Product Leadership: The Four Pillars
Product Leadership seems to be the hottest topic in our profession. But do you know what it takes to be a great Product Leader? In this post, you’ll learn the four pillars of Product Leadership and discover key skills that can take your career from good to...
Product Innovation – How Product Managers Can Avoid an Expensive Trainwreck
Product innovation is the process of creating new products that generate increased value for your customers and your company. This means that for products to be successful, they need to solve a pain that customers are willing to pay for. While at the same time...
How to Build Solutions Your Customers Want (And Are Willing to Pay For)
Companies are looking at the Internet of Things as a powerful trend that can fuel new revenue opportunities. They see it as an opportunity to leap-frog the competition and significantly grow their revenues. And yet, many companies are failing and growing...
Impact Pricing – IoT Business Models and Pricing Strategies
Many companies make the mistake of launching IoT solutions without a business model plan or a pricing strategy. In this interview at the Impact Pricing podcast, I discuss best practices to avoid this pitfall. Companies often fall into the trap of believing that what...
How to Build Sustainable IoT Products
Sustainable IoT products continue to gain traction in the minds of top technology executives. And yet, very few companies have a clear understanding of how to incorporate sustainability into their product strategy—creating a big challenge and a great opportunity for...
Top IoT Challenges Product Leaders Face in 2020
What are the top IoT challenges Product Leaders face in 2020? To find out, I conducted a survey to hear directly from Product Leaders. In this post, I share the answers to the survey, as well as the insights I gathered throughout the process. I received 73 responses...
The 5 Layers of the IoT Technology Stack
In this post, I describe the 5 layers of the IoT technology stack and how Product Managers can incorporate them into their product strategy and roadmap. You’ve probably heard a lot about how the Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionize many areas of our...
What is an IoT Platform? (And How to Choose One)
An IoT platform is an integral part of any IoT product. It can help you accelerate your time-to-market, minimize risk, reduce development cost, and help you arrive at product-market fit faster. If you’re confused about IoT platforms, believe me, you are not alone....
How IoT Can Help Fight Climate Change
I believe IoT can help fight Climate Change. Unfortunately, many people only associate IoT with “convenience products” that don’t add a lot of value, such as smart toasters. (Just in case you were wondering why I’m on stage with images of big...
What Is the Internet of Things? A Product Management Perspective
What is the Internet of Things, anyway? Although most companies, analysts, and media outlets constantly talk about the Internet of Things (IoT), a large number of professionals struggle to understand what it actually is. It’s estimated that 15 billion devices...
What Is an IoT Product Manager?
As the Internet of Things continues to grow, more and more companies are trying to leverage this technology and business trend to grow their business and impact their bottom line. Despite the vast opportunities the Internet of Things provides, many companies are...
7 IoT Business Models That Are Transforming Industries
In this post, I describe the top seven IoT business models you can use to increase revenue, adoption, market share, and the profit of your product. I recently attended a very popular IoT conference in Silicon Valley. During a presentation, the keynote speaker asked...
Why User Onboarding Should NOT Be an Afterthought
Your product’s user onboarding experience matters, probably more than you think. A great user onboarding experience can increase product adoption, decrease support costs, and decrease sales and marketing costs… all of which contribute directly to your...
A Simple IoT Framework for Product Managers
In this post, I present an IoT framework to help Product Managers tackle the complexity of IoT products. This framework provides an easy-to-follow structure to uncover requirements at each layer of the IoT stack, including business decisions, technical decisions, and...
How to Build an IoT Product Roadmap
Let’s face it. Building an IoT product roadmap is hard—much harder than building roadmaps for “normal” technology products. That’s because IoT products are complex systems. To create a working solution, all layers of the IoT Technology Stack—device hardware, device...
How to Navigate Growth as a Product Manager
The job of a Product Manager can be challenging at even the most mature companies. But how do you manage growth at a company experiencing rapid success? When business is booming, new challenges arise for getting features to market faster, scaling quickly, and...
Securing the Internet of Things
Product Managers play a significant role in securing the Internet of Things. Unfortunately, this part of our job is not getting the right level of attention. Securing the Internet of Things is too often considered an after-thought or the responsibility of some other...
4 Ways to Enable Customization of Your IoT Product
Most Industrial IoT products are not designed to enable customization. Therefore, most products often fall short of “the last mile” to give Industrial customers exactly what they need since these customers are usually expecting a turn-key solution. To...
Data Acquisition: A Primer for IoT Product Managers
One of the key attributes of the Internet of Things is its ability to measure physical signals to better understand the world around us. It is a very important topic and one that Product Managers should have a good grasp on. In this post, I provide an introduction to...
Why There’s No Killer App for IoT
Every new technology trend brings speculation and talk about a “killer app” that will be the solution to all of our problems. Tech publications and blogs produce countless articles searching for the “killer app” for the iPhone, the Cloud,...
How to Differentiate Your IoT Product: Provide Insights Not Data
The goal of IoT products should be to product insights, not data. Some people even argue that the reason to deploy IoT products is to produce and collect all this data, that the data in itself is what provides the value. I don’t think so. In this post, I...
Why It’s So Hard to Create a Good User Experience in IoT
Creating a good user experience for IoT products is hard. There are more layers of technology, more users to please, and more teams to coordinate than ever before. Are you prepared to lead the way as a Product Manager? Throughout the years, UX practices have evolved...
5 Essential Steps for Getting into IoT Product Management
You want to get into IoT Product Management. But where do you start? What skills do you need? Which companies are working on IoT today? Start here, with these five essential steps for getting into IoT Product Management. These days, more and more companies are...
How Does an IoT Device Work?
Hardware decisions impact your IoT device’s cost, user experience, application capabilities, and more. But only about 20% of IoT Product Managers have experience managing hardware. In this post, I demystify the hardware inside IoT devices to help you understand...
7 Ways to Get a Product Management Job when You Lack Industry Experience
Many Product Managers still think industry experience is unnecessary to get hired. However, as a hiring manager, I know firsthand that industry experience can make a difference when deciding between final job candidates. Learn why hiring managers DO value industry...
Podcast: How to Use the IoT Decision Framework
I’m very excited to be featured in the IoT Inc Business Show! I had a great conversation with Bruce Sinclair, the host of the show, on how to use my IoT Decision Framework. Listen to the podcast Here’s a summary from Bruce Sinclair: “In this episode...
How to Protect Your IoT Product from Hackers
IoT security is tough and risky. A security breach can put human lives at risk, because hackers can get control of real-world objects. To make things worse, IoT products give hackers a new attack point: the physical device. How can you ensure your IoT product is...
People Don’t Buy IoT, They Buy a Solution to a Problem
Too many product teams and entrepreneurs think, “If I connect it, they will come.” The problem is that people don’t buy IoT, they buy a solution to a problem. In this post, I talk about an excellent example of IoT solving a customer problem, and...
IoT Product Management at Stanford University
My Product Management for the Internet of Things at Stanford Continuing Studies (BUS-145) expands on my IoT Decision Framework and focuses on all the areas you need to consider when building an IoT product. Note: My next time teaching this course at Stanford will...
How Internal Tools Can Make or Break Your IoT Solution
Great Product Managers know that a robust IoT solution includes more than the customer-facing part; it also includes the internal tools your company needs to manage customers and conduct its operations. Without these internal tools, your development team can...