About Our Product Management Blog
High Octane is a Product Management Blog from Proficientz that offers “how to” tips for improving strategy, planning and execution in trenches of product management, product marketing and sales enablement. Our best practices focus on using your portfolio to make customers more successful with cross-functional solutions that have more strategic value than individual products. We publish several entries each month. Click here to subscribe and get them delivered directly to your inbox.
3 Obstacles to Creating Stickier Products and How to Overcome Them
Here are three common obstacles to creating stickier products and how to overcome them.
1. How You See Your Users
The number one most difficult thing for all of us is to see our users through the lens of the job they do instead of seeing them through the lens of our products.
Spend more time talking to users about the entire scope of their job and how […]
3 Things I Learned Becoming an Online Only Business
After 18+ years of training clients in person, COVID-19 travel restrictions and social distancing have turned Proficientz into an online only business in the short-term. It has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience.
Quick background…our online product management training and certification program was released in late 2018. It’s completely self-serve. Customers register, pay, go through the training lessons, complete the exercises and […]
The Key to Becoming a Great Business Problem Solver
This is going to sound elementary, but hang with me for a minute. The key to becoming a great business problem solver is the ability to distinguish customer problems from customer outcomes or goals.
Here’s what I mean. Customers say things like, “One of our biggest problems is that we don’t get enough repeat business from existing customers.”
It’s easy to take statements like that at face […]
Essential and Non-Essential Customer Problems
The terms essential and non-essential are now part of our new lexicon as we fight the coronavirus pandemic. Essential and non-essential businesses. Essential and non-essential goods and services. And now, essential and non-essential customer problems.
For all of us product professionals, we need to quickly assess the extent to which the problems we were solving for customers a few months ago are still essential. With any […]
B2B Product Manager April 2020 Issue
The B2B Product Manager April 2020
COVID-19 changes everything, for us and our customers. This month we offer three things you can do to make sure your product and marketing priorities are in lockstep with the new priorities of your target customers.
We’re also offering a free 30-minute webinar on April 23rd to help you become a star problem-solver by shifting your focus from customer problems to […]
What to Do When Customer Priorities Have Been Thrown into a Tailspin!
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown your customer priorities into a tailspin. For some organizations, their biggest vulnerabilities have been exposed at the most inopportune time (Zoom Meeting). For others, their strengths have been amplified (MyPillow).
In either case, the top-down priorities of your target customers are completely different than they were before COVID-19.
If there was ever a time to make sure your product priorities […]