packaging and pricing of a commodity to succeed. This brought Product Development back to the centre of the Product Management role, as it was imperative not just to understand the customer and their needs, but to align the product’s development with them.
- Though Agile and the Manifesto are heavily associated with Scrum, Scrum was actually developed before the manifesto in the nineties alongside other methodologies like DSDM and XP that were trying to achieve the same goal. Kanban, which is widely used in product development today, was developed in the Toyota Production System as far back as 1953!
- First it changed the relationship between Product Management and Engineering from an adversarial one to a collaborative one. Scrum invented the role of the Product Owner, but really all agile methods embraced communication between the Product Management role and the Engineers as the best method to figure out how to build the best solution to a customer problem.