As discussed in Practical Product Management, there are six methods of research: three are best for finding problems; three are best for evaluating solutions. An experiment is the best tool for evaluating usability—or is it? Check out www.interface-research.com. This site compares 10 different aspects of usability for a web site and asks which you prefer. At the end, they show you their results so far. Pretty clever. This form of research is called a choice model because it forces the respondent to choose. After all, you cannot choose both answers.

But here’s the question: is the survey telling us which is better or telling us which is popular? And is popular better? Britney Spears is popular. (For better, check out The Alternate Routes.) I’m not convinced that the popular choice is indeed better or if it is just what we’re used to.

If you have a new user interface or new web site design, why not use a method like this to test before you poke it out online? For that matter, you should test positioning, product names, your marketing collateral templates look-and-feel, and so on. Do you?

UGH! I'm working on the annual survey data with poor tools. In some cases, the Vovici software is all I need. For anything more I have to suffer pivot tables in Excel. I guess I really need someone to give me a copy of SPSS. Meanwhile, I've never used any data mining tools that truly present information clearly.

Check out the data visualization of the fund-raising for our upcoming presidential elections. And if you haven't played with Hans Rosling's census data visualization, you really should; he conveys really rich data in a simple format with Gapminder.

Wouldn't it be great to have a dashboard for business information?

I’ve encountered some fairly cool products in the last few weeks... just in time for Christmas. Here are some ideas for your gift list.

You can never go wrong with books by Bill Bryson. Everybody loves his writing. I bought a dozen copies of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid ($11) for friends and family. This book is just completely great. If you or someone you love grew up in the 60s (or grew up in the Midwest), buy this book. Also check out A Walk in the Woods ($8) about the Appalachian Trail and In a Sunburned Country ($10) about Australia.

And if you haven't read it, you should add The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott to your business book list.

Everyone who has attended one of my seminars knows that I’m a gadget guy. Want to know if a new gadget idea will sell? Take pre-orders! This vendor is taking pre-orders of his reproduction of the Flux Capacitor for delivery next year. Who doesn't want this? Even if you don't need a time machine, you definitely want to check out the Garmin Nuvi 350 ($350) GPS to get you from here to there. Garmin offers different models with different features but no matter which you choose, the Garmin software is certainly better than what came with your car and is infinitely better than the Hertz AlwaysLost.

Regular readers of my blog know that I recently won the Software Idol contest at Business of Software 2007. It was great to speak at the conference; winning a Nintendo Wii was icing on the cake--and dang it, that thing is just fun. My wife and I are now "pro wii bowlers" even though I have a wicked slice (or whatever you call it when the ball curves to the left at the end of the lane). If you have a friend or family member who already has a Wii, you probably know about Guitar Hero III but it is almost impossible to find. Some other great (and easy-to-find) products you might consider are:

• Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I can’t believe this is as fun as it is but basically you relive the six Star Wars movie in the world of Legos. It should be stupid but somehow it’s a blast. Using a “force push” to trash a droid is just so… satisfying!

• Rayman Raving Rabbids 2. Talk on your cell phone during the movie until the manager catches you. Slap the kids on a car trip to keep ‘em quiet. Play the guitar part for "Papa’s got a brand new bag." Shoot invading rabbids with a plunger. Silly simple games for all ages including an easy mode for little kids.
  

• Also think about a second Wii Remote and a rechargeable Wii remote Charge Station for two remotes ($30) so you’re always ready to play.

If you have a digital camera, you definitely need to buy a Shutterfly calendar or photo book. I love the 12x12 photo book for vacations and family events but your mom might prefer an 8x11 book or a 4x4 brag book.

It’s probably time for everyone on your list to get a new iPod. I recently bought the 160 GB Apple iPod Classic. The 80-gig version will hold 20,000 songs—and only a complete musical nut (like me) has that many—but if you’re storing video, you’ll need the bigger one ($250 and $350). The Apple iPod Touch is totally cool if you don’t have much music; an 8-gig will hold about 2000 songs, or roughly 200 CDs. ($300).

And of course you will want to load your iPod with music from The Alternate Routes. Ignore the review on iTunes; these guys are great, especially the bass player. You probably should get a tee-shirt too. Buy the album from Amazon or iTunes.

Alan at On Product Management want to know what makes a good “vendor blog”? He writes,

Like many things, there are good blogs, bad blogs, and good and bad corporate blogs. I dislike blogs that are blatant marketing pitches, and it’s clear that readers don’t like them much either.

That's for sure! When will marketing and sales departments understand that no one likes to be pitched? Pitches in blogs and other online forums are like a stranger running into your house and yelling BUY BUY BUY at you!

Alan asks,

What works for you and your blog?

I started the productmarketing.com blog originally to store deep-dive articles on topics from our training classes, ideas that required more analysis than a brief answer in class could provide. Originally the main page was a diary pointing to new content on my site (and others). I found myself writing article-length email replies to a question from class and realized that I should write the article once and distribute it on request. “Here’s the link!”

When I put all the articles online, Google had a field day. All that rich content in one place made the productmarketing.com website pretty attractive to search. The articles provided lots of great, rich content while the blog kept the content fresh. You can read all the details in our web history article.

My challenge of late has been to allocate blogging time with a travel schedule that is virtually 100%. I find it’s really hard to get my mind quiet enough in the cacophony of traveling life to write anything at all. That’s a real challenge when your company’s thought-leader has a “real job” too. Like so much of product management, it can be frustrating when the people you need for content are motivated to do something else.

My current strategy is to schedule a morning for writing before my week starts. I keep a folder on my desktop of topics that need exploration and then just write to whichever topic is most interesting to me at the time. I also need to remember to check to see if I’ve already written an article on the subject! There’ve been times when I say, “Hey, wait a minute! I’ve written this before!!” Silly me.

Our content management software has a handy feature. I can schedule when a post will appear. On those rare days when I’m particularly prolific, I can write a series of posts and then schedule them over the next few days and weeks. I try to post on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have a bunch of stuff.

Our marketing people know the number of visitors to the site and which articles they read but I’ve never been much of a measurement person. I know, I know; it’s heresy... I'm supposed to be.  As much as I know that I’m supposed to use data, I learn through anecdotes. I measure success when people come to my seminar because they read an article or post on the website. That said, our annual product management survey reports that only 9% of product managers use RSS readers while 84% read our email newsletter.

I think Jacob Nielson is right. In Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, he concludes,

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

A blog is a great place to post short notes but schedule some time to fully explore an idea in the form of an article or webinar. If you don’t take the time, you’ll get shallow postings instead of thorough, valuable content.

Have you ever tried to be funny in email? It’s hard to do. We use smileys or other clues because the written word lacks visual clues. Maybe that’s why video is so popular.

Teachers know that different kids learn in different ways. There are some basic learning styles:

• Auditory learning occurs through hearing the spoken word.
• Visual learning occurs through images, demonstrations and body language.
• Kinesthetic learning occurs through doing, touching and interacting.
• Read/write learning occurs through reading and writing.

(I don’t know if 'read/write' was listed last because it is least effective or if this bullet was added afterward by an editor. The article says there are three kinds of learning but lists four. Hmm.)

I recently spoke at the Business of Software 2007 conference. The organizers taped my speech and posted it to Google video. Those who have read my articles will find the theme familiar: product management is how a company defines and delivers products to market in a consistent, repeatable way. Afterwards, about half the conference visited me in a “bird of a feather” get-together to talk about the role of product management in tech companies. Questions ranged from how to find good product managers to how to do product management and also how to sell product management as a valued role to tech companies.

Watching a video isn’t necessarily better than reading; it’s different. But it’s hard to convey humor or emotion in a blog post. Hmmm, maybe a video is better.

I have written hundreds of articles on product management and marketing. These articles have brought people to our website where they learn that we offer training courses and consulting. I don’t think I have to jump up and down on everybody’s head, saying “BUY BUY BUY” to get people to sign up for a seminar. Thought-leadership programs drive sales.

My friend David Scott has written about thought-leadership as a key marketing strategy in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” Watching from afar has been fairly interesting. His blog has driven people to buy his book; both his blog and his book has driven people to hire him to do keynote speeches where more people buy his book. Ah, the circle of life.

David's discussions on how youtube can be used as part of an overall thought-leadership strategy has brought him to the attention of “Fox News” and “The Wall Street Journal.” And today, he's is in the paper.

And here’s the great part: he didn’t call them; they called him!

Old Rules; beg for coverage and beg for each sale;

New Rules: create thought-leadership by participating in a community that helps customers buy.

White papers, technology briefs, industry articles, interviews and speeches at conferences: these show that you and your company are not following the pack but leading it. You should definitely investigate thought leadership programs as a key element of your marketing strategy.

More haiku to add to the ones the Cranky PM whipped together:

Bad executives
make commitments that, alas,
we cannot keep.

Kevin, poor Kevin.
No loss is ever your fault.
The world's worst sales man.

This emergency,
from poor planning on your part,
is now mine. But why?

O please tell Satan,
V P of Development,
quality matters.

and finally,

Good news! Successful
product managers use the
Pragmatic framework.

Happy Thanksgiving.

One of the great things about this time of year in the U.S. is the number of holidays right in a row. The irregular pattern of work days makes traveling a little more problematic and gives many of us the chance to catch up on things. I know the sales people are hysterical--it's the end of the fiscal year for many--but despite a daily call from Kevin-the-world's-worst-salesperson, the typical product manager has a few quiet days to think about this year's accomplishments and next year's planning.

Ah, a day at home to get some work done.

In case your boss is still living in 1989 and missed the whole telecommuting thing, research supports the value of working from home. It's a win-win for employer and employee. You know what isn't helping? IM. Turn it off before you try to do any real work. Disconnect from the internet until you've finished your project.

And even if your company doesn't ask you to do it, send your manager an annual status report on your projects: a "State of the You" status report.

We at Pragmatic Marketing like to balance qualitative research from interviews with quantitative research from surveys. Every week we meet hundreds of product managers and technology executives; we hear their stories; we observe the magazines they read (such as our own Pragmatic Marketer) and what web sites they visit (such as my blog at productmarketing.com). We supplement this info with quantitative research from our annual product management survey.

Are all surveys created equal? Not according to Wharton. Read more in Polling the Polling Experts: How Accurate and Useful Are Polls These Days?

Product managers tell me that their execs don't value research. Actually I find that executives do indeed value research--it's just that they tend to value the qualitative over the quantitative. They want product managers to call face-to-face on customers while many product managers prefer to hire the work out to a third-party.

Of course, you need both. You need both stories and data. So go visit three customers and then survey a hundred. Deliver market facts to your executives in their preferred format.

Recently the folks at 37signals started an opinion storm over the subject of personas by saying:

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves.

When writing about Buyer and User Personas, I wrote:

In developing products and creating market messages, product management must have clarity on the ideal user and buyer. The industry has adopted the term "persona" to refer to the ideal profiles of our customers.

The issue of course is that it’s better to program to a real person when you can but as vendors, we are usually programming for people who are not us. The problem with most approaches to programming is that they assume you have access to an onsite customer. But if you’re a vendor, you need to create a profile, a biography, of the ideal customer to show that we’re not programming to ourselves.

As 37signals points out, this is not a creative writing exercise. Instead the persona should be a profile grounded in market research. That’s how we know Robin the typical product manager is 32 years old, has a Dell D610 running Windows XP and Office 2003, and is always connected to the internet. This profile is based on our qualitative research with product managers as well as our quantitative research from our annual product manager survey.

Want to add some color to our research? Take Pragmatic Marketing's Product Management and Marketing Benchmark Survey for 2007.

UPDATE: Read a great post Building a Data-Backed Persona at Boxes and Arrows and Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas at User Interface Engineering.

Hooray! I won!!

Last week I flew to San Jose to attend the Business of Software 2007 and to join in the software idol contest. Five speakers, ten minutes each. I took the advice of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of US, who wrote:

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.

I was sincere (well, okay, I was funny) but I think the trick was that I was brief; my final time was about 7 minutes while all the others ran long.

The speech got me thinking about sales training. How many times over the years have we droned on and on about features to an audience still a little stumped by their Blackberries? Kevin, the world’s worst sales person, says “Don’t confuse me with what the product does. Just tell me what I need to say to beat the competition.”

At a sales training, every speaker ran long. The VP of Sales said, “I know I scheduled you for 45 minutes so we’ll delay cocktail hour until you’re finished.” Oh great! The only thing between a group of sales people and their drunkenness is a product manager! Solution: “There are three things you need to know about the product: here’s how to sell it; here’s how it’s priced; here’s how we’ll support you with awareness and leads. Everything else is on the sales intranet. That’s all!” The only one who got a standing ovation from sales people was this product manager.

Neither sales people nor customers are nearly as interested in the inner workings of your technology as you and your developers are. Tuned in product managers know that we have to communicate what the customer needs to know in the language of the customer, not the language of the vendor.

Each year, Pragmatic Marketing conducts a survey of product managers and marketing professionals in technology companies. The results provide an interesting insight into a typical "day-in-the-life" for those tasked with defining and launching technology products in today's competitive market.

Please take a few minutes to participate in this year's survey. It will be open until November 21st and the results will be published here in December. Until then, you'll get a quick look at some of the results when you complete your submission.

I'm speaking today at Business of Software 2007 in San Jose. I have 10 minutes to make my case and I've spent the weekend editing and pruning and cutting. Assuming I don't get over-excited, I think my speech is only 9 minutes.

Sometimes a deadline or a hard-stop is a good thing. What would you say if you knew you couldn't run long? What features would you omit if you had a hard ship date?

A fundamental idea of Scrum is to see how much development you can do in a two-week period. Get something done, show it to the customer, repeat. Scrum sprints give the team the satisfaction of completion of something--a form of closure--which inspires the team to begin again. Deliver 100% of something rather than 70% of everything. "Do less more often" is so much more satisfying (and successful) than "over commit and under deliver."

Those who have attended Practical Product Management have done positioning in an hour. Granted, it was a case study product so you didn't care too much but... what if you only had an hour to do positioning for your product? Could you do it? And would the result be any worse than the document you and your team agonized over the course of that all-day off-site you ran? Maybe the one-hour version is just as good.

Arbitrary deadlines can be weapons: dates that are imposed from above result in schedules that no one believes. But more often, deadlines are a good thing. They force us to choose; they challenge us to focus. They give us a marker for completion. They introduce an artificial but no-less-real terminus. What can we do in one hour? What can we finish in two weeks? How much can we accomplish in the allocated time?

What would you say if you only had 10 minutes to do it?

Speaking of what people want to hear (but that the politicians don't), my friend Shaun is trying to stop those annoying calls from politicians. You may recall that they exempted themselves from the Do Not Call legislation. He's trying to generate awareness on his web site, Citizens for Civil Discourse. Join this movement to take control of the political conversation away from the politicians and give it back to the voter.

Why are projects so late? Joel Spolsky writes:

A huge number of technology projects go wrong. This is news to no one. Whether you run a software company with a number of ongoing development efforts or you have a nontech company that hires consultants here and there to provide systems integration, chances are you've bumped up against this problem. Delays, blown budgets, and outright failures are so common in the software world, in fact, that it's hardly newsworthy when a project is years late and millions over budget.

It seems to me that too many managers think of programming as factory work while Joel obviously sees it as art. And I agree with Joel. Whether you're writing code or a blog or a book, you need a creative environment. And working 80 hours a week doesn't help. Trying writing when you're not inspired--and then try it when you're tired too.

Nothing seems hard to those who don't have to do it.

In Everyone needs to know what we do here, I wrote:

The fastest way to lose credibility in a technology company is to say that you don’t understand technology. It’s okay to say that you don’t understand a new idea or a new implementation but to be effective in technology marketing and product management requires domain and technology expertise. People who tell you otherwise probably aren't very effective in working with technical products.

I was curious what others thought about the importance of domain knowledge so we asked some of our favorite bloggers to comment:

• Jeff Lash at How To Be A Good Product Manager
• Saeed Khan at On Product Management
  
• Roger Cauvin at Cauvin
• Bikram Gupta at Thoughts on Product Management

You can read my original article with their comments appended.

Hertz has offered me the honor of joining their frequent renter program. For only $450, I can get a car whenever I want. Huh? Don't I already get that? I have never been unable to rent a car... from Hertz, Enterprise, Avis, or everyone else! Oh, and preferred parking. Nice. (Actually, now that I mention it, it seems that they have been parking my rental car as far away as possible. Maybe they're softening me up for this ludicrous offer.)

Since when does buying a commodity require a premium price? Seems to me  that someone in the Hertz marketing department is smoking their own brochures.

Bill Miller writes about unrealistic schedules:

I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules. You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what? The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too.

Product managers, sales people, marketing departments, and executives make commitments all the time--and often they're unrealistic. We commit to a roadmap and then change it. We can't really commit to schedules when the feature-set keeps changing--but then we commit anyway. Yeesh. We have long advocated time-boxing as a method for balancing the schedule and commitments. Come to our Requirements That Work class to learn an agile approach to product planning.

Years ago, the president of a startup asked the product manager to commit to an aggressive date. The product manager discussed it with the dev lead and the whole team and agreed that, yes, they could make the date but it involved a fair amount of overtime. The team agreed to work Saturdays until the project was complete. When the president announced the decision that development would work Saturdays, he also committed the entire sales department to work Saturdays until the project was complete.

The moral: being a team-player means that the people making the commitments should have some skin in the game too.

Naseem Javed writes,

It only takes a minute to establish if one is holding that magical key or just toying with a rusty screwdriver.

Today, in order to have a commanding presence with universal access on e-commerce, domain names must act like very special golden keys as without it, the entire exercise of Internet-centric commerce becomes almost useless. Super-success in cyber-branding lies in the sophisticated creation, development and ownership of these powerful and magical keys, so that they may open an undiscovered universe of billions of unknown customers around the world. Without this power and access, what's the point of being in the race for leadership and image positioning?  It only takes a minute to establish if one is holding that magical key or just toying with a rusty screwdriver.

Domain management strategies have now, in fact become ultra-sophisticated and the most valuable components of building digital branding assets and the intellectual property of any ambitious corporation. Domain names are no longer small issues to be handled by the booming logo-centric-slogan-happy-agencies or web-tech-teams. They now demand powerful strategic, boardroom-level discussions with a commanding knowledge on global domain-registration laws and search-engine-visibility rules while capturing all other nomenclature objectives to create such golden keys.

During the dotcom boom, a million domain names were registered a day. Even the most unusual, silly and dysfunctional names were sought-after icons of get-rich-quick dreamers. Ninety-nine percent of such names failed. Exhausted or expired, these names have now disappeared. Along with them, the hundreds of millions of dollars on short lived website campaigns. But today, now fully matured in concepts and strategies there are some very powerful universal domain names that skate around on e-commerce, open complex gates and passages and have carved powerful, highly lucrative positions. The global power of e-commerce can only be demonstrated by their superior and exclusive fluidity on the net.

Smart businesses around the world are aggressively in search of such golden keys. To approach such universal domain-naming tasks starts with a serious audit to professionally measure the strengths or weaknesses of the names; this process is best served by highly objective views. The primary goal is to achieve power and access for maximum impact. Today, only the very best names will dominate the global marketplace. Weak, confusingly similar, or nearly identical names do not have a chance of surviving the power and ubiquity of e-commerce.

The duplication factor alone will bury most names in complex global listings. The most expensive websites are useless and the best campaigns will remain stuck unless there is a deeper understanding of this subject. Then there are alpha-structures, killing great websites and become liability to business itself. One must have the knowledge to determine the message, personality and length of the name, plus the choice of alpha characters, as each emits its own unique signals and demands typing. General branding exercises cannot be mistaken for these complex naming analyses and the strictest application of The Five Star Standard of Naming guards against such expensive busts.

The hyper-visibility of a universal cyber-name is the main issue. A quick search on Google is an instant test of any name's visibility. To appear on the top or on the first page is the most sought after idea but only an extremely small percentage can achieve this as most names are poorly structured and stays buried in massive duplication.   With high cost of promotion and intense global competition it's a brand-new frontier. A lot of money can be wasted in creating an artificial bounce to highly expensive websites, but in reality it's only those uniquely designed domains that quickly rise to the top with very little effort. Only an in-depth, highly custom analysis will point to the deep problems and illuminate latest methods to fix them.

Today, it's about global domainization, as multiple domain names create multiple problems in multiple markets. There are highly sophisticated rules to be followed. Be aware that there are too many fancy services offering strange global registrations and localization often faceless websites and without references. Domains are for the international audience and global customer base, so why have serious language issues, where in translations and foreign connotations they may be embarrassing or confusing customers. Cyber branding is an extremely global phenomenon.

Mind-share is more important than market-share. Customers must allow a name brand to settle in their minds before they give out cash. As such, market positioning is more critical than profit maximization. The human mind gravitates toward good names; those that are user-friendly and trustworthy. When trying to process millions of silly and randomly structured names, the mind quickly becomes exhausted.

In conclusion, logo-driven-branding has fallen into a deep sleep on these complex matters, and there's no need to wake it up. Currently with 95% of the domain names stuck in traffic jams, a frank and very candid CEO-level discussion is required while denials and refusal to face up to reality will simple keep the e-commerce presence in oblivion, guaranteed. Today one needs a very special golden key to open the gates of e-commerce and must now throw away that rusty screwdriver?

Naseem Javed is recognized as a world authority on Corporate Image and Global Cyber-Branding. Author of Naming for Power, he introduced The Laws of Corporate Naming in the 80s and also founded ABC Namebank, a consultancy established in New York and Toronto a quarter century ago. Currently, he is on a lecture tour in Asia and can be reached at nj@njabc.com.

I have neglected my blog reader for the last week so I was reading fast--meaning I was scanning and I was distracted a little anyway because I was listening to music at the same time; I'm a guy so that means I wasn't really paying attention to either one. And I almost missed this: my friend David’s The Gobbledygook Manifesto was in the Top 10 ChangeThis Downloads for August 2007. Congratulations, David!! If you haven’t read The Gobbledygook Manifesto, you should. Oh, and if you're in PR and you're not reading David's blog, you should.