There's a vast difference between an average PM and an excellent PM. Yet if you google "what makes a great PM?", you only get a list of lowest-common-denominator qualities: organized, good communicator, reliable, blah, blah, blah.

Of course it's important to be organized and communicate well. But that's just the starting point. So what specific traits are we looking for to truly separate the top tier project managers from all the rest?​

Tired of generic 2022 predictions about remote work, cloud, and data? Here are 5 specific trends for software business leaders to consider:

One of the biggest challenges of a new startup is generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs). A startup is a race: you are burning through limited funding, and every day you need to go all-out before funding runs out. Along the way, you are demonstrating progress to leadership and investors, and there's no better way to keep their confidence than pointing to a pipeline of fresh daily leads.

So how do you get MQLs for your startup ASAP?

You're at an established company that wants to break into a new market or new geography. Where do you start?

Product and service offerings follow a growth lifecycle:

1. Product/market fit - you have a great idea but need to figure out the formula for repeatable growth - what market, what problem are you solving, who will pay for that, how to monetize, how to make it a repeatable formula. Many startups fail if they can't figure this out.
2. Growth - once you figure out the formula, you can scale up sales, marketing and product to operationalize the growth, meeting quarterly targets. Riding this wave, owners need to judge whether and when to sell, or keep going.
3. Flatline and Decline - eventually, offerings hit a flatline period where their traditional markets are starting to be saturated, commoditized, or disrupted. Growth is hard, your operational leaders are hammering away at what used to work, wondering why it's not generating the same result, all the while playing politics to stay afloat. 

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Once you hit Flatline and Decline, it is very hard to bounce back. Stories of flatlining businesses that suddenly take off again are rare indeed. While there are ways to resuscitate a flatlining business, the ideal is to NEVER GET THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE and instead take the right actions to ensure continuous growth.

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SaaS businesses are all the rage! Even companies that have success with traditional products are re-thinking their business as a SaaS offering, to reap the many benefits:

• Valuation. Even if all you sell is basically the same product to the same customers, but on a "SaaS" model, that can be enough to attract new investors and increase your valuation by an order of magnitude.
• Recurring revenue. SaaS implies a subscription model, which lends itself to more recurring revenue, or at least more predictable recurring revenue.
• Additional revenue streams. SaaS businesses can collect and monetize anonymized customer data, including patterns of customer behaviour. They can serve ads to different customer segments, or upsell partnering products.
• Product stickiness. Customer behaviour data can be analyzed to quickly assess how to make the product more sticky. Feature "experiments" can be run on different customer segments.
• Reduced operational costs. Cloud technology can theoretically allow for a zero IT footprint on the client site, reducing deployment and support costs. And because SaaS is also usually "self-service" ie. purchased and upgraded directly online, it can reduce sales overhead as well.
• Access to new markets, such as SME and mid-market customers that increasingly buy only SaaS.

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These benefits are so attractive that every and any product and business model is being re-imagined as SaaS, leading to some great ideas (e.g. Spotify, Coursera, bacon-of-the-month dropped off at your doorstep!). But not every business lends itself intuitively to a SaaS model. Especially if you have years of legacy technology and processes established with an existing customer base, the transition won't happen overnight. There are key questions to answer in each facet of the business.

Yes the PMP exam does have many "trick questions"! ​Here is my cheat sheet of tricks, gotchas and pitfalls collected about these questions. You have to be very careful about the wording and cut through the noise in the question to find what the really important answer is. This is meant to simulate project management in the real-world, where day-to-day you have to cut through the noise and make decisions based on what's truly important. There is also lots of terminology, acronyms and references to names of theories and principles that you need to know, and sometimes these terms are not even in the PMBOK itself. 

Who are the people that can't live without your product? Why is that product a must-have for them? And what is the difference between these must-have users compared to other users for whom it's just a nice-to-have? These questions are at the root of scaling growth. Find your must-have users.

Yet, when planning target markets, it’s human nature to want to go broad. There is a feeling of safety and comfort. “Why, my product has hundreds of uses, for everyone! Let me list the ways…” But one of the great paradoxes of growth is that, in general, the more broadly you define target markets, the less business you actually take in. It literally pays to get more targeted.

Now that you've read the The Complete Guide to Customer Research Interviews, you know that gathering intelligence from customer interviews, market analysis, online research, win/loss analysis, is critical to developing a strategy that drives product-market fit and growth. But once you have accumulated all your customer and market insights, what do you actually do with it? Here are 5 immediate steps to infuse your strategy with intelligence in practice.

A company is only as secure as its weakest link. But what if the weakest link isn't at the company at all, but rather one of its third-party vendors? A company can reinforce its own security posture by training its staff and implementing the latest tech, but it still has to provide access and share information with its suppliers, and its suppliers’ suppliers, and so on along the chain. With each degree of separation, the company has less control over its suppliers’ security – especially small suppliers lacking security controls. But when there is a data breach, no matter how far along in the supply chain (e.g. even if it's your vendor's vendor's vendor), you yourself bear the consequences.

Last year I was fortunate to attend several all-day Chief Security Officer (CISO) roundtables on data protection with some of the top CISOs from Fortune 500 and beyond. Imagine being the CISO of a huge company like Honeywell with over 100,000 employees made up of hundreds of loosely coupled acquisitions worldwide, or Thales, a $17B organization and itself an industry leader in security. Imagine being the CISO of one of the major international banks like JP Morgan. As the CISO, what would be most on your mind? What would be keeping you up at night? Here are the 5 recurring themes I heard.