Entries For: December 2005

2005-12-31

2005 Archive

Turning Browsers into Buyers

David Meerman Scott writes in CMO Magazine,

Today, when people shop, the Web is almost always their first stop. In any market category, potential customers head online to do initial research. The moment of truth is when they reach your site: Will you draw them into your sales process or let them click away?

When prospects use search engines and directories to reach your site, link to it through another site or respond to a marketing campaign, you have an opportunity to deliver a targeted message at the precise moment that they are looking for what you have to offer. Yet chief marketing officers, particularly those in B2B markets, often fail to realize the potential of their corporate websites, which must hook buyers in from the start and hang on to them until the sale is complete.

Read more in Turning Browsers into Buyers.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/29/2005

ack/nak: discussion: the tao of pricing

from a new product marketing blog called ACK/NAK:

"One of the wonderful things about being a product marketing guy is being able to get my hands dirty with pricing. Especially this time of year, when the tao of pricing is accompanied by the te of discounting. Te - which I'll interpret here as signifying 'virtue' - is a principle very different than Tao - which I'll interpret here as signifying 'the way'.

I'm thinking about this because I just got the following request from sales: 'a very important customer (ed: they're all very important, but let's not digress) has asked for a discount on product x amounting to our 'best price' for this particular product, even though they're not buying at the volume required to get this 'best price'.'"

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/27/2005

BrainDeath by Micromanagement

From Creating Passionate Users:

If you asked 100 managers which they'd prefer--employees who think, or mindless zombies who respond only (and exactly) as ordered, you'd get 100 responses of, 'What a ridiculous question. We hire smart people and stay out of their way so they can do their jobs.' And if you asked 100 managers to define their management style, none would claim to be micromanagers. Probe deeper, though, and the truth begins to emerge.

Ask managers if their direct reports can make decisions as well as the manager can, and they hesitate. Ask if the manager could step in at a moment's notice and perform the employee's job, and too many managers would say--with pride--'yes.'"

Read more in BrainDeath by Micromanagement.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/27/2005

Circular Marketing: The Number One Issue of 2006

We are being forced to re-design to a new level of "micro-nization" of business units, a "wireless-izing" of mass communication and a "voip-izing" of populace conversations in marketplaces, under a massive globalization with highly localized customization to fit the demands of consumers. This subject is very hot and research on these issues is still being drafted.

Searching fixed

For the last few months, the Google search on the productmarketing.com website has been messed up. I found a bug in the way I set it up and it's now fixed--I think. Try searching again.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/18/2005

2005 survey: Average, Minimums, and Maximums

Average, Minimums, and Maximums from the 2005 survey are posted.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/16/2005

Positioning begins with reality

from Messages That Matter :

"A good positioning strategy can do more than create awareness and demand for your B2B product or service. Through thoughtful execution of your strategy in marketing campaigns, you can also make your selling more productive by beginning the sales qualification process during the positioning process. But it works only if you are willing to face reality, and recognize that your product or service is best suited for a specific set within a target audience, not every buyer."

Read the from full article.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/16/2005

How to Ship Anything

This from Joel on Software :

When we started selling the Aardvark DVDs on our website, we didn't think it would be so hard to pack and ship them. First of all, we didn't expect there would be so many, and we conveniently forgot some of the little problems like filling out customs forms which turned out to be big nightmares.

Read How to Ship Anything.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/15/2005

2005 survey: Canadian compensation

The 2005 survey has been updated with Canadian compensation. (We didn't get enough participation from the rest of the world to post responses for other countries.)

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/10/2005

2005 salary survey results posted

Each year Pragmatic Marketing conducts a survey of product managers, marketing managers, and other marketing professionals. Our objective is to provide Pragmatic Marketing clients with industry information about compensation as well as the most common responsibilities for product managers and other marketing professionals. Read the results of the 2005 salary survey.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/09/2005

CMO Council study reveals the painfully obvious

from Revenue Journal: CMO Council study reveals the painfully obvious:

"73% of the 400 marketers polled in the CMO study say that they 'have no formal marketing performance scorecard' to rate their department's performance, and you can see why less than 10% of the survey respondents from large companies said their marketing group was 'highly influential and strategic.' Less than half felt their teams were 'well regarded and respected.'

Years ago I said that marketing had shifted from '80% creative and 20% logistics' to '80% logistics and 20% creative.' CEOs hiring marketing managers are now looking for candidates who are logistically sophisticated.

Those who got into marketing because they 'like working with people' are struggling now. Their only hope is to start thinking more like a finance person and to become the company's expert on the customer (by personally interviewing customers every single week). Otherwise, they will find themselves replaced by someone who has an MBA in marketing and finance, has kept up with the latest technologies, and persistently and consistently listens to customers."

The 'art' of software is in the software; marketing is, or should be, a repeatable process; more a science than an art.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/07/2005

Less as a competitive advantage

A friend shared this post from Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals):

Less.

I want to talk about the concept of less. And more specifically the idea of using less as a competitive advantage.

Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have 4 features, you need 5. Or 15. Or 25. If they're spending X, you need to spend XX. If they have 20, you need 30.

While this strategy may still work for some, it's expensive, resource intensive, difficult, defensive, and not very satisfying. And I don't think it's good for customers either. It's a very Cold War mentality--always trying to one-up. When everyone tries to one-up, we all end up with too much. There's already too much "more"--what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.

What I'd like to suggest is a different approach. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. Do less than your competitors to beat them.

I want to discuss five things you need less of that you're likely to think you need more of.

Read the five things in Less as a competitive advantage.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 12/01/2005

Why Marketing ROI Misses the Mark

Robert R. Johnson (no relation) suggests, "Rather than adopting piecemeal approaches from finance, marketers should look to operations and production for a more defined set of measurement disciplines." Read more in Why Marketing ROI Misses the Mark from CMO Magazine.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/30/2005

Complexity is easy; simplicity is hard

Google understands that simplicity is both sacred and central to its competitive advantage. Mayer is a specialist in artificial intelligence, not design, but she hits on the secret to her home page's success: "It gives you what you want, when you want it, rather than everything you could ever want, even when you don't."

That, says Joe Duffy, founder of the award-winning Minneapolis design firm Duffy & Partners and author of Brand Apart, is a pretty good definition of good design. He quotes a famous line from the eminent designer Milton Glaser: "Less isn't more; just enough is more." Just enough, says Duffy, contains an aesthetic component that differentiates one experience from another.

It's just that holding the line on what constitutes "just enough" is harder than it looks.

Your Buyers Don't Want Gobbledygook

David Meerman Scott writes,

So what's with all the nonsense words being thrown about by well-intentioned marketing people at B2B companies? Nearly every Web site I look at and almost all the press releases I receive are laden with meaningless jargon that's just plain annoying. When I see words like flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry standard, or cutting-edge, my eyes glaze over. What, I ask myself, is this supposed to mean?

Read his article in EContentMag.com.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/28/2005

Back in the Box

Douglas Rushkoff writes,

I can't count the number of times I've been called by companies searching for a miracle cure--a speech or a day's consulting to help them 'get out of the box.' Invariably, what these firms really need--and what I'll venture most organizations on the lifeless American corporate landscape could stand--is to get back in the box.

In their endless rush to embrace the next big thing, too many businesses have forgotten what they are and what they really do. The fashionable compulsion to break with the past has, bizarrely, come to mean abandoning the true value they once offered customers.

Big Talk And Small Steps: Implementing Strategy

In many companies, the management team, Marketing, and Business Development are full of ideas about where to take your product. They come up with all sorts of potential applications for it, applications that would be competitive and profitable.

These ideas sound great, but they have to be implemented before they'll make any type of substantive difference in revenue or profits. And once your team attempts to implement new ideas, it meets lots of resistance from the technical folks who are charged with that task.

Yet not expanding your product, not finding new avenues for revenue, not making changes that increase profitability, will only hurt your product and the company over time. The market and the competition is busily striving to improve and gain market share against you. Inventing new strategies, and then implementing them successfully, is a requirement, not an option, to keep a company viable. If you're not moving ahead, you wind up falling behind.

As with all new strategies, the chances for failure are high. If you want your product to grow and succeed, you must learn how to make strategies and ideas a reality. Read on for a discussion of how to maximize your chances of success.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/24/2005

Fixing the Requirements Mess

In "Fixing the Requirements Mess" CIO magazine explores the challenges of managing and articulating requirements.

Requirements, as every CIO knows, are a problem, but CIOs may not be aware of just how catastrophic the problem has become. Analysts report that as many as 71 percent of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management, making it the single biggest reason for project failure--bigger than bad technology, missed deadlines or change management fiascoes. Though CIOs are rarely directly responsible for requirements management, they are accountable for poor outcomes, which, when requirements go bad, can include: project delays, software that doesn't do what it's supposed to and, worst of all, software that may not work correctly when rolled out, putting the business--and the CIO's job--at risk.

Read more in Fixing the Requirements Mess.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/21/2005

Eclipse Roadmap

I don't know if this is a good example but it is an example of a roadmap approach. The Eclipse Roadmap is intended to be a living document which will see future iterations. This document is the first version of the Eclipse Roadmap, so it is labeled as version 1.0.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/18/2005

Creating Googles, Apples and a process of innovation.

from Creating Googles, Apples and a process of innovation:

Larry Keeley, co-founder and president of the Doblin Group in Chicago, said that today, companies can increase their innovation effectiveness by 35% to 70% or 9 to 17 times the norm. The norm, of course is the incredibly low 4.5% 'hit' rate of successful innovation that companies generally have. Keeley said that 'if you just use anthropologists, you can triple your innovation effectiveness by three times.' Think of that for a moment. That's probably why corporations are hiring so many cultural anthropologists.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/15/2005

Product Manager, Interrupted

Jacques Murphy writes, If I could point to a common trait of product manager positions, whether the focus is technical or marketing, it's that product managers spend much of their time in what I call interruption mode. Interruption mode is when it seems like everyone, from the CEO to the UPS delivery man, pops into your office to ask you questions or seek your help on projects as varied as requirements, RFPs, press releases, and collateral.

These kinds of interruptions could easily take up your entire workweek. I've had days that were nothing but interruptions, by phone and in person.

But product managers also have critical components of their jobs that require extended concentration to produce. Projects such as requirements documents, user stories, articles and presentations all demand blocks of time where you can create and polish them.

The struggle, then, is to figure out how to carry out these two conflicting aspects of your product manager job. Read on for tips on how to carve out concentration time for your bigger projects and yet be available as an as-needed resource for teammates who need your help to get their work done.

Read the full article on the Boston Product Management Association web site.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/14/2005

Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005)

Peter F. Drucker, a man largely credited with creating the school of thought that governs most modern corporate management styles, died Friday at 95.

Peter Drucker--writer, management consultant and university professor--was born in Vienna, Austria in November 1909. After receiving his doctorate in Public and International Law from Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany, he worked as an economist and journalist in London before moving to the United States in 1937.

Peter Drucker published his first book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939. He has written 35 books in all: 15 books deal with management, including the landmark books The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive. His most recent book, Managing in the Next Society, was published in fall 2002.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/12/2005

Winners, Losers of Corporate Image 2005

Corporations that develop clear messages and clearly communicate their stories to both the internal organizations and the external forces are the real players. The rest are either still discovering who they are or just making stories as they go along or periodically falling flat on their faces. Read more in Winners, Losers of Corporate Image 2005.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/11/2005

Interview with an honest boss

Check out the Interview with an honest boss? Who knew that Hallmark had a sense of humor?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/10/2005

Best of Out-Of-The-Office auto-replies

I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood.
You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.
I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from holiday on 4 April. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.
Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.
The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over).

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/10/2005

Don't Manage Time, Manage Yourself

In Don't Manage Time, Manage Yourself, David Allen writes:

We clutter our minds with vague promises about what we should do, what we could do. But there is always more to do than there is time to do it. Most of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do - it comes from not keeping agreements they've made with themselves. When you tell yourself you ought to do something and then don't do it, you experience self-doubt and frustration. You can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool yourself for a second. Read tips about managing your time in Don't Manage Time, Manage Yourself.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/08/2005

Pragmatic Marketing roles & compensation benchmark

Every year, Pragmatic Marketing conducts a survey about roles, responsibilities, and compensation for product management and marketing professionals. You can find prior years' results on our web site. As always, we're asking some questions to get more visibility into a typical day in the life of a product manager. And we're still asking compensation questions so you can see how your company's salary and bonus structure compares to the rest of the industry.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/04/2005

Uncle Mark's 2006 Gift Guide & Almanac

The Uncle Mark 2006 Gift Guide & Almanac is simply the very best guide for anyone vexed about technology, in search of good purchases, or who simply wants to know the answers to life's incessant questions. Free.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/03/2005

Issue 5: Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization

Product Management's placement in an organization is an indicator of the CEO's understanding of its potential. In an ideal world where Product Management has a seat at the table with the executives, it is positioned to play a critical role in a company's overall success in the marketplace. Read Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization in the Nov/Dec issue of productmarketing.com.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 11/01/2005

The Dilbert Blog: I love Technology

I guess I'm not the only one who has trouble traveling. Scott Adams writes in The Dilbert Blog: I love Technology:

"Today (the day I wrote this) I woke up early because I have a cross-country flight. I fired up my computer and used the airline???s web site to change my seat assignment and print out my boarding pass. Well, technically, I spent an hour trying to do that, but the web site kept melting down at different points until I finally gave up and called their 800 number and handled my transaction in an efficient manner using their speech recognition system.

Read more about the typical customer experience, told in a humorous way. And then reflect what it's like for your buyers trying to contact your company.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/31/2005

IDEO and the Art of Innovation

How does the process of designing a better product work? IDEO is the poster-child of innovation. This Nightline broadcast, originally aired in February, 1999, shows how the team works and how they redefined a commonplace item: the shopping cart. You can buy a DVD of the "Deep Dive" broadcast online at the ABC NEWS STORE. Unfortunately, the store itself needs some redesign work; the DVD is hard to find and hard to buy!

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/29/2005

Excellent Customer Service

I spend a lot of time with tech support for the various gadgets I use. Most experiences are not pleasant at all (long wait times, automated voice systems that can't understand my voice commands, rude operators, ignorant level 1 support, shipping products back and forth for refurbishing) - need I go on? You all know exactly what I'm talking about.

But I had an experience last week that was TERRIFIC! I had purchased portable speakers for my iPod (On Tour by JBL). I've had them for 5 or 6 months (love them - perfect size for travel), but when I put a new set of batteries in, the speakers wouldn't turn on. I tried another set thinking I had stale batteries. Still didn't work. So I tried the power cable which did work. So I went to JBL's website to see if this was a reported flaw with the speakers. I couldn't find anything in their FAQ, but was able to write an email to support. The next day I got an email back saying that they couldn't figure out why I was having a problem. So, rather than making me mail my receipt or talk to someone in support, or go back and forth with several emails, they did something cool. They sent a return authorization number, told me where to ship the speakers, and sent me a BRAND NEW unit within a few days. NO questions asked.

You can buy the speakers on the Apple website if you can't find them in a retail store. Great job, JBL!

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 10/26/2005

Effective Meetings

One of my students showed me a meeting cost counter (free download at EffectiveMeetings.com). It can be displayed during your meeting and it shows the cost of the meeting as it progresses (based on the number of people in the meeting, the average hourly wage, and the length of the meeting). This might help you and your colleagues conduct more effective meetings.

By the way, the website is a treasure trove of tips and articles to help you conduct better meetings.

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 10/26/2005

Role of Technical Sales Engineers

I rec'd this in email:

> we are now trying to understand the sales engineer position.

Have you read my article on SEs? Basically, SEs are in the field sales organization but have deep technical experience rather than sales abilities. I find that most SEs come from the customer base with lots of experience with the product in a production environment. They typically stay in the job a few years until they get burned out on the travel and then move either into sales or into product management.

SEs are paid well: typically $100-120K plus a revenue-based bonus program. They are also eligible for the sales award trip if their region does well in achieving its targets. I don't have stats for this role as our survey is focused only on product management. One company that focuses exclusively on SEs is TechSellEnts.com (ugh, terrible name) but they do not have any info on their site about compensation.

If your company hasn't invested in sales engineers, then product managers will spend a disproportionate amount of time doing demos and other SE work.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/26/2005

Marketing Profiler

Is your marketing group a "growth champion" or merely a "service provider"? The Marketing Profiler asks, "Do you want to create a marketing organization with greater impact on your company's overall results? Are you curious about where you stand in achieving this goal? Do you want to know what steps would help move you further along this path?" A five-minute survey helps identify your marketing profile with recommended tools and reading.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/25/2005

The key to making happy users: Make the right thing easy

'Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.' If designers followed that one clear principle, there'd be a lot more happy users. I'd get a lot more work done instead of struggling with a counterintuitive interface. Writing software would be easier because APIs would simply make sense, with less chance of blowing up at runtime. I could use my car stereo. Read more in Making happy users from Creating Passionate Users.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/21/2005

Product & Process Innovation

In the Thunderbird Innovation Challenge, over 300 teams from over 100 of the top MBA programs in over 20 countries compete for the right to travel to Thunderbird in sunny Arizona for the face-to-face final round. Having judged 15 proposals, I must say... I'm not impressed. Is this the best the business schools around the world can do? These are old-fashioned awareness and branding campaigns. I fear it shows that the MBA teaches one to think IN the box. The ideas were boring! Where is the innovation?

I was thinking about "out of the box thinking" while stuck in the TSA line at Dulles this week. What if TSA cared about the customer? What could they do to make it a more satisfying experience? We in the USA are quite willing to be searched and scanned but does it have to be so annoying? My personal peccadillo is the incredible number of people who don't seem to know what metal is. "Oh, this huge belt buckle? How about this handful of change? What? My cell phone is metal?" Yeesh.

Many airports offer a frequent flyer line which alleviates some of the problem people (Thank you, Denver, Chicago, and Atlanta!) but Dulles, serving politically-correct DC, doesn't offer such a line. How could the TSA move people through security without being annoying? My ideas are: 1) speed it up for frequent flyers and 2) assist the infrequent flyers. In addition to a frequent flyer line for those who know the ropes, how about guides--sherpas, if you will--for infrequent flyers? A nice lady asks, "Do you fly frequently?" If the passenger doesn't, she walks with him and describes what's happening, what he needs to remove from his bag and his person, reminds him to hold on to his boarding pass, and just generally expedites the flow of people.

Like most businesses, TSA just posts a sign and relies on the employees to scream out instructions to the people in line. Instead of posting signs and yelling, "hold on to your boarding pass!" they need to focus on solving the customer problem in innovative ways.

What about you? Have you looked at your product and company operations from the customers' view? What process innovations would ensure a better customer experience?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/20/2005

"Agencies say advertising is part of the solution because that's their output."
Jon Wilkins, co-founder of Naked Communications. Marketing communications is fundamentally and forever changed. Read the full article.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/20/2005

When TV Surrenders to Web

from When TV Surrenders to Web: "As long as the flow of information shifts from the old model of 'from one to many' to 'from many to one,' the current TV and print model will crumble. And it will keep on sliding, fast. It is happening right now. Media executives, mostly in denial, are shunning the subject. Smart ones are coming up with well-branded 24/7 Web-based news sites and general broadcasts. This is a brand-new revolution, and the entire model is about to be changed."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/20/2005

The Host With The Most: Hosting Software

Many companies today want to package their software product as an Application Service Provider (ASP), or hosted, offering. Hosting your software brings a number of advantages to your business. But hosting software is not for the faint of heart. Read The Host With The Most to understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/19/2005

The Winners and Losers of the Internet Break-Up

Naseem Javed writes, "Why should Internet break and how ridiculous is this issue? Imagine if a few printers around the globe got together and jointly decided to replace all our current currencies and their value and choose brand new colors, designs and new values all own their own. Economy? What economy?" Read more in The Winners and Losers of the Internet Break-Up.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/16/2005

Content-Type.com free file hosting

Ever need to send a big file? With Content-Type.com free file hosting, you are allowed to distribute uploaded files to as many people as you need and have unlimited bandwidth.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/15/2005

Nifty Tool for Affinity Mapping

We were doing some positioning for one of our courses at Pragmatic Marketing (yes, we use our own tools), and I learned a new trick with Excel.

In positioning, we start with a list of problems. Then we aggregate problems into a marketecture of problem-oriented features. The Auto Filter feature in Excel allows you to see what marketecture items you've mapped the features to. To use Excel for this affinity mapping process, first list the problems in column 1. Then, begin mapping them into groups of items that are alike by creating a second column. The second column has the group name. Select the spreadsheet, go to the Data menu, select Filter, and Auto Filter. Voila! There is now a drop-down list of all of the group names. You can select a specific one to see all items with that group name.

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 10/14/2005

Setting priorities

Joel Spolsky writes in Set Your Priorities: "If you ever find yourself implementing a feature simply because it has been promised to a customer, you're drifting over to the land of consultingware and custom development, which is a fine world to operate in if that's what you like, but it just doesn't have the profit potential of off-the-shelf commercial software."

What did we learn from Star Trek II? "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." And given that development is typically 20-30% of the corporate expenditure, it follows that custom work should be billed at 400-500% of its cost, not offered at a discount to win a deal.

Read Joel's full article for some easy tips on prioritizing a product or a release.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/13/2005

Keep the sharp edges!

Creating Passionate Users has some interesting thoughts on teams and greatness.

'Great software isn't created by committee.' That quote came from James Gosling, at the developer 'fireside chat' at the last JavaOne. And from Applied Minds tech wizard Bran Ferren, 'Art isn't the product of a team.' Is this true?

First, I don't believe James was necessarily talking about the functionality and code when he said 'great software'. Clearly, teams of great programmers can produce great code. I think he means the kind of breakthrough apps that people can become passionate about, and I also think it's less about the programming and more about the design and spec.

and speaking of being passionate

Have you considered submitting an article to productmarketing.com?

Productmarketing.com accepts articles about product management topics from anyone involved with product management or product marketing in technology. Articles should explain a point of view or a product marketing technique with examples and case studies. Ask yourself, 'Is this actionable by a product manager?' Articles for the print journal are usually archived on the web site.

Learn more at Submitting articles to productmarketing.com.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 10/03/2005

First impressions

A friend bought an Apple PowerBook, largely on my recommendation. He opened the box and found beautiful packaging... and a dead computer. He spent four hours on the phone with technical support before they decided it was indeed broken. Four hours!

As one might expect, my friend is, shall we say, annoyed.

(In a similar story, I bought a Sony VAIO and had to wait 13 weeks for a repair. THIRTEEN WEEKS!! TEN WEEKS plus THREE MORE WEEKS. Will I ever buy another Sony VAIO. Never! Yet I have friends who are extremely pleased with their VAIOs. I'm guessing they never called for a repair.)

My friend's first Apple experience has been a disaster. He has made a huge decision to change from Windows to Mac, and this is the thanks he gets? How many people will he tell? How long will it be before he forgets? That first experience is so incredibly important! We should make sure that the first experience is WONDERFUL!

Well, here’s what should have happened. On calling the tech support line, he should have been asked his customer number. Because that number is less than 30 days old, he should go to a special line for first time customers. The tech support rep should have set a timer for 15 minutes. At the 15-minute mark, he should have said, “Mr Scott, I’m going to send you a replacement for arrival tomorrow. When you get the new machine, put this broken one in the shipping box and return it to me. Thanks for buying an Apple product and I apologize for this problem.”

Apple does so many things right but what David will remember is his first experience. He’s wondering if he’s made a mistake and should buy a Dell instead. His new machine better set up immediately; it better convert his Windows files without any major problems; it better be the “better” computer that he’s been promised.

Or he’ll tell. He'll tell everybody.

Have you been thinking about customer service as part of your product marketing?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/30/2005

This ROI is broken....

I got this blurb about ROI analysis. Thought it'd be interesting.

This comprehensive tutorial explains in plain English -- and with everyday, real-world examples -- the concept of return on investment (ROI). You'll learn that ROI is one of the few principles that applies to just about everything in life! This white paper succeeds in demystifying ROI, making it an accessible tool to assist you in everyday business and personal financial and investment decisions.

After performing the free registration, I still cannot download it. Maybe you can. Try it here.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/30/2005

Well, if the persona fits...

Flight attendant unions in the US have asked members to boycott new thriller Flightplan, saying it depicts in-flight personnel as "unhelpful and uncaring". Read more here.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/30/2005

Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide

from Creating Passionate Users:

It's one thing to talk about--and execute--a user-focused approach when you're a small company or an independent contractor. But what if you are, in fact, a fish in a sea as vast as, say, Microsoft? Can you hope to make a difference?

Here's my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies.

Read the full post at Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/23/2005

A look inside the iPod nano and Apple's margins

Here's an interesting look inside the iPod nano and Apple's margins: "According to a writeup of the iSuppli analysis on BusinessWeek, the $199 2GB iPod nano costs Apple $90.18 in materials and $8 to assemble, leaving a profit margin before marketing and distribution costs of about 50%."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/22/2005

Tech Takes Back the Market

from Tech Takes Back the Market in CMO magazine:

Until recently, however, marketing has played a relatively small role in the industry's fortunes. Unlike more mature consumer products industries, where marketers play central roles in business strategy and planning, the enterprise tech sector is characterized by small 'm' marketing--lead generation and sales support focused on advertising, trade shows, brochures, and, more recently, Web sites and online campaigns. Strategic thinking has traditionally been left to the entrepreneurs and engineers. During the periodic slowdowns, a quick injection of sales force energy would pick up the slack.

Until now. As the tech industry matures in a post-bust world and hunts for its next wave of growth, the locus of innovation is shifting toward the marketing department. Indeed, marketing leaders are on the verge of three dramatic transformations.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/20/2005

Joel on Software - The Project Aardvark Spec

Product managers and product architects may find this a helpful read.

Joel on Software - The Project Aardvark Spec: "As the final version of Copilot.com (what this spec calls "Aardvark") went into production in early August, 2005, this spec is now of historical interest only. I'm making it available as a part of Joel on Software because many people have asked to see some samples of the kinds of specs we write at Fog Creek."

In a later post, Joel adds

“As I worked through the screens that would be needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper was required to start the whole process. Making this change in the spec took an hour or two. If we had made this change in code, it would have added weeks to the schedule. I can’t tell you how strongly I believe in Big Design Up Front, which the proponents of Extreme Programming consider anathema. I have consistently saved time and made better products by using BDUF and I’m proud to use it, no matter what the XP fanatics claim. They’re just wrong on this point and I can’t be any clearer than that.”

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/20/2005

What's the Big Idea?

from CMO Magazine: Conventional wisdom holds that great marketers, like great companies, stay ahead of the curve by following one simple rule: Listen to your customers, and then give them what they ask for.

Our advice is to forget what conventional wisdom says. If you're looking for new ideas, customers are often the last place to look, because most don't actively seek the cutting edge or the next big thing. Customers couldn't have told you they wanted an iPod, for example, but millions bought one. They wouldn't have asked for a $4 Caramel Macchiato before you gave it to them. If customers were the primary source of insight, you'd still be puzzling over the value of this thing called the World Wide Web.

Prompted for fresh ideas, most customers simply tell you what you--and your competitors--already know. They don't want to think about it. They figure that's your job.

And they're right. Instead of giving customers what they ask for, the innovative CMO gives them what they want before they want it.

Heard on United....

"We know that there are many bankrupt airlines you could choose and we're glad that you chose ours."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/16/2005

Working The Plan Using A Plan That Works

The reason Development's planning efforts are so important is that the rest of the company depends upon the success of such planning in order to plan their own work. Functions such as QA and Documentation (if they are separate from Development), Training, Marketing, Sales, Hosting and Production, and Customer Support all need solid assumptions upon which to build their plans. And this is where the Product Manager gets involved.

Without Development's ability to pin down dates and expected results, Product Management can't build reliable plans for product releases, and the entire momentum of your product is affected. So whether a Product Manager wants to or not, he or she must be involved in the planning of Development work.

Read on for ideas on how you as the Product Manager can help get your Development organization to the point where it has clear, useful, and reliable plans.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 9/08/2005

Change This Manifesto

John Zagula (who co-authored The Marketing Playbook with Rich Tong) mentions Pragmatic Marketing's contribution to Change This in his blog:

Effective Product Managers Know Their Market By Steve Johnson & Barbara Nelson. Some very good tips for marketing folks to cut through all the "market research" mumbo jumbo and reach out to deeply learn who their customer is.

Worth reading again (and saving) if you missed it when it was first published.

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 8/27/2005

But will anyone buy because of Dish, Colorado?

Echostar Communications yesterday embarked on a bizarre publicity stunt by offering free satellite television to all households in the first US town willing to change its name to Dish. It's embarrassing! This seems a silly dot-com-type publicity stunt that will never affect revenues. Will anyone buy a second-rate system because of Dish, Colorado? Read more.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/24/2005

Pushed And Pulled: Development vs Production

Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to move customers up to the newest software, where the priority has to be doing it at the right time, and doing it right.

Read more for a discussion of how these two priorities push and pull you in two different directions and how to handle them.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/23/2005

Seth's Blog: Hurry!

How can you tell if you're too obsessed with urgent? Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

Innovation: The Best Practices of Technology Brokers

Technology brokers have discovered how to bridge the disparate worlds they move among outside their boundaries, and how to build new ventures from the technologies and people they come across. In the process, they have developed four intertwined work practices that help them do this: capturing good ideas, keeping ideas alive, imagining new uses for old ideas, and putting promising concepts to the test. Although the markets and settings of different brokers are diverse, their approaches are not. Indeed, the four intertwined processes are remarkably alike across companies and industries.

Read more in Innovation: The Best Practices of Technology Brokers on HBS Working Knowledge.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/17/2005

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web

"Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything." Read Wired historical view of the web in We Are the Web.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/09/2005

Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do, Part I

I've gotten a couple of emails from folks lamenting that their developers are pushing for a complete rewrite. Before you and your company make a commitment to such a project, read Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do, Part I: "They made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/07/2005

Issue 4: The Higher They Go, The Stupider They Get

"Working on things that don't make sense is the single biggest source of job dissatisfaction. Directives from top management shouldn't end with employees going back to their desks, heads down, grumbling all the way. So why do intelligent, well-meaning managers make stupid decisions?"

Read "The higher they go, the stupider they get" and other articles in the new issue of productmarketing.com posted online. Articles include:

The higher they go, the stupider they get
A case for buyer personas
Product management: for Adults Only
Product Strategy doesn't just happen
You want to start a company. Where do you begin?
The Egoless Company

Read productmarketing.com Issue 4: The higher they go, the stupider they get.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/07/2005

Degrees Of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management

Jacques Murphy writes:

Product Management is not a job that people can go out and get a degree in. You can get a degree in Computer Science that covers the knowledge you need in order to start out as a programmer. You can get a degree in Marketing that gives you the basic foundation to get started in Marketing or Advertising. But there's no college level degree that I know of out there in Product Management.

This makes it a real challenge to find, evaluate and hire good Product Managers. With so few objective external indicators, you have to define the Product Manager position very clearly and scrutinize candidates to see if they are a good match.

So what do you look for when you want to hire an ace Product Manager to champion your product and move forward relative to the competition?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 8/05/2005

A Final Word on Branding Products

Today, branding is a mixed bag of basic, traditional advertising tools, simply waxed and packaged to appear as intellectual advice with an expensive price tag. It is targeted to fit any hungry frame of mind, and is designed to make corporations feel ever so comfortable with terms like 'verbal,' 'digital,' 'audio,' 'smelly,' 'silent' or 'loud' branding, as all these terms are designed to offer great safety and invisible lifelines to sinking ships. But does it work? Read A Final Word on Branding Products.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/28/2005

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report

The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term "phishing" means. Read the full report.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/27/2005

Pricing for Software Product Managers

Pricing has far reaching effects beyond the cost of the product. Pricing is just as much a positioning statement as a definition of the cost to buy. Price defines the entry threshold: who your buyers are and their sensitivities, which competitors you will encounter, who you will be negotiating with and what the customers' expectations will be. Good pricing will remove the price issue from being an obstacle to a sale. Pricing is also used as a weapon to fight the competition as well as gray markets. Read more in Pricing for Software Product Managers (updated).

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/21/2005

Polishing Your Marketing Message

from Polishing Your Marketing Message:

The effort to first define and develop the marketing message for your product usually takes place with a limited amount of research and input from customers, especially for new capabilities. For the many organizations that don't have the luxury, either in terms of time or money, to spend all they want on market research to determine just which benefits resonate the most with which type of prospects, the marketing materials must be developed and printed nonetheless. This means that your product's marketing message goes out to the world before you have really had enough time to discover some of its most compelling advantages. You mine what gold you can get your hands on, and sell it for all it's worth.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/19/2005

Accidental Product Naming

from Accidental Product Naming:

"When creative concepts collide unexpectedly, this sudden accident incubates a branding process, which can result in a random selection of a weird strategy. This gives birth to an extreme name identity, whereupon a major advertising process kicks in. All things are combined -- shaken, not stirred -- and that's how we refer to today's trendy branding. To avoid a catastrophe, we must first learn the secrets of the various branding tricks and become aware of the bigger risks."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/16/2005

Thinking about the present and future....

What are the devices and trends in computing and where are they headed?

from Social Machines:

Three broad technology trends are making computing continuous. The first, as noted earlier, is easy, inexpensive Internet access. The second is the spread of inexpensive, wireless computing devices. Above all, this means wireless laptops. Only a computer capable of running a full-blown Web browser allows access to the full range of Web-based software applications, which are, as we'll see in a moment, the third major source of technologies making computing more social. But laptops can't be carried everywhere, and smaller devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, voice recorders, portable CD and DVD players, MP3 players, PDAs, pagers, GPS receivers, and wearable gear like Microsoft's wireless SPOT (for 'Smart Personal Object Technology') watches have the important function of maintaining the information field when there isn't a computer at hand. Then, of course, there's the smart phone--in essence, a miniature computer juggling tasks that formerly required half a dozen separate devices. Separate devices: PalmOne's Treo 650, for example, is styled like a phone but also acts as a still and video camera, an e-mail and instant-messaging platform, an MP3 player, a game player, a personal organizer, a Web-browsing device, an e-book reader, and a short-range communicator (using the Bluetooth wireless standard). The smart phone is 'an ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing,' writes Russell Beale, director of the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham, England. It's 'a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is highly personal, and is almost always available... .' The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most important and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a platform for personal publishing and social software.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/14/2005

From consultation to standardization

Even a successful supplier of custom tailored technology can only go so far. Eventually, to sustain revenue growth, a company needs to have standard products and sales practices. At a June 8 meeting of the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network, Vocollect Product Manager Brad Wyland offered a case study of how his company created the tools and mentality required to successfully launch a standardized product in a market accustomed to individualized solutions.

Read From consultation to standardization from the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/13/2005

Huge Cyber-Tsunami Developing in Asia

Today, for the first time, China has 100 million people on the Internet, 30 percent of whom are on broadband. Within a few years, a billion people in Asia will be playing with e-commerce. All that power and all that technology replicating at a phenomenal rate will create global shockwaves both in trade and communications.

The entire continent of Asia, including India and several other highly populated countries, is not far behind. The process of this advance is still hard to imagine by Western nations, most of which are comfortably nestled in vast, rich lands with very low populations.

When combined, this adoption of technology and new e-commerce attitudes in Asia creates the true ingredients in the making of a powerful cyber cyclone that will cut a clear path.

Read more in Huge Cyber-Tsunami Developing in Asia by Naseem Javed.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/12/2005

KPI and bonuses for product managers

Product management is hard to instrument in the traditional ways; the temptation is to create a measurement program based on product revenue. While this sound good at first, the problem is that it encourages product managers to focus on existing products and put their energy into actively selling what we have. But what about next year's products?

Product management (and Development too) should be focused on next year's products; there are plenty of people dedicated to marketing, selling, and supporting the products we have today.

The focus of product management should be on activities this year that result in new products next year. And for that I recommend onsite visits. The typical product manager gets US$12,000/year in bonuses--usually based on this year's product performance. However, this doesn't really motivate since you cannot control it. But you can control (to some extent) your schedule. Therefore some portion of bonus and KPI should be on onsite visits.

If senior management wants to have new products, features, and markets next year, they should bonus product management on that goal. I recommend that we pay bonuses on onsite calls to customers and non-customers (the untapped market); that's where product manager's get the most valuable information for developing new ideas. Check out Barbara Nelson's article on the subject.

Regardless of whether your management sees this, you'll want to do it anyway: onsite visits are the source of product management credibility. Developers are desperate for statistically-valid market data yet all they get is product management and executive opinion as well as deal-of-the-day requests from sales people.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/11/2005

Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking

Product Managers find themselves at the center of their company's debates and decisions on product design. They understand how crucial it is for the software to be well designed, so that it not only does what the market wants it to do, but does it in the way the market wants it to.

Good product design can mean the difference between success and failure. But it's easy to think in such black-and-white terms. More subtly, good and bad design exists along a continuum, and most Product Managers find themselves working with software that has inevitable design flaws due to rushed release dates and the pitfalls of all-too-unstructured development efforts. Product Managers, by bringing about improvements to a product's design, have a positive impact that results in a more profitable company.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/07/2005

Culture Crash

Admit it: You hate your sales department.

They're all loud egomaniacs whose idea of great collateral is a brochure peppered with bullet points and the word new. They don't care about the value of the brand; they just want to move boxes or close sales, long-term consequences be damned.

And you know what? They don't like you, either. To sales, the marketing organization couldn't possibly know less about the business and how it operates. And marketing never has to worry about actually making numbers.

Sound familiar? Read Culture Crash in CMO Magazine.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/06/2005

Strategy by Design

from Strategy by Design: "many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design's playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed -- someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy -- all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don't focus very much on making it better."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/05/2005

Living in Dell Time

Dell leverages its obsession for operational excellence in every aspect of their business.

"Dell, which hit $45 billion in annual revenue this past July and is growing at a nearly 20% yearly clip, seems well on its way toward surpassing its goal of $60 billion within the next few years. And it's not letting up. Still relentlessly striving to get better faster, Dell intends to slash $2 billion in costs. CFO Jim Schneider has indicated that much of the cuts will come from manufacturing operations and the supply chain. That will put even more pressure on Dell's component makers. Michael Dell is fond of saying that in the high-tech business, you either grow or die. It all just happens much, much faster when you're living in Dell time." Read more in Living in Dell Time.

What is your company's distinctive competence? And how does it affect every area of your business?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/05/2005

irrelevant brilliance

You cannot sell a man who isn't listening; word of mouth is the best medium of all; and dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.
--Bill Bernbach, DDB Advertising

posted by Steve Johnson @ 7/02/2005

P&G Chief's Turnaround Recipe: Find Out What Women Want

Sitting in his company's South American headquarters here, A.G. Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble Co., shared some advice with a group of laundry executives: "The simple principle in life is to find out what she wants and give it to her. It's worked in my marriage for 35 years and it works in laundry."

The group erupted in laughter and Mr. Lafley smiled. But he wasn't really kidding. Hewing to this deceptively straightforward principle has helped the 57-year-old P&G veteran revive the fortunes of the maker of Pampers, Pantene and Tide. Five years ago, when Mr. Lafley took over the world's largest consumer-products company, it was floundering amid a botched attempt to overhaul its insular culture. Read more in Find Out What Women Want. (You may need to click here instead).

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/29/2005

Marketing has a marketing problem

from Seth's Blog: "Marketing is not about trickery or even insincerity. It's about spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity. Marketing is about treating prospects and customers with respect, and realizing that it's easier to grow the amount of business you do with happy people than it is to find new strangers to accost."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/25/2005

Advertising, Under Review

from Advertising, Under Review: "Today, the average American receives more than 3,000 marketing messages a day." Some would argue that traditional advertising is passe'; Dawn Hudson of Pepsi believes that advertising has never been more relevant.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/24/2005

Focal Point: Adding To Sales Discussions

Product Managers provide a unique role in a software company, something that may include skills in Sales, Marketing, and Development, but reaches well beyond the scope of any of those three functions. It's a role nobody else fills. Yet because of their in-depth understanding of the market and the reasons people want and need their product, and because of the paramount need to make sales succeed, Product Managers can easily find themselves pulled into more sales calls than they care to be involved in, given their other priorities. read more in Focal Point: Adding To Sales Discussions.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/24/2005

Fast Talk: Apple in Their Eyes

In Fast Talk: Apple in Their Eyes, four rivals talk about designing their answer to the iPod. "Digital-audio players weren't exactly virgin territory when Apple entered the fray in 2001. But the iPod -- with its sublime design, intuitive usability, unparalleled cool quotient -- set a new standard by which all other MP3 players would be judged."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/23/2005

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby dead at 81

How Jack Kilby invented the microchip: Since he'd only been with Texas Instruments a few months, he wasn't eligible for paid leave when almost all the employees went on TI's annual mass vacation. Left alone to experiment, unencumbered by distractions, interruptions and scrutiny from peers and managers, Kilby came up with the device that changed the world.

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby dead at 81: Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer and pioneer in the development of microchips, has died in Dallas after a brief battle with cancer at age 81.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/22/2005

United Airlines puts business first?

Inside-out thinking continues to prevail at United. Their new business1 program was clearly designed by employees thinking they know what people want, instead of researching it. For instance:

We understand how important it is to be reliable, especially in business. That's why Business1SM arrival times are guaranteed. If your flight is more than 30 minutes late, you'll receive 500 redeemable Mileage Plus? miles.

Whoopee. 500 more miles that I can't seem to use except during a lunar eclipse. And the disclaimer and restrictions section is longer than the announcement itself.

I can just hear a group at United sitting around a conference table asking, "What do business people want? On-time arrival and newspapers. Yep, that's it!"

Well, of course we would like to arrive on time but we understand when there are problems. All we really want is an honest appraisal of flight status, a comfortable seat, friendly service, and the freedom to check our bags without waiting an hour to get them back.

Oh wait. I've described JetBlue and Independence Air, haven't I?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/20/2005

Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak

The typical product team wants to make products "better" and adding features often seems to be the best approach. We hear "somebody might want to do this!" when the important questions are "Will our primary customer want to?" and "Will adding this make the product more difficult for our primary customer?"

This from Creating Passionate Users: Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak: "It's a gazillion degrees in my house right now, but I can't figure out the thermostat controls, so the heat's still on and the air conditioning unreachable. My new Denon receiver/tuner sounds amazing--good thing I'm using it mostly with my iPod; I have no clue how to tune in a radio station. When I bring up the newer versions of Microsoft Word, it looks so utterly foreign and overwhelming to me now that I give up and close it. And all I wanted to do was type a simple letter. Most of you here know that Don Norman talked about this forever in the classic The Design of Everyday Things, but why didn't the designers and manufacturers listen?"

My new car has a GPS. Cool! I use it all the time. But it asks "Add or Replace" when you choose a destination. Huh? I grabbed the book and learned that "Add" means to add this destination to your current route (ie., creating a multi-segment trip) while Replace means to replace your current destination with this new one. I can just hear the developers say "Someone might want to do this!" If the product was planned for a delivery service, this would make sense. But in fact, our primary persona will not want to do it and worse, adding it confuses him or her.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/17/2005

The True Measure of Success

Every other function in the company presents the anticipated ROI to the board when asking for capital to build a plant, acquire a company or open a branch office in the middle of nowhere. Until now, marketing has spent millions every year--year in, year out--and has never had to show an ROI. Instead, it charms the board with a sound and lights show.

If you're wondering why marketing lacks respect in the C-suite, if you're wondering why marketing budgets get cut at the start of the fourth quarter, here's a thought: If you refuse to behave like an adult and justify your existence like every other function, you will continue to 'get no respect' and be treated like a talented but irresponsible child.

Read The True Measure of Success in CMO Magazine.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/15/2005

On Reengineering Marketing

John Porcaro comments on the disconnect between the customer research that was being done, and the product engineers who were building the product. He writes,

"Almost two years ago, we had a 'Marketing Symposium' where Steve Ballmer made a comment about 'selling what we build, AND building what we can sell.' His point was that often we spend a lot of time building amazing features into products, only to see the features (or products) being ignored. Of course, marketers need a good story to tell when approaching developers. Some marketers dwell firmly in the land of intuition and 'street smarts', which in-and-of-itself might not be a bad thing, but most developers I know expect plans to be backed by logic, measurement, and a well-positioned framework." You can read his full post here.

Every week I meet product managers who want to know how to force developers to do what they want. They seem to feel that the title of "product manager" gives them power. But neither power nor credibility comes from a title. You want to get developers to listen? Here's how. Use market-facts. No developer is interested in intuition and street smarts; they want logic and market facts. Product manager credibility and respect are earned.

Have you visited a customer lately?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/14/2005

vendors who write for Windows

I spent all day Saturday fighting Windows. Thing is, I don't really hate Windows; I'm frustrated by the bad programmers who write for Windows. It's almost enough to make me switch to Macintosh!

Some programmer managed to do something to DirectX which made another program stop working. (It may have been that Windows Media Player updated itself even though I don't use it). The second program requires DirectX, found a NEWER version than expected, and failed. Come on guys!! Get it together.

So I restored back to before Media Player updated itself, reinstalled the second app and it now works. Luckily I wrote down ALL of the programs that have been installed in the last month since I had to reinstall them all.

(Take a deep breath. "Serenity now!")

Okay, so, granted, I'm a little on the edge already but then I loaded a PDF that hung my system. A PDF?? Oh, come on! [@#$%^&*.] A few minutes later I figured it out: Adobe Acrobat had put up a dialog that asked if I wanted to upgrade (although I have said "no" to this at least a million times) but the dialog box was UNDER the PDF window where I couldn???t see it. I cannot fathom what caused me to THINK to look.

Oh, and a quick thank-you to whichever programmer decided to delete my normal.dot file. But I had it backed up. Got you! HAHAHAHAHA.

I spent an hour on the phone helping my dad with some genealogy software. The end result: to put emphasis in notes, you have to press Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B. You know, like Word Star in 1985. (Remember control keys? Use ^o to get small text?)

Then I was working with a special MP3 program that refuses to use TAGS! I ended up using MP3 Tag Studio, Notepad, Word, and Excel to accomplish what I wanted. To Microsoft Excel programmers: thank you thank you thank you! I had to use this formula to make things work:

=RIGHT(REPT(0,6) &amp; A4,6 & "-" & CLEAN(MID(MID(C4,1,title_length)) & "-") & MID(B4,1,artist_length),1,49))

What a workhorse Excel is! You can use Excel and Word to accomplish almost anything. Hey, waitaminute, both of those are available on the Mac....

So what's the point? While clear understanding of the user and his requirements should make the better product, the developers have to care. They just have to CARE about the people who use their products. "I can get it to work" is not an acceptable answer if a computing expert (like me or your typical product manager or other power user) cannot. And I'm not the typical user. The vendor's user forum is filled with page after page of wails of anquish from poor unsophisticated customers who want the result but didn't realize that they needed a computing degree to set the system up. (There's a workaround: all you have to do is use Excel, Word, notepad,....)

I think the iPod and iTunes are brilliant (even on Windows). Perhaps these were the result of clear requirements but they were definitely the result of a development team that loves music. They put in some wonderful subtleties that couldn't have been in the requirements.

Every week I meet product managers who are frustrated with the usability of their products. They believe that they need to somehow articulate the requirements better or differently. Perhaps so, but the developers also have to care about usability; they have to care about the users of the products; they have to care.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/11/2005

Meeting Promised Development Dates

If you have worked in or with the software industry at all, you have lived through some dramatic delays in product development. For instance, Product Guernsey, originally announced last year, was due in January. It's now the beginning of June, and it's announced that the product, now called Providence, won't be out until September. Or your last major release was supposed to take nine months. A year later, it won't be out for another nine, so technically the team has worked for a year but it's twelve months late.

Sound familiar? Read more in Meeting Promised Development Dates.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/10/2005

Managing people is a lot like teaching your daughter to drive a car

Here's an interesting question: How does a manager decide when a product manager is ready to make decisions on his/her own?

Managing people is a lot like teaching your daughter to drive a car. At first you watch her very carefully: make sure she keeps the radio off and her eyes on the road; you grow a few gray hairs as you try to not scream SEE THE CAR? DO YOU SEE THAT CAR?? But after a while, she's driving competently and you let her out on her own. But you make sure she has a mobile phone and make her promise that she'll call if she's going to be late. You grill her before she leaves and again when she comes home: Where are you going? When will you be home? What will/were you doing? And after a while, once she has earned your trust, you give it to her. At some point, you're merely curious IF she came home, not WHEN she came home.

Isn't managing the same? We watch carefully and want frequent updates at first. Then, once they've earned it, we give them our trust. At that point, all we want is a heads-up on anything that's going to blow up in our faces. Now managing is less about "What are you doing?" and more about "How can I help you get your job done?"

This is equally true for a product manager's relationship with counterparts in other departments: a developer, marketer, a sales person. We watch carefully at first until they've earned our trust. And then we give them our trust and respect.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/10/2005

Alas, Cash-Strapped Airlines Try In-Flight Advertising

"On a recent Alaska Airlines flight, passengers were told to remain buckled and seated for the last 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport. It was a standard security measure for flights heading into restricted airspace over Washington. It also turned a planeful of passengers into captive customers who were then pitched a Bank of America Visa card -- with little chance of tuning it out. Over the intercom, a flight attendant encouraged passengers to sign up for the Bank of America credit card. Then other flight attendants went down the aisle handing out applications." Read more in Cash-Strapped Airlines Try In-Flight Advertising.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/09/2005

WiFi is certainly preferable to in-flight phone use

"Assuming it can stay in business long enough, United Airlines may end up being the first airline to offer wireless Internet access on domestic flights. The carrier said Monday that it had received regulatory approval to install cabin equipment for Wi-Fi service after demonstrating that its 'Air-to-Ground' wireless technology did not interfere with normal airborne operations." Read more on Good Morning Silicon Valley.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/09/2005

Time to Reengineer Your Marketing Model

Many marketers who agonize over how to differentiate their products or services feel perfectly content to use the same marketing model year after year. Most of a CMO's energy is focused on optimizing marketing spend across well-established categories. Rarely are these allocations based on the ability to connect investments to interim metrics, and then to specific financial outcomes.

Marketers who think about straying from convention run into resistance from the established network of agencies and service providers that reinforce the existing marketing model. Most of these entities have a vested interest in sustaining the status quo, regardless of the outcome.

Despite the challenges, reengineering the marketing model should be a priority for any CMO. Read more in Time to Reengineer Your Marketing Model in CMO Magazine.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/08/2005

June newsletter posted

I've found that the key to success in technology companies is an understanding of Star Trek. Most engineers, developers, and technical people are familiar with these characters. Perhaps the Star Trek characters are familiar because we work with them every day. The characters of Star Trek give us the typical personas in a technology company. Is your company The Original Series or The Next Generation?

Issue 3: End of Life: Retiring a Product

Outdated software can turn into a monster. How do you discontinue a product that is no longer profitable? And how do you know that it's time? Read "Retiring a Product" and other articles in the new issue of productmarketing.com.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/04/2005

Microsoft uses personas

"Stan is a hands-on sort of guy. The entrepreneur's day starts at 7:30 a.m., when he gets into work and checks his e-mail. At 8:30, Stan starts preparing for the daily 9 o'clock sales meeting. The rest of the day is a blur of calls and meetings: Stan's banker, his accountant, his suppliers. The chubby, graying 41-year-old usually leaves work at 5:30 with a briefcase full of reports to read that night. Sometimes Stan goes straight home to his wife and two children. But often he goes out to dinner with a client and doesn't get home until late.

Stan may sound like you, or many hardworking small-business owners you know. But there's one important difference: Stan doesn't really exist. He's a fictional character dreamed up by researchers at Microsoft to help them develop Office Small Business Accounting 2006, a new financial-management application that will hit stores in September. "

Read more about Microsoft's application of personas in Getting to Know You.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/04/2005

RSVME for Outlook

I really like Outlook add-ins that use the address book instead of tedious and error-prone (ie., workaround) exports. Check out RSVME Outlook surveys. The publisher says,

"RSVME is a survey tool that integrates with Outlook and e-mail packages, and enables obtaining feedback from people. You can put together a survey on any subject, from the best time for soccer practice to who is bringing what food to a party. Then select names out of your address book you want to send the survey to, and send."

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/02/2005

Age of Abundance Demands Innovation

This from Naseem Javed:

You might have the best team with the best of innovation, but there are these overly diluted markets out there, glutted with look-alike brands and identical services. The challenge is to fine-tune a product development and marketing process that will not only re-energize the production but produce a shaper edge in design, quality and value, and build a unique iconic identity.

Recently, we came out of the age of curiosity, entered the age of scarcity and are now sinking in the age of abundance. Everything is here.Today, all over the world, millions of identical companies are producing millions of identical products and services, and they are pushing identical prices on identical delivery platforms. On top of that, they have identical management and identical corporate behavior all the way from the boardrooms to the cubicles.

Furthermore, there are identical brands, identical names and identical business and identities. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. There seems to be a serious lack of originality, substance, courage and leadership. Is this age of abundance going to drown us?

Compulsory and forced innovation has limits; there are only so many ways to re-design a car. Moving ashtrays and coffee mug holders every two years is not a new model of a car. Levitation is. A computer in its current hardware shape is completely outdated. So are thousands of other things.Our current culture is responsible for this lack of original and creative innovation. Office cubicles have taken away the power of innovation as masses have been conditioned to rigid conformity, visible isolation, linear formations and assembly-line mentality. Copying has been awarded as a safe play.

Bring down the wall. Like the Berlin Wall, bring down the cubicle and run around like the Incredible Hulk. Ask your teams to create at least one new idea every day. Discuss it with some serious effort. If not immediately applicable, then file it away for future reference. Ask and ask again and again: Why are your products and services SO similar to your competitors, including the colors, prices and the brand names. Only if asked with persistence and honesty will it create and open doors to innovation. Don't blame others, just search for innovation.

Find the ropes. Like Spiderman, avoid the elevators and scale the headquarters. Jump and bypass your immediate bosses, as often they are the ones directly responsible for playing it safe by adopting simple rules and for following others with identical goods and services. Go to the top; it is easy, all you need are ropes and good swings. Innovation is the bond and the glue between new products and customers. Good ideas will easily rope in the management. Next time, ask before pushing the elevator button: Is this the only way to go to the top?

Fly over the globe. By air or at least via the Web, circumnavigate the globe -- not merely once a year but, rather, daily or even hourly. There is a wild, wild world out there. The ideas and opportunities are endless. Global research is critical today. To stay ahead, lead your teams to sharper innovation. This can be achieved by observing global trends and market shifts. Put your suits away; try a robe for a change.

In conclusion, you might have the best team with the best of innovation, but there are these overly diluted markets out there, glutted with look-alike brands and identical services. The challenge is to fine-tune a marketing process that will not only re-energize the production but produce a shaper edge in brand design, image quality and value, and build a unique iconic corporate identity. When there are too many identical business journals, it seems comic books, after all, are nothing to laugh at.

Naseem Javed, author of Naming for Power and Domain Wars, is recognized as a world authority on Global Name Identities and Domain Issues. He introduced The Laws of Corporate Naming in the 80's and also founded ABC Namebank, a consultancy established in New York and Toronto a quarter century ago. Naseem also conducts executive workshops and conferences on global image and name identities issues. Contact Naseem at njabc@njabc.com.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 6/01/2005

Apple Matters

Chris Howard writes in Apple Matters:

Which comes first? Mindshare or marketshare?

Recently, I was talking with a friend, and she said "I have to get an iPod." "Which one?", I asked. "Oh I don't know anything about them. You play music on them don't you?" was her reply.

I was stunned. Not by her wanting something without even knowing what it was.

No, what amazed me, was that this hit home to me, how much mindshare Apple has captured with the iPod. Sure they might have 75% or so of the portable music player marketshare, but I'd suggest they have quite a significant percentage of the mindshare of the populous.

Giving Sales a Complete Toolkit

In small and large software companies alike, Product Management is usually the critical factor in creating an effective sales toolkit. That's because Product Management marries the strategic goals coming from the management team with the level of detail needed to support the sales team. Product Management takes its understanding of everything from the business model to the targeted customer profile to the company and product positioning, and brings it to bear on the distinct benefits and associated features of the software. It's the ability to translate the generalities of the marketing message down to the specific and practical details of what the software does, so that sales reps have a long list of capabilities that they can relate to bigger needs and benefits.

So one key result of thorough Product Management is the existence of a complete toolkit for sales. But providing the right toolkit requires more than just providing the tools. It's just as important to provide guidance on how to use the tools. Without guidance and training to the sales force on how to use the fine-tuned sales mechanism you have provided, you may find it used as a blunt instrument, to little effect.

Read Giving Sales a Complete Toolkit for a description of the important tools to include in a sales toolkit, and a discussion on how to help sales reps use the right tool to do a precision job each time.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/24/2005

Not all Customers are Equal

For some businesses (or sales and marketing people), market share is everything. They don't care about profit so long as they own the market. That's great in the short term but sooner or later you have to turn that substantial customerbase into a profitable one. And you have to admit that there are some customers who simply cost your business money to service them.

Sometimes the 'unprofitable' customers are those who tie up your customer service people with frivolous complaints or comments. They waste your colleagues' time. It might be that they refuse to move to a new version of your product because their model 'is just fine thanks!'

Whatever it might be, there are times you must walk away from the customer, whether it is an outright refusal to service them further or to put into place more expensive contracts for service which make it unreasonable to continue purchasing from your organisation.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/18/2005

What Every Good Marketer Knows

Seth Godin writes,

Assuming that you're like me and the rest of the people I know (which means you haven't figured out everything there is to know about marketing yet), here's a list to get you started: What Every Good Marketer Knows.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/17/2005

The Long Tail

In most businesses, we focus on the statistically relevent majority. But there is much money to be made, and customers to satisfy, in the statistical edges... the long tail. Chris Anderson writes,

"One of the signs of a great idea is that people feel like they've known it forever. That, at least, is what I tell myself when people suggest that the concept of The Long Tail predates my article of the same name last year. This first came up in the crafting of the Wikipedia entry on The Long Tail following my original article, and it again rose in my conversations with Tom Standage of The Economist last week. I'll take a moment here to explain the derivation and perhaps we can clear up this issue once and for all."

Internet Explorer share slips below 90 percent

Microsoft Corp.'s share of the U.S. browser market has slipped below 90 percent as the Firefox browser continues to grow in popularity, according to independent tracking by WebSideStory. Firefox, an open-source browser collectively developed by the Internet community under the Mozilla Foundation, had a 6.8 percent share as of April 29, an increase from 3.0 percent since WebSideStory began tracking Firefox separately in October.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/15/2005

Call for Presentations

Software Magazine and King Content Co. invite you to submit a session title and description of 50 to 100 words to be considered for presentation at the 2005 Software 500 Marketing Perspectives Conference & Expo, to be held October 10-12, 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. read Call for Presentations.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/14/2005

Blogging has not reached the hinterlands...

Don't you find that technology company marketers are so often the ones who know the least about technology? David St Lawrence posts,

"I am having an email exchange with a marketing consultant I really care for, and she writes: My target audience is really Directors and VPs of mktg at large technology companies. I'm not sure these folks are going to find me because I have a blog.

Read the full post and (rather long) comments at Blogging has not reached the hinterlands....

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/14/2005

The Real Ideal: Strategy to Tactics and Back

Product Managers, because of the nature of their responsibilities, carry out the unique function of making strategies real and turning realities into strategy. Since they are often called upon not only to view the product from the perspective of management and competitive strategy but also to apply the software tactically, and with great mastery, Product Managers find themselves straddling the often gaping chasm between the great ideas and goals of the company, and the everyday tasks that the troops are working on in front of customers. Read more in The Real Ideal: Strategy to Tactics and Back.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/12/2005

May newsletter posted

Corporate identity and image design rules of the past are gone and so are the principles of old-fashioned mass marketing blitzes. What is now new is to aim for the targeted areas with powerful, unique global name identities and apply the latest of cyber-branding skills. The laws of e-commerce and Internet marketing are just the right steps in the right direction.

It's called marketing

Why is the iPod successful? It's not the technology! iPod is a well-designed, easy-to-use product supported by brilliant advertising in a competitive field of techno-devices supported with techno-babble.

Good Morning Silicon Valley reports "Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo is choking down a nice big plate of crow this morning. Back in November, Sim slagged Apple's flash-based iPod shuffle as a non-starter. That's a four-year-old product. So I think the whole industry will just laugh at it.'

Well, the industry may be laughing at the shuffle, but the market isn't. According to Merrill Lynch, the shuffle, which hasn't even been available for six months yet, has already claimed a 58% share of the flash-based digital media player market. And that's in spite of what Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer described as being 'supply-constrained in March.'

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/04/2005

This is your brain. This is your brain on e-mail.

from Good Morning Silicon Valley: This is your brain. This is your brain on e-mail.: "E-mail is more harmful to one's mental acuity than pot. That's the upshot of what was undoubtedly a very amusing study recently conducted at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry (and sponsored by HP -- just what are they trying to tell us?). In clinical trial after clinical trial, 80 all told, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, found the IQ of frequent e-mailers fell by 10 points during the work day -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. 'This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,' Wilson said. 'We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness, roughly twice the IQ drop caused by marijuana.'"

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/03/2005

The Higher They Go, the Stupider They Get

from Revenue Journal :: The Higher They Go, the Stupider They Get:

Lou Gerstner is one of the best examples of a customer-centric CEO. If you're in management, and you haven't read his book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? you're missing a great read--and insight into what made him so successful. Before he came to IBM, he was an IBM customer, and a consultant to large companies. He knew the traps that CEOs can fall into. As a customer, he was fully aware of the stupid mistakes that managers make.

When he first started his job as the CEO of IBM, instead of calling a bunch of meetings with employees and analysts to discuss His Grand Strategy, he horrified college professors and reporters by saying that the last thing IBM needed at that point was another 'vision.' Worse, he spent the bulk of his first three months visiting customers. He continued to spend about 40% of his time talking to customers during his tenure at IBM. How many CEOs can say they do that?

And I'm not talking about spending time with big-ticket prospects, closing the deal. When the CEO is acting as the company's Top Salesperson, the customers he's talking to will be just as cagey and close-mouthed as they are with their regular salesperson. The CEO won't learn anything useful in that situation.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/03/2005

2nd Edition of Great Demo! published

The 2nd Edition of Great Demo! has just been published. The book presents how to achieve surprisingly improved software demos--and is an easy read on a plane flight. This 2nd edition of Great Demo! has been substantially updated to address new situations and share best practices. There is a new, complete chapter on Remote Demos (e.g., via WebEx and Live Meeting), an area that has become more important, but often with less-than-desired results. The new chapter addresses the challenges of Remote Demos and provides guidelines, best practices and some sage tips to increase the effectiveness and interactivity of these demonstrations. Great Demo! is available now on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and directly from The Second Derivative.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/02/2005

Software 2005 Conference presentations

Last week, 1500 software leaders gathered at the Software 2005 conference. The conference theme was "Building Blocks for Success." McKinsey presented their second annual report on the state of the software industry, and described one of the building blocks for success as the ability for software companies to demonstrate superior customer value:

"Customers have often accused the software industry of over-promising and under-delivering. In the current environment, it's not enough to say that purchasing software, for example, can help a company save 5 percent. Instead, the sales representative must demonstrate that she clearly understands the client's business model and financial situation, and then articulate the exact categories where the software will save or generate money." Here is a link to the full report.

For the keynote and breakout presentations, click here. Don't forget to check out Pragmatic Marketing's presentation, Increase Revenue and Profit with Product Management in a Strategic Role.

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 5/02/2005

How do you get someone to listen to you?

We know we're supposed to discover market problems by visiting the market and observing products. Yet it sometimes difficult to know how to get people to listen and to share their problems. David St Lawrence writes, "I was looking for contributions to augment the examples I had collected. Without missing a beat, the young man on my right asked me, with a wicked grin, 'How do you get someone to listen to you?'"

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/02/2005

Handling the Competition

For any of you who have been closely involved in a sale where your product was competing directly against another product, you know that selling against a competitor is tough. Product Managers, as part of supporting the sales force, need to provide guidance and support in selling against the competition. Read Handling the Competition.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 5/01/2005

ads break the Rule of Specificity

In Revenue Journal, Kristin Zhivago writes,

AMRO ads and landing pages break the Rule of Specificity; they never reveal what is being sold. I look over this page, and I still have the same, burning question: What does this company sell? Read her full post.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/27/2005

Software 2005 Conference

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of the month, Pragmatic Marketing is presenting at Software 2005. The conference runs from Apr26-27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Software 2005 is a one-stop event that delivers best practices for the entire life cycle of a software company with sessions on funding, development, launch, scaling, liquidity, and managing in mature markets. The conference features a powerful lineup of speakers, breakout groups, and networking opportunities -- all designed to provide insight into the most important challenges facing software executives today. (http://www.software2005.com/)

posted by Barbara Nelson @ 4/14/2005

measure the effectiveness of marketing

Marketing departments at technology companies are losing influence in the C-suite, primarily because of their inability to show the effectiveness of their marketing investment. More than 80% of respondents in the CMO Council study said they were dissatisfied with their ability to prove marketing ROI.

'Particularly in technology and telecommunications sectors, the marketing role is often subjugated,' said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.

Neale-May said the biggest problem is the lack of effective marketing measurement systems. 'You have to show in a very exacting way where and how marketing is impacting the performance of the company and the value of the business,' he said.

Here's how companies surveyed measure the effectiveness of marketing.

30% Revenue per marketing dollar
13% marketing mix model
13% common metrics across marketing group
13% currently creating ROI model
13% Not able to measure
9% Year-on-year programming dollars
4% Sales force productivity
4% Compare spending against competitor

Source: CMOs feel the power.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/14/2005

Avoiding Cyber Oblivion

Today, there is a major shift in thinking on how to build a major corporate personality. To play the game, one must clearly figure out the secret powers of e-commerce and the role of new technologies in contrast to traditional print and old-fashioned, mass-advertising driven models. Read Avoiding Cyber Oblivion by Naseem Javed.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/12/2005

Phone calls are sand, not rocks

We don't have time for the strategic when we're consumed with the tactical. Christine Hannis, head of communications for BBDO Europe writes,

"People can't bear to miss a call. Everybody thinks the next call can be something really exciting. And getting so many calls proves social success. It fulfills a fundamental insecurity."

How many rocks can you add to a bucket of sand? Phone calls, meetings, and email are the sand; visits to the market are the rocks. Is your day so filled with the tactical that you haven't allocated time for the strategic portion of your job?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/11/2005

The Quest for Exceptional Workforce Performance

We truly live in a Dilbert world. Product managers often express concern that their company either has no strategy or, if there is one, they don't know what it is.

In The Quest for Exceptional Workforce Performance, Accenture reports that only 12 percent of respondents reported that more than 75 percent of their workforce fully understands the company's strategic priorities; and just 17 percent said more than 75 percent of their employees understand the connection between their jobs and corporate strategy execution.

In the absence of a corporate strategy, each department creates their own: development builds, marketing brands, sales sells. Product management has an opportunity here to identify the corporation's distinctive competence based on customer input, and communicate it both within the product teams and to the senior execs.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/08/2005

Apr 05 newsletter

Product management is a well-understood role in virtually every industry except technology. In the last ten years, the product management role has expanded its influence in technology companies yet we continue to hear the question, "Who needs product management?" Read the Apr 2005 newsletter: Who Needs Product Management?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/05/2005

Stuck in a Swamp of Skepticism

Let's assume someone really good-looking swept you off your feet with promises of a life of bliss. You dated, got engaged, and then tied the knot. About five minutes after you left the church together in your limo, your new spouse suddenly turned into the ugliest, meanest, rudest person you had ever met. A broken heart and many months later, you were free, and you vowed to yourself: 'Never again.'

This is the mindset of today's software buyer. Especially those considering big-ticket, enterprise-wide programs.

These people are Skeptical, with a capital S. They have already been badly burned by 'revolutionary' systems.' Read more in Revenue Journal :: Stuck in a Swamp of Skepticism.

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/01/2005

Why don't we pay attention anymore?

All of that data flying at you by e-mail, instant message, cell phone, voice mail and BlackBerry--it could actually be making you dumber. Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in attention deficit disorder, has identified a related disorder he calls attention deficit trait, and he says it's reaching epidemic proportions in the corporate world. "It's the great seduction of the information age," Hallowell tells News.com's Alorie Gilbert. "You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you're not." Dr. Hallowell dispenses some advice worthy of your attention in Why don't we pay attention anymore?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 4/01/2005

Who Needs Product Management?

Barbara Nelson explains in Who Needs Product Management?

posted by Steve Johnson @ 3/31/2005

Pragmatic Marketing

Sections

Personal tools

Document Actions

Entries For: December 2005

2005 Archive

Turning Browsers into Buyers

ack/nak: discussion: the tao of pricing

BrainDeath by Micromanagement

Circular Marketing: The Number One Issue of 2006

Searching fixed

2005 survey: Average, Minimums, and Maximums

Positioning begins with reality

How to Ship Anything

2005 survey: Canadian compensation

2005 salary survey results posted

CMO Council study reveals the painfully obvious

Less as a competitive advantage

Why Marketing ROI Misses the Mark

Complexity is easy; simplicity is hard

Your Buyers Don't Want Gobbledygook

Back in the Box

Big Talk And Small Steps: Implementing Strategy

Fixing the Requirements Mess

Eclipse Roadmap

Creating Googles, Apples and a process of innovation.

Product Manager, Interrupted

Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005)

Winners, Losers of Corporate Image 2005

Interview with an honest boss

Best of Out-Of-The-Office auto-replies

Don't Manage Time, Manage Yourself

Pragmatic Marketing roles & compensation benchmark

Uncle Mark's 2006 Gift Guide & Almanac

Issue 5: Where Does Product Management Belong in the Organization

The Dilbert Blog: I love Technology

IDEO and the Art of Innovation

Excellent Customer Service

Effective Meetings

Role of Technical Sales Engineers

Marketing Profiler

The key to making happy users: Make the right thing easy

Product & Process Innovation

When TV Surrenders to Web

The Host With The Most: Hosting Software

The Winners and Losers of the Internet Break-Up

Content-Type.com free file hosting

Nifty Tool for Affinity Mapping

Setting priorities

Keep the sharp edges!

and speaking of being passionate

First impressions

This ROI is broken....

Well, if the persona fits...

Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide

A look inside the iPod nano and Apple's margins

Tech Takes Back the Market

Joel on Software - The Project Aardvark Spec

What's the Big Idea?

Heard on United....

Working The Plan Using A Plan That Works

Change This Manifesto

But will anyone buy because of Dish, Colorado?

Pushed And Pulled: Development vs Production

Seth's Blog: Hurry!

Innovation: The Best Practices of Technology Brokers

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web

Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do, Part I

Issue 4: The Higher They Go, The Stupider They Get

Degrees Of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management

A Final Word on Branding Products

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report

Pricing for Software Product Managers

Polishing Your Marketing Message

Accidental Product Naming

Thinking about the present and future....

From consultation to standardization

Huge Cyber-Tsunami Developing in Asia

KPI and bonuses for product managers

Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking