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How to align stakeholders
Best practices in product management leadership
How to create value together
Product Management Using the Analogy of Cake
Building a product can be exciting and fun. Sometimes, people get excited about the frosting (or the features) instead of the cake (or the main goal of the product). This can be dangerous because the frosting might not be the most important thing.
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88 reads
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Cake vs. Frosting
If you are a business that makes or sells products, it is important to be able to tell the difference between the cake (the product's core features) and the frosting (the product's extra features). The cake is like the foundation of a building - it might not look very pretty, but it is what makes...
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132 reads
Demand the Cake, Not Frosting
The fancier the frosting, ask more about the quality of the cake.
- “What’s cake, and what’s frosting here?”
- “Let’s see the plumbing instead of the PowerPoint.”
- “I don’t care how great it looks. Tell me how it works.”
- “Forget the fro...
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98 reads
Using Tap as an Analogy
A tap is a household item that delivers water. It can be a simple, old tap, or a more elaborate tap with special features. The important thing is that it delivers water to your hands.
There are all sorts of different taps, like bronze, gold-plated, copper, marble, and tap w...
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100 reads
Frosting Sells
Some people focus too much on making frosting that looks good, instead of making a cake that tastes good. This is also true for investment pitches and sales pitches. People can be easily distracted by the beauty of a pitch deck or website, without realizing that the engineering might not be good....
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96 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
A great comparison is drawn between cake and frosting in Priya Narasimhan's explanation of product management.
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
Minimum Viable Product
The Minimum Viable Product is the simplest, most basic form of a product or service, which can be sold in the market. This doesn't have all of the bells and whistles but has enough features to work. Basically, it is good enough but not perfect.
Releasing an MVP allows one to get feedback at...
4. My product manager is wrong, I would do it better
It can be challenging to plan every detail of the project.
From a product manager view you have to think about the limitations of the technology, you have to think about users who will use your product, you cannot forget about business and marketing requirements and so on.
Sometimes,...
Attach reason to the task
Getting motivated about a task doesn’t mean you have to be happy or excited about it.
Sometimes you must ask yourself: Why is this task important? What will it bring about in my life? The answer could be as simple as I won’t get fired.
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