Dec 21. Product-related requests from customers help align the product with customer’s needs, shed light on how they use the product and generally improve the attractiveness of the product to its target market. However, sometimes, these requests become disruptive. Read Daniel Shefer's Disruptive Customer Demands.

Dec 20. Stuck at headquarters, it’s easy to forget customer realities and needs. Great PMs know that internal goals and criteria are only one part of a successful product. Frequent escapes to talk with live customers are essential to remind us of what’s important. Read Rich Mironov's Product Bytes for December.

Dec 17. Before the testing and bug fixing, before the technical design and product plan, before the business and technical requirements, comes the Product Roadmap. Jacques Murphy describes Product Roadmap to the Promised Land.

Dec 12. Large companies are beginning to understand the value proposition of intelligently linking sales and marketing, and how such systems will become a critical component in competing in ever-increasing, cutthroat environments. This paper details specifically how Sales and Marketing Effectiveness software can dramatically improve win rate. Read The Next Wave in Marketing Software--How to Improve Win Rate with SME.

Dec 9. A recent survey reports that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned.

Dec 8. Three-quarters of the money spent in product development investments results in products that do not succeed commercially--from Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen.

Dec 6. One of product managers’ most challenging issues is tracking and analyzing volumes of product and competitive data. This has never been more true than in today’s fast-paced, competitive environments where combating competitive maneuvers carries strategic urgency.  Tim Levey of Promere Software discusses Managing Complex Competitive Environments.

Dec 3. How many times have you been on the receiving end of a web-based (remote) demonstration and found your attention wandering? Worse, do you find yourself flipping over to read email, or muting your telephone speaker to talk with colleagues, or simply dropping out of the demonstration? Read Achieving Success With Remote Software Demonstrations by Peter Cohan.

Dec 1. Joel writes: "Making software is not a manufacturing process. In the 1980s everyone was running around terrified that Japanese software companies were setting up "software factories" that could churn out high quality code on an assembly line. It didn't make any sense then and it doesn't make sense now. Shoving a lot of programmers into a room and lining them up in neat rows did not really help get the bug counts down." Read the full article on Joel on Software.

Nov 27. A new Turkey and Gravy Soda tastes, well, pretty much like you would imagine. But that's not stopping people from buying it. Even the producers of the Thanksgiving-themed beverage at Jones Soda Co. were surprised by the demand. They sold out all 6,000 bottles online within about two hours last week.

My friend Daniel comments: "Two things in this world do not have limits: Human stupidity and bad taste. Imagine, they got two with one shot...."

Nov 25. Peter Cohan describes How the Demo Lost the Business.

Nov 20. Fast Company discusses Clayton Christenson's new Innovator's Solution. It addresses the disturbing message of Innovator's Dilemma: If good management is the root cause of failure, then good management can't help companies escape the cycle of disruption and death. But if the agreed-upon principles of success can't resolve the dilemma, then what can? How do you build a company that can both endure and disrupt?

Nov 19. Larry Weber offers these tips for leading a company (or product):

• Build a community, not a company.
• Roll out the welcome mat for nomadic customers.
• Good communities are not built on monologues.
• Act like a great mayor.
• Marketing is job one.
• Love your competitors.

Nov 17. Eran Livneh shares The Secret of Moulin Rouge and the Art of Product Positioning.

Nov 5. Jacques Murphy writes Requirements: Like Lambs to the Slaughter, a look the process of writing and prioritizing requirements.

Nov 4. Daniel Shafer writes Nine Things Product Managers Should Know About Supporting Sales.

Oct 31. Mark Hurst of GoodExperience.com reminds us: "The only reason users use the Web to do anything is because it's a better experience than doing it in the real world."

Oct 27. A perennial problem for Product Management is finding the right organizational home. In companies large enough to have a PM department, it has a tendency to oscillate between Marketing and Engineering. Two root causes for this are role confusion and organizational distance. Read the full article in Rich Mironov's Product Bytes.

