Improving software product management: a knowledge management approach

The skills and practices of a product manager can be seen as part of the intellectual capital of a software vendor. From this perspective, it is surprising that knowledge regarding software product management is not yet widely available. This impedes many companies from effectively improving their SPM methods. To support knowledge dissemination, method assessment, and method improvement in this and other areas, we propose the online method engine. The solution combines knowledge management principles with incremental process improvement in order to allow software companies to obtain improvement guidance for their SPM methods, specific to their situation. The approach is designed to be domain-independent.