Product management at Haas

November 12th, 2005

I came across an excellent piece on product management today. The Haas School invited a few distinguished product managers to deliver a presentation on the PM space. One of them comes from Ken Norton, who’s posted the presentation on his website.

Product management has been a curiosity of mine, so much so that it’s one of the reasons I enrolled at McCombs. I always admired the skills needed to build a great product, despite not having much authority or oversight.

To date, I’ve learned quite a bit about project management in my Operations course (thanks to Goldratt’s Critical Chain). Of course, there’s a big difference between project and product management. I could anticipate the subject coming up when my marketing course kicks in next semester. Still, it’s cool to see similarities cropping up between the two. Check out Ken’s PDF presentation…there’s an equation that he uses to estimate time. His breakdown assumes a 1/6 chance of a project not being delivered on time. Not coincidentally, that’s one standard deviation from the normal distribution curve. That’s pure Goldratt.

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