Oct 23. Bob Levy of BostonProducts offers tips for Founding a Product Management Association.

Oct 21. Steve Johnson discusses the product management triad in an interview on SoftwareCEO. The interview will be available until Oct 28 and then will be archived to their "members only" section.

Oct 13. I spoke with Mike Bosworth last week and learned that his new book, CustomerCentric Selling, will be available in late November. The creator of Solution Selling, Bosworth has updated his methods for selling big ticket items while avoiding the often adversarial relationship between buyer and seller. I've preordered it and will post a review when it arrives.

Oct 12. Jacques Murphy writes: One of the biggest headaches for software companies is the creation of RFPs. RFPs are labor intensive, exhaustive and exhausting efforts to tout the product. The effort to produce RFPs can be a drain on precious resources in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. And Product Managers get involved more often than they should. Read more.

Oct 8. I've been using a new clock in sync with my presentations: Topmost Clock from SoftDemon. It stays on top of everything but is transparent so you can see (and click) under it. Perfect for presenters who want to know the time but don't want to be obviously looking at their watches... and pretty cool for just knowing the time without obscuring the desktop.

Oct 5. Daniel Shefer writes Ten Things Product Managers Should Know About Sales.

Sep 29. Seth Godin writes: "The simple way to win the skirmish over the do not call list is this: Whenever a telemarketer calls, answer with enthusiasm and put them on hold. If we spread the word about this strategy, the industry will give up. With tiny margins, they can't afford the loss in productivity if only 10% of us are able to put the callers on endless hold."

Sep 28. "Product managers are charge of whipping up all the other departments and getting them to work together. This is to make sure that the product gets pulled forward by a coordinated team of horses, rather than torn apart by horses running in different directions."--from All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald S Passman.

Sep 25. Joel has a new office with what seems to be the perfect programming environment. Read more... and tell your facilities people to read it too.

Sep 25. Customer service translates into brand preference. We know this but few businesses seem to actually do it. Fast Company profiles how a tire business differentiates itself from the rest using customer service. Read the full article....

Sep 18. Acknowledging the failures of the largest merger in U.S. history, the board of AOL Time Warner Inc. voted Thursday to remove the letters "AOL" from the company's name.

Sep 10. Microsoft today warned computer users about a new critical security hole in its Windows operating system that could allow an attacker to gain control over a computer, delete data and install unwanted programs.

Sep 9. Forrester has been doing web site reviews for the past few years, testing for usability and grading test sites on specific site characteristics. Grades for each characteristic range from +2 (strong pass) to -2 (strong failure), with maximum and minimum possible scores of +50 and -50. In their latest review of some 375 web sites, Forrester found that site managers still had quite a lot of work to do. The average score was a dismal -1.5.

Sep 5. Reviled by Internet users, scorned by Internet service providers, and hounded by antispam activists--spammers are apparently seeking comfort in numbers. Since the beginning of the year, over 150 junk e-mailers have joined The Bulk Club, an online service that offers tips, tools and a community for spammers, according to a membership list accidentally left exposed at the club's website.

Sep 4. Daniel Shefer gives a tour of techniques that product marketers can use to better support the sales effort. Read Shortening the Sales Cycle.

Sep 3. Before your next positioning session, check out The Visual Thesaurus. Based on the ThinkMap platform, it shows words and definitions, letting you navigate their synonyms graphically.

Sep 2. McKinsey Quarterly reports: Many companies have tried to get more from their sales efforts over the past ten years by packaging their goods as solutions: integrated offerings of products and services. But too many companies are trying to sell solutions when all they really have are product bundles that represent little added value. Real solutions are highly integrated, add value greater than the sum of their parts, and are difficult for customers—and competitors—to disaggregate.

Aug 30. IDC reports that IBM reclaimed the number 1 spot in the worldwide server systems market, with 30.4% market share in factory revenue and 10% year-on-year revenue growth. HP, which had gained the number 1 spot in 1Q03 on the strength of its year-old merger with Compaq, held the number 2 spot in 2Q03, with 27.7% share and flat year-on-year revenue growth. However, HP retained its lead in factory revenue in the Linux server and Windows server market segments. Sun Microsystems and Dell remain the number 3 and number 4 server vendors worldwide, respectively, followed by Fujitsu Siemens in the number 5 spot.

Aug 28. This month’s Product Bytes is called Parenting and the Art of Product Management. Much of good product management makes for good parenting... or is it vice versa? Click here for the full article.

Aug 27. An article in the New York Times relates that not all lessons learned during the internet craze were bad. In summary:

• Being a Luddite is bad, but being a technophile can be worse.
• There is a difference between red tape and necessary procedures.
• Speed can connote efficiency as well as recklessness.
• Employee loyalty isn't an outdated concept.
• It is often easy to do more with less.
• The Internet may not be a great business model, but it is a great business tool.
• Managers must value elan and encourage optimism.

Aug 26. In his book FusionBranding: How To Forge Your Brand for the Future, author Nick Wreden talks a new look at branding, noting that brands are built by organizations, not by marketing departments. Recent efforts at branding were largely wasted as they focused on advertising and not creating customer satisfaction and ultimate loyalty. In many companies, branding and positioning are used as "tricks" to fool the customer into thinking a vendor has something special. Wreden argues that excellence in operations and customer support are the keys to winning a long-term brand proposition. The old-style consumer goods positioning approach just doesn't work for technology products. If branding is your area of interest, FusionBranding offers an approach that makes sense for technology companies focused on the future.

Aug 9. Today's word (from m-w.com): oligopsony \ah-luh-GAHP-suh-nee\ noun : a market situation in which each of a few buyers exerts a disproportionate influence on the market.

Aug 4. I just re-read The Deadline by Tom DeMarco. It's just an excellent book for product managers and development leads. Click here to read my review.

July 29. Barb asks, Why is it so easy to find good examples of bad marketing writing? In a McAfee Personal Firewall Plus mailing we read: "Using heuristic-like functionality, McAfee provides a tertiary layer of protection by logging items that display symptoms of attacks or characteristics of hack attempts." Huh?

July 27. In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters by Merrill "Rick" Chapman. Since the beginning of the computing industry, technology companies have wondered about the value of marketing. This book explains the winners and losers in the context of marketing disasters. Rather than search for excellence, Chapman searches for explanations of how once high-flying companies fail. Positioning mistakes abound, as do mistakes resulting from executive and engineering arrogance. Using a combination of personal anecdotes and astute industry observation, Chapman proves he has been there. He shows us marketing and operational mistakes for companies like IBM, Apple, Lotus, and Novell, as well as almost forgotten MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, and Borland. Chapman has a clever and funny style, making the book very readable.

July 23. IBM's top employee relations executives said that 3 million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 and that IBM should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries.

July 21. This month's Product Bytes discusses technology product roadmaps. Click here to read the newsletter.

July 15. Charles Fishman writes, "Every corporate giant says it wants to change. Few can do it. Every young company starts as a natural force for change. Few can sustain it. Every organization has people who think they want to be agents of change. Few can survive it."

July 14. Peter Cohan just send me a copy of his new book called "Great Demo: How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations." Designed for sales engineers or "Field Application Scientists" as he calls them, Great Demo gives straightforward advice on creating software demos.

July 12. Here's a great one: "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't." Download all the Pragmatic Marketing Quotes with quotes for sales, marketing, development, product management, and ... life.

July 2. Are you receiving the Pragmatic Marketing® newsletter? The new issue contains an article about Running Customer Advisory Boards and more. Read more...

