Publications
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By John Mansour on October 16, 2023
Portfolio Positioning Is What Makes Your Product Positioning More Strategic
Here’s a simple example of portfolio positioning and how it makes your product positioning more strategic. Your accounts payable product improves the customer’s cash flow. It sounds strategic. What CFO doesn’t want a stronger balance sheet? Your accounts receivable product further enhances cash flow. Even more strategic when customers use both, right? There’s still something […]
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By John Mansour on October 13, 2023
A Portfolio Roadmap Isn’t Just a Product Thing
Before we bring the portfolio roadmap into the picture, let’s set the stage with product roadmaps. For most people, the term roadmap conjures up a visual presentation of product features and delivery dates published by product management. While that definition doesn’t coincide with the purist view, let’s run with it since feature-date roadmaps are the […]
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By John Mansour on October 11, 2023
Product Portfolio Management – Integrating Business Processes vs. Products
Let’s start this discussion of integrating business processes vs. products with the spotlight on pre-sales, sales, and customer on-boarding since they bear the brunt of the ripple effect. Here’s the scenario. You’re in the throes of the sales cycle and it’s product demo time. In addition to functionality, you’re highlighting the fact that all your […]
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By John Mansour on October 10, 2023
Product Portfolio Management – Market Strategy vs. Product Strategies
Going all the way back to my practitioner days, it was apparent then that as product management goes, so goes the rest of the organization. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise since everything revolves around the products. My goal with this 10-part series on product portfolio management is to highlight the strategic ripple effect […]
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By John Mansour on October 9, 2023
How To Use a Portfolio Vision to Lead Products
Here’s why a portfolio vision is so critical to the success of your products and how it elevates Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to plan and execute more strategically. Think of your portfolio vision as the ultimate “strategic goal/outcome” your target customers want from your portfolio of products. Then think of the […]
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By John Mansour on October 4, 2023
Bridging the Gap – Strategic vs Tactical Customer Discovery
Market and customer discovery is the single most foundational skill for success in product management and product marketing. There are two things to consider when it comes to being more strategic in your discovery. One of them is obvious and the other is rarely if ever discussed. Let’s start with the obvious one, understanding what’s […]
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By John Mansour on October 3, 2023
Product Portfolio Management – Forecasting Revenue by Market vs. Product
Product managers and product marketing managers, if you’re into data driven decisions, forecasting revenue is one of the more difficult things you’re tasked with, especially for each product/module. There’s a good reason it’s so difficult. But here’s the bigger thing. With the recurring revenue models in B2B software, it’s not just product management and product […]
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By John Mansour on October 3, 2023
Product Roadmaps – The Forgotten Part That’s Taking You Nowhere Faster!
Think of your roadmaps, backlogs and sprints as a very specific set of turn-by-turn directions. For the most part, your teams can execute those directions very well. There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one. Where are you supposed to end up? What’s the destination? How will you know when you’ve arrived? Is it […]
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By John Mansour on September 11, 2023
The 3 E’s of a Great Sales Demo – A Chain Reaction
When all three of these factors are present, it’s going to be a great sales demo. There are a lot of steps in the sales process that can make or break a deal, but buyer politics aside, the demo is the biggest hurdle to clear because the product is the centerpiece of the evaluation. The […]
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By John Mansour on September 11, 2023
Customer Success – How To Build Relationships With Customer Executives
As the customer success manager (CSM) role evolves into more of a strategic customer leadership role versus a tactical reactionary role, it’s critical to build relationships with customer executives, and in most cases, it’s not as difficult as you think. Kudos if you’re already there. Relationships with customer executives aren’t only critical to customer success […]