What makes The Best Product Person person of 2012 tick?

In this last installment from a Q&A session I had with Andres Glusman of Meetup.com — and shedding some light onto just exactly what makes Andres truly The Best Product Person of 2012.

Looking Forward…

> What trends do you see in product management? positive trends? any negative trends?

We are moving towards an environment with faster cycles and greater experimentation. I’m witnessing firsthand, how this leads to significantly better results. That is also adding a lot of rigor to product development and significantly increasing our chances in making a difference with all the time and energy we invest.

I’m also seeing greater collaboration and sharing of best practices (we’ve opensourced our blueprint for making your own usability lab).

> How do you see product management evolving over the next 5 years?

I see the role evolving to be the person who orchestrates effective experiments while maintaining a cohesive user narrative. .

Nominate TBPP 2013 Today!

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun! The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded! Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

Stay Tuned

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of other articles exploring The Best Product People, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012: Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

What makes The Best Product Person person of 2012 tick?

Over the coming weeks we will be sharing segments of a Q&A session I had with Andres Glusman of Meetup.com — and shedding some light onto just exactly what makes Andres truly The Best Product Person of 2012.

Advice…

> What is the best career advice you received as you entered product management?

Break big projects into small batches. Get your earliest ideas infront of customers as fast as possible. Build, measure, learn.

> What is the hardest less you learned as a product manager?

Failure is the most likely outcome of any wildly creative endeavor. Go after the thing that is most likely to cause you to fail first. If you make it past that hurdle, you are probably on to something.

Nominate TBPP 2013 Today!

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun! The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded! Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks I will share more of my interview with Andres Gusman, The Best Product Person of 2012!

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring The Best Product Person of 2012, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012: Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

What makes The Best Product Person person of 2012 tick? 

Over the coming weeks we will be sharing segments of a Q&A session I had with Andres Glusman of Meetup.com — and shedding some light onto just exactly what makes Andres truly The Best Product Person of 2012.

In the now…

> Whose shoes would you like to walk in for a day? Why?

Everyone’s. Part of what I love about our usability lab is that it gives me so many opportunities to see the world from other people’s point of view. It is truly fascinating.

> What excites you about your current products?

I’m excited by the fact that I feel like we are doing something with massive potential. People regularly tell me that Meetup has changed their lives. It’s humbling because I feel like we are just getting started. We’ve got a ton of momentum now and we are executing experiments that are really paying off.

> What do you like most -and least – about being a product manager?

I love running experiments that impact millions of people and I love that this industry is so new that we are defining what this role is as we go.

The flipside of the newness coin is that we are all figuring it out as we go along. There is no playbook and there is a lot of variety in what it means to do Product Management across the industry. That makes it hard to swap best-practices and compare notes. I’m comfortable with that ambiguity, but I look forward to 10-15 years from now, when we will look back and laugh about how primitive our approaches were in 2012.

Nominate TBPP 2013 Today!

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun! The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded! Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks I will share more of my interview with Andres Gusman, The Best Product Person of 2012!

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring The Best Product Person of 2012, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012: Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

It’s January, so it must be time to kick-off our annual series diving-in and learning all about what makes The Best Product Person of 2012 tick. Over the coming weeks I will be sharing segments of a Q&A session I had with Andres Glusman of Meetup.com — and shedding some light onto just exactly what makes Andres truly The Best Product Person of 2012.

Getting to here…

> What key people helped shape you into the product manager you are today?

Everyone I’ve worked with at MU over the years. In particular Matt Trush, Scott Heiferman, Gary Burns, Greg Whalin, Peter Kamali, Matt Meeker, Chris Keane, & Dervala Hanley. Plus remarkable people in the Lean community including Giff Constable, Kareem Kouddous, Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

> How did you decide to become a product manager?

At my core, I’m really a social scientist (my background is in Economics & Psychology). I’m fascinated by people and what makes them tick. Working in product gives me the opportunity to understand and shape people’s behavior at scale. Since almost everything we do at Meetup is viewed as an experiment, we have an opportunity to try lots of approaches, see surprising results and double down. That’s a pretty awesome laboratory. Plus, for me getting into product at Meetup meant that I’d get to build a team with people who really inspire me.

> What inspires you in your day-to-day work?

The challenge of shaping the behavior of millions of people. What I do this week will impact millions of people next week.

Nominate TBPP 2013 Today!

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun!  The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded!   Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks I will share more of my interview with Andres Gusman, The Best Product Person of 2012!

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring The Best Product Person of 2012, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012: Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn 
The Product Guy

On Thursday, January 3rd, the 3rd annual winner of The Best Product Person (TBPP) was announced at The Product Group!

And, the winner of The Best Product Person (TBPP) of 2012 was Andres Glusman of Meetup.com!