June 27. The "Do Not Call Register" from the government is up and active. If you do not want to receive calls from telemarketers this is a new data base available in which to register your home telephone number. You may receive further instructions and explanations from the web site. The location of the site is www.donotcall.gov. (Almost 2 million people signed up on the site's first day.) My friend Eddie thinks that they should set up a telemarketing company to call people to ask them if they don't want to be called. The ultimate in telemarketing irony!

June 26. Is there a product management association in your area? Click here to find out. Also, click here if you need a copy of the Pragmatic Marketing® grid.

June 19. The key to Microsoft's success may be a combination of operational excellence with competitive paranoia. It seems that they flounder until they have a clear competitor in their cross-hairs: Word Perfect, Netscape, OS/2. Current challengers: MSN versus AOL, Linux versus Windows, and MSN Search versus Google.

June 17. It's really amazing how United Airlines succeeds and fails in the same day. My flight from Dulles to Denver was delayed, causing me to potentially miss my connection. But their computers knew it hours in advance and automatically rescheduled my out-going flight and notified me via pager, phone, and email. Astounding!! But once I arrived at the airport, the excellent computing-based experience was replaced by the dreadful human-based experience. Lines for check-in, lines for security, lines for upgrades, and lines for boarding. Once on-board in business class, we were greeted with uncomfortable seats, terrible food, and surly service. It used to be the other way: computers were hostile and people were friendly. How I wish that American, United, and Delta would hold a focus group of their top travelers to figure out how to run a business both at a profit and with a good customer experience. Be sure to check out United'sEasyUpdate--at least their computers are friendly.

June 13. "Maintaining a complicated life is a great way to avoid changing it, " argues simplicity guru Elaine St. James. Busy product managers should read "Get a Life" on Fast Company.

May 29. Michael Fischler gives us a Golden Rule of positioning: A strong position is one that already exists in the mind of the market segment. Find his other excellent articles at MarketingProfs.com.

May 28. A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is a representative group of customers that meets periodically to offer advice on the product and company direction. These meetings are a great way to validate that your product direction is in sync with your customers' technology and business plans. Key customers can look at your plans and provide valuable feedback about your strategy. Read full article.

May 19. Hunter Hastings writes, "The concept of marketing R.O.I. is almost universally misunderstood and therefore the practice of R.O.I. analysis is usually faulty."

May 13. This month's Product's Bytes is about gathering competitive intelligence with some tips for using third-parties.

May 8. Check out Ambient Orb. They describe it this way: "This frosted glass Orb slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your kid is on instant messenger." It is cool--or is it just possible?

May 3. The landmark book on user interface has been updated. About Face 2.0 : The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper discusses the value of design in the development process, an area where we are unfortunately lacking in high-tech. Designed for product managers and their development counterparts, it drills down into user interface design with ample case studies to bring home the value of designing instead of just coding. Updated in 2003 with new examples to reflect current metaphors.

May 2. Management upheaval. Labor discord. A brush with Chapter 11. Last week was a bad one for American Airlines (AMR). It was almost as bad, though, for customers left wondering (among other things), "Is my American flight still on? What about my future travel plans? And what's up with my frequent-flier miles?" Those clicking to AA.com for answers were dealt a rude shock: a business-as-usual homepage and zero customer reassurance.

Apr 29. Was your last product D.O.A? Maybe it's time for Product Marketing Forensics. Jim Foxworthy, a former Pragmatic Marketing instructor, now offers product marketing consulting for technology companies including product marketing triage, roles definition, and product positioning creation.
http://www.marketingforensics.com

Apr 26. Those concerned with security may be surprised at how willing employees are to share passwords with strangers. A recent survey by the organizers of the Infosecurity Europe conference found that 90% of office workers would reveal their passwords to a questioner at Waterloo Station in London. Last year, 65% of those surveyed gave up their passwords. The most popular passwords were people's names (16%), followed by football (or soccer) team names (11%) and birthdays (8%). The most common single password (12%) was "password"!

Apr 21. Southwest Airlines posted another profitable quarter while American dropped executive bonus plans that raised objections from the unions. It's interesting to look at the major airlines as product management examples, both good and bad. They solve a market problem but Southwest sells profitably and American doesn't. Why do customers enjoy flying Southwest and suffer American et al?

Apr 17. Software Product Management Best Practices is a study focusing on the best practices in enterprise software product management.  Developed by SoftwareMinds in collaboration with Pragmatic Marketing®, the survey will answer questions like:

• How does the product management discipline in our organization compare to our industry peers?
• What are ways in which product management activities should be measured?
• What are the factors that contribute most to developing and executing a viable product plan?
• How does the product lifecycle affect the product management process?

Apr 15. Instant messaging has become a corporate tool for many product managers. It's a great way to have a quick discussion with someone on another floor, across town, or across the globe. But which of the messengers should you use? I've started usingTrillian, which integrates all five different messengers into a single window. Cost: free or $25/year.

Apr 11. News: Microsoft Sues Lucent in Complex Patent Case. NEW YORK (Reuters)--Microsoft Corp. has filed a lawsuit to invalidate some patents held by telecom equipment maker Lucent Technologies Inc., which itself is suing Dell Computer Corp. and Gateway Inc. over the same rights, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Apr 9.Automation Access, a System Integrator specializing in small business, gives a status report of today's technologies with many links to supporting research. Some of the statements:

• The PC software industry is in the final days of being destroyed by Microsoft.... Soon there will be Microsoft, Intuit, and Symantec.
• Without an effective, well designed and well promoted Web site, your business, products or services, aren't going to be considered at all.... Not long ago, there were three network domains: LAN (Local Area Network), WAN (Wide Area Network) and "The Internet" (a very large peer-to-peer WAN). Today, there is only one: "The Internet".
• Web Services is becoming a very big thing, with the bulk of new system development within the corporate environment being rapidly moved to Web Services.
• Wireless has been around for some time, but only recently has it been able to overcome its traditional value proposition, "We're a lot more expensive, but we're a lot slower". Today, the price and performance differential is still there, but wireless is fast enough and cheap enough for a variety of uses. You use wireless where it is impractical to use wire, and nowhere where it is practical to use wire.
• Other than huge amounts of discussion and thousands of column inches by "experts", formation of high level government committees and papers issued by them, nothing substantial has been done [about computer security].

Apr 7. I just discovered Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job. The blurb says this: Whether you are a veteran programmer seeking a new position, or a whiz-kid starting your first job search, interviewing for a programming job requires special preparation. The interviewer will present you with several challenging programming problems, and give you an hour or so to find the most elegant and economical solutions while being watched the entire time. This helpful guide will give you the tools necessary to breeze through the test and make a lasting impression that will land you the job!

Mar 26. The technology spending recovery is coming--next year, says Gartner chief executive Michael Fleischer.

Mar 20. Today I did my first webinar in years, sponsored by SPM and Interwise. It was fun but strange. The Interwise software worked extremely well, doing voice  and graphics over a dial-up connection. But I learned that I'm not very good at multitasking...  I'd be watching some of the widgets on the screen and then realize that I forgot what I was talking about! A webinar is certainly different from a face-to-face meeting.

Mar 12. Do you fly a lot? Wanna know the best seat? Check out Seat Guru with commentary on seating options by aircraft for each major airline.

Mar 11. IDC reports the deep cuts to IT marketing budgets over the past two-plus years are symptomatic of a much larger problem plaguing technology marketing – IT marketers are struggling with measurement and will likely face enduring budget scrutiny until their capabilities improve.

Mar 6. Thursday is the time to stay home and get some work done. Read Time for product management.

Mar 5. In his Good Experience newsletter, Mark Hurst writes, "By now you may have heard of the study that proclaimed Google to be 'brand of the year.' Above Coke. This is for a company that is less than 10 years old, with no advertising firm, and almost no visual elements anywhere on its site."

