Each week I scour articles, wading through the dogs, and bringing you the best insights to help product managers and innovators be heroes.

Congratulations to FIRST LEGO team 31492, Hack Attack, 1st place champions, Southern Colorado Qualifier. I am a first-time coach for the FIRST LEGO League, guiding a team of boys ages 10-12. Our first competition was Saturday. With 48 teams competing, we won 1st place and are heading to state in a few weeks! Awesome. It was an incredible experience for the boys, mentors, and my assistant coach. If you want to help the next generation of product managers and innovators, volunteer to coach a team. You’ll love it. Learn more at https://www.first-lego-league.org

PDMA 2017 conference was one of the best yet! Sarah Robb O’Hagan (@ExtremeSRO) kicked off the conference with an inspiring and informative keynote about the importance of failure on the path to success. Check out her book Extreme You. Carrie Nauyalis (@PDPMprincess) of Planview introduced Sarah in what is now known as the best intro ever — award-winning stand-up comedy great. Every session I attended was valuable. I also received praise for the two sessions I did – Thank You! One was how product groups in organizations are naturally accelerating their product capability and innovation through my study group approach (see https://productmasterynow.com/company-training/) and the other was a workshop for using the Lean Canvas as a minimum viable business case (see https://productmasterynow.com/blog/tei-010-titleusing-lean-to-run-experiments-and-deliver-customer-value-with-ash-maurya/). I hope you can attend next Nov – PDMA 2018!

A product portfolio management primer. Organizations have a universal issue – too many projects and opportunities and too few resources for them. Putting the right effort into the right product at the right time is one way of looking at product portfolio management. When organizations have more than one product, it becomes an important organizational capability to build. Read more at https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/11/product-portfolio-management-success-scale/

3 types of MVPS for product managers to use. (1) Confirm product/market fit, (2) test a hypothesis, and (3) enter the market. Read about each at http://www.cleverpm.com/2017/11/09/understand-the-purpose-of-your-mvp/

Content marketing in 4 steps for product managers. Product management and content marketing share a focus on understanding the customer served. Having an understanding of content marketing will help you create better marketing messages for your product. Check out this short tutorial at https://medium.com/@juanferrub/how-pms-can-give-a-hand-to-marketers-by-using-a-process-for-content-creation-ac73b247ba4

Manage product feature requests by using three categories. (1) Unresolved problems with an existing feature. (2) Feature improvements. (3) A brand new feature request. Details of each at https://blog.intercom.com/the-right-way-to-respond-to-feature-requests/