It should be remembered, and now fully recognized, that there could be no winner without someone nominating him or her.

The individual who first nominates The Best Product Person of the year is also a winner!

This year, we extend a special Thank You and congratulations to Giff Constable, the first of many, who nominated Andres Glusman. Giff won a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com!

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun!  The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded!   Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

Key to many a product manager’s pursuits is excellence in user experience and design. And, so too, is this true for Giff. With his prize, he purchased the very cool book, from one of the most influential product designers of the 20th century, "Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible". An excellent read for any product manager, Dieter’s ideas can probably best be summed up in his 10 principles of good design:

• Good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic.
• Good design should be make a product easily understood.
• Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment.
• Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.

Again, congratulations to Andres Glusman #TBPP2012 and his first nominator, Giff Constable! Keep up the great work and we look forward to many more of your exciting contributions to the product community.

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012:Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn 
The Product Guy

About ‘The Best Product Person’

The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy (http://tpgblog.com) and The Product Group (http://meetup.com/theproductgroup).

TBPP Recognizes 1 person each year, invites them to speak and share their knowledge and experience with the larger product community. The nominations can be submitted by anyone. And, if you are the first to submit the winning nominee, you too will be rewarded  Over the course of the year, the various nominees are interviewed and the finalists narrowed down to: The Best Product Person of the year . The finalists are interviewed and evaluated for excellence in Product along the following lines… Becoming a Product Person, Your Product, Advice to Product People, and Future & Trends.

TBPP is both (1) the way the Product community gets together to recognize excellence amongst our ranks as well as (2) provide, to a large audience, insights into that excellence in a manner we can all learn from and leverage in our own Product journeys.

For more information about The Best Product Person award and past winners visithttp://tpgblog.com/tbpp

About ‘The Product Group’

The Product Group is an opportunity for Product Managers, etc. to come together to meet, interact, and network. It’s an awesome way to meet fellow Product People in a laid-back, conversational environment within which sharing and learning can flourish and complement the knowledge base for all on a peer-to-peer basis. The NYC chapter of The Product Group meets the first Thursday of each month. If you are interested in a establishing chapter near you, please contact The Product Guy or The Product Group for more information. (http://tpgblog.com/theproductgroup/ )

On Thursday, January 3rd, the 3rd annual winner of The Best Product Person (TBPP) was announced at The Product Group!

From the start of the nomination period we were inundated with nominations from every industry, large and small, from all around the World.  In the end, this year we received over 100 nominations with many receiving multiple nods for recognition in excellence in Product Management!

The Product Guy & The Product Group are very pleased to announce The Best Product Person of 2012 is Andres Glusman of Meetup.com!

Andres, at his core, sees himself as a social scientist, absolutely “fascinated by people and what makes them tick.”   A graduate of The Wharton School, he finds his inspiration and influences in his team and others like Giff Constable, Kareem Kouddous, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries.  He leads Meetup’s Strategy Team and is responsible for quantitative and qualitative customer discovery and validation (including Meetup’s usability lab which conducts 600+ sessions per year). Prior to Meetup, Andres has held marketing and strategy roles at Boeing, Yahoo, and i-traffic. He is also the Co-Organizer for the 3000+ member NYC Lean Startup Meetup.  For more about Andres and his team, check out http://www.meetup.com/about/.

Over the coming weeks we will be speaking with and learning more from Andres.

Thank you to everyone who participated, nominated, interviewed, AND passed on the word! The nomination period for The Best Product Person of 2013 has begun!  The individual who first nominates TBPP is also awarded!  This year, the first nominator of Andres received a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com.  Nominate your pick for The Best Product Person right now!

http://tbpp.wufoo.com/forms/the-best-product-person-of-2013/

And, don’t forget, take a moment and congratulate The Best Product Person of 2012: Andres Glusman. (tweet)

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn 
The Product Guy

About ‘The Best Product Person’

The Best Product Person (TBPP) is the leading international award honoring excellence in Product Management. Established in 2010, TBPP is awarded annually in association with The Product Guy (http://tpgblog.com) and The Product Group (http://meetup.com/theproductgroup).

TBPP Recognizes 1 person each year, invites them to speak and share their knowledge and experience with the larger product community. The nominations can be submitted by anyone. And, if you are the first to submit the winning nominee, you too will be rewarded  Over the course of the year, the various nominees are interviewed and the finalists narrowed down to: The Best Product Person of the year . The finalists are interviewed and evaluated for excellence in Product along the following lines… Becoming a Product Person, Your Product, Advice to Product People, and Future & Trends.

TBPP is both (1) the way the Product community gets together to recognize excellence amongst our ranks as well as (2) provide, to a large audience, insights into that excellence in a manner we can all learn from and leverage in our own Product journeys.