Mar 3. The number of high-tech companies pursuing long-term branding strategies is down sharply. Results of the study, presented at the Silicon Valley Branding Forum in Palo Alto, show that only 60 percent of the 1,100 companies surveyed have implemented long-term brand identity strategies. The study also documents a "brand divide" between small and large technology companies. While 84 percent of large tech companies have a long-term brand strategy in place, only 43 percent of small companies and 66 percent of medium-sized companies do.

Feb 22. Mohanbir Sawhney writes that typical vendors do not really deliver solutions; instead they merely offer tools that require customers to create their own solutions.

Feb 19. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is a proposed uniform law that would create new rules for software licensing, online access and other transactions in computer information. UCITA was originally a joint project of the American Law Institute (ALI) and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. So far it has passed only in Virginia and Maryland.

Feb 14. In "Top Six Sales Guide Mistakes, " Gwyn Finnell writes, "Most companies spend their marketing budgets generating market awareness, but spend precious little equipping their sales force with the knowledge to sell."

Feb 5. From Ziff-Davis: 'Microsoft's 10-Q filing revealed one of the more telling signs of Microsoft's woes: the open-source threat. It's more than just an annoyance—the company claims open source is "a significant challenge to its business model."

Feb 4. New to the job of product management (or perhaps product manager for a new product?)? Brandon Whichard advises Where to begin in product management.

Jan 28. Hilton Hotels Corporation announced it is installing wireless connectivity in the common areas and meeting spaces in the 55 U.S. company–owned and managed Hilton brand hotels. The announcement follows a similar declaration by Marriott International, which is building on the existing wired infrastructure in 400 of its hotels to add wireless capability in public spaces and meeting rooms.

Jan 28. A January report by Keynote Systems found that many messages sent via Short Message Service (SMS) are never arriving at their destination. The study conducted in the United States found 7.5 percent of messages are not received. That may sound like a small number but the performance gap has implications for companies trying to get SMS to catch on for businesses and consumers in the U.S.

Jan 25. A fast-moving computer worm slowed down Internet access Saturday for about 22,000 servers, according to the Internet security firm Symantec. Oliver Friedrichs, a senior manager with Symantec, said the SQL worm was taking advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server that was detected (and fixed) six months ago .

Jan 21. Forrester Research To Acquire Giga Information Group. Is this the beginning of consolidation of the analysts?

Jan 18. The Online Publishers Association reports that the total market for paid online content in the third quarter of 2002 grew to $361.4 million. This represents a 14 percent gain over the previous quarter and a whopping 105.3 percent gain over the same quarter in 2001. Through the first three quarters of 2002, paid online content totaled $975 million, compared to $670 for all of 2001.

Jan 11. Charlie Knapp reports: Mobium Creative Group in Chicago recently released survey results that identify top problems with b-to-b communications. The survey, which was conducted in conjunction with a Starch research audit of business-to-business ads, produced the following results:

• Contain too much product and company information and lose the key message--74%.
• Marketing communications messages don't address the needs and concerns of the target audience--66%.
• Ads are full of "chest pounding" by companies--39%.
• They lack human interest and passion--28%.
• They don't take creative risks--20%.
• Contain stock photographs of corporate environments--19%.

Jan 10. Over time, brand leader companies have developed and refined research practices that tap the voice of their customer for answers. Every company can benefit from understanding the new product development processes that are used by these businesses that manage to thrive during tough and uncertain times. Read Using Research in Defining New Products.

Jan 9. Has branding gone too far? We've renamed sports arenas and tournaments after corporations. On eBay, a couple offered to let you name their baby after your company. Sadly, it was not a joke, but eBay took exception and removed the auction.

Jan 8. from ZDnet: When times are good, in-house IT makes great sense. But after a downturn or two, outsourcing starts looking like the most cost-efficient, long-term approach.

Jan 1. Happy New Year. It's time to update all your copyright notices. Don't forget your web pages and all paper documentation.