How Take Charge Product Management Came to Be

Steven and I are very actively engaged in the product management community. We conduct product manager and product team training’s for individuals and organizations, I teach product management at DePaul University, and we regularly do webinars and public speaking.

Most of these opportunities result from the success of our books. In fact, I’m pleased to say my book is number one in the UK and Canada and number two in the US on Amazon.com as of this writing (in the field of product management).

Almost every week someone asks what led me to write Take Charge Product Management? The truth is, I never had a grand plan to write a book.

I actually started in sales a number of years ago and made my way into the product management profession over time. I honestly believe that most people eventually end up doing what they enjoy – even if they start out somewhere else. You tend to be good at what you enjoy doing.

My path included running product management for three separate organizations before the opportunity presented itself to form Actuation Consulting and write my first book. I was contacted on a crisp winters afternoon by an editor associated with McGraw Hill and asked if I would be interested in putting my thoughts and experiences down on paper. I had never contemplated doing this, so I had to give it some thought before agreeing to submit a sample chapter.

The rest is history and a lot of hard work. Writing a book, at least for me, requires singular focus. Something that is harder to do today with all of life’s complexities and interruptions.

What drove me to write the book? I had witnessed firsthand the struggles organizations have in effectively implementing product management. I realized that, as a three-time leader of Product Management, I was continuously stepping into organizations that were struggling to effectively implement product management and that each time I was asked to run product management I had to reteach the continuously evolving material to my team of product managers.

I started to wonder if perhaps there was a way to reach a broader audience, share what I had learned, and help individuals to acquire skills and knowledge that would make them ultimately more successful.

That was the impetus for the book.

Product managers come from almost every function and we all end up learning as we go. This won’t always be the case – but those are today’s realities. My book was intended to help new product managers effectively step into the role and not have to recreate the wheel.

Speaking of which, a friend of ours Hakan Kilic is sharing his thoughts about some new product management toolkits we recently introduced based upon our books and popular demand. If you’re interested in reading his review click here.

Steve picks up the Agile enterprise-wide transformation trail again in our next post. Stay tuned…

 

Greg Geracie is a recognized thought leader in the field of product management and the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management consulting, training, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management. He is also an adjunct professor at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on high-tech and digital product management.