For more information about The Best Product Person award and past winners visit http://tpgblog.com/tbpp

About ‘The Product Group’

The Product Group is an opportunity for Product Managers, etc. to come together to meet, interact, and network. It’s an awesome way to meet fellow Product People in a laid-back, conversational environment within which sharing and learning can flourish and complement the knowledge base for all on a peer-to-peer basis. The NYC chapter of The Product Group meets the first Thursday of each month. If you are interested in a establishing chapter near you, please contact The Product Guy or The Product Group for more information. (http://tpgblog.com/theproductgroup/ )

What has quickly become a tradition, we are finishing off the first series of the year looking at our most recent annual winner of The Best Product Person. Chris Sarette, The Best Product Person of 2011, is the estimable subject of this series. Over the past weeks I have shared segments from a Q&A session I had with Chris — lending some insight into why Chris truly is The Best Product Person of 2011. 

In this final installment of the series we explore the path leading from here.

Looking forward…

> What trends do you see in product management? positive trends? any negative trends?

My sincere hope is that Mend is part of a trend that has people digging deeper to find out the people they’re affecting with their purchasing decisions. Right now, it’s very tough – you’re forced to rely on what you hope are sound business practices of the stores and brands you buy from. But I think the success of movements like Etsy and Farmers Markets is part of a growing trend to re-connect consumers to makers/providers, and the desire by consumers to shop with greater confidence.

> How do you see product management evolving over the next 5 years?

Both online and brick-and-mortar retailers are looking to provide a buying experience that’s more dynamic and exciting for consumers, and I think products will evolve to meet these expectations. I think we’ll see more and more of projects like Levi’s Water Less Jeans (http://store.levi.com/waterless/), which bring consumers into the manufacturing experience.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

What is quickly becoming tradition, we are kicking off the first series of the year looking at our most recent winner of The Best Product Person. Chris Sarette, The Best Product Person of 2011, is the estimable subject of this series. Over the coming weeks I will be sharing a segments of a Q&A session I had with Chris — and lending some insight into why Chris truly is The Best Product Person of 2011.

Advice…

> What is the best career advice you received as you entered product management?

Engineer excellence. Don’t think of quality as something you check for at the end of an assembly line, but rather as something that’s ingrained into every stop a product makes in its development.

> What is the hardest lesson you learned as a product manager?

Finding balance. You need to set realistic goals for yourself and your team, otherwise what should have been victories end up becoming failures, because you had unrealistic expectations from the start. At the same time though, you can’t afford to get comfortable in what you know. Pushing the boundaries of what you’re capable of will keep you motivated, and exciting to your consumers.

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks I will share more of my interview with Chris Sarette, The Best Product Person of 2011!

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring The Best Product Person of 2011, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

What is quickly becoming tradition, we are kicking off the first series of the year looking at our most recent winner of The Best Product Person. Chris Sarette, The Best Product Person of 2011, is the estimable subject of this series. Over the coming weeks I will be sharing a segments of a Q&A session I had with Chris — and lending some insight into why Chris truly is The Best Product Person of 2011.

In the now…

> Whose shoes would you like to walk in for a day? why?

I would love to see the world through the eyes of the industrial designers I get to work with. It fascinates me how they take everyday inspirations – something as nondescript as a bag of almonds – and pull beautiful shapes and functions out of them. Understanding the interactivity of proportions, textures, colors, and shapes as they do would be intriguing.

> What excites you about your current products?

With our Canvas Totes Series this holiday season, we aimed to reinvent what the public at large thinks a “cause bag” is, or is capable of being. We’ve been told that our machines, and our seamstresses, wouldn’t be able to work with leather – they did. Similarly, the prospect of setting up a screenprinting workshop in a remote area of the world was deemed lofty – and yet we have several hundred prints coming off the press on a weekly basis. I’m excited that we’re pushing the envelope of what people think this project should be capable of producing, and helping push a consumer’s expectations for African goods from craft to a durable and fashionable ware.

> What do you like most -and least – about being a product manager?

It’s easy to get frustrated at just about any step in a product’s evolution. Collaboration on design can get heated, when someone else is just as convinced as you are that another direction is better than what you have in mind. Then trying to match the particulars of a sample to the raw material factories in your knowledge base, while hitting the price points you need to hit, can leave you frazzled. To overcome all these obstacles, and then hit a snag in production because something like needles have suddenly become the scarcest commodity in Uganda, can leave you at your wit’s end. But while all these challenges are often the hardest part of being a product manager, the moment when you FINALLY get to check the box off next to any of these line items for a new product makes it all worth it. To finally carry around a bag that you helped bring to life, or better yet, to have someone compliment you on that bag you’re carrying around, is exhilarating.

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks I will share more of my interview with Chris Sarette, The Best Product Person of 2011!

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring The Best Product Person of 2011, or any other of the upcoming product person interviews, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy