Topics in the January 2007 issue of The Pragmatic Marketer include:

• Pragmatic Marketing's 2006 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey
• Technology Assessment for a better strategy
• Product managers are really superheroes in disguise
• Navigating uncharted territory: How we developed a strategic product marketing role
• Product design: bridging the gap between product management and development

Read the January 2007 issue online.

Ansel Adams wrote, "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." And such is the case with the Chandler project. After four years of development, they have delivered only a 0.6 release with no general availability in sight.

In Dreaming in Code, author Scott Rosenberg follows a group of programmers tasked with creating a new product over a three-year stint. Along the way the book explores disciplines in development (and the lack of), the history of computing (particularly its truths and folklore), and explains why software engineering isn't a science but an art. A common misconception even among developers is that software is similar to construction when, as becomes clear in the book, developing software is more like cooking. Programming methodologies are as plentiful as cookbooks but both are limited by the realities of artistry. A chef can make miracles from a pantry full of ingredients; a cook cannot.

If you're involved with a development team as a product manager or marketer, there is much here that will illuminate your team's dysfunction. Rosenberg reintroduces us to concepts that have been known since The Mythical Man Month and The Soul of a New Machine but apparently not understood, remembered, or believed. Strongly recommended.

The use scenario may be the most important artifact of the requirements document. They go by many names depending on your company's nomenclature: goals, tasks, usage cases, whatever. The use scenario provides the details of the question "what is the customer attempting to accomplish?" Or said another way "Explain the entire experience from beginning to end."

I have a personal blog--updated information about what's happening with me, my family, and especially my son's band The Alternate Routes. I use the blog to update my extended family and friends without having to send emails to all of them. I frequently want to post a picture in the blog, which shouldn't be hard but actually is. Here's what I used to do: resize and copy the desired picture to a shared folder on my Mac that was synchronized with my .Mac account on the web; then I would link to the picture in my public folder which actually involved using an undocumented URL. It was convoluted but easy enough once I figured out how to do it. I later found that I could accomplish the same thing a little more easily via Flickr but it was still rather convoluted. Nowadays I add the picture to my photo program, which can export to Google's PicasaWeb. Then I click on Embed and PicasaWeb generates the HTML necessary to incorporate the photo into a blog post. Photo resizing, transfer to web, and code-links are all easily done in three steps. If I managed the blog with iWeb (which I don't for other reasons), it's even simpler: drag and drop the picture onto a placeholder. That's it.

What I've been describing are all of the individual tasks necessary to achieve my goal: I want to include a photo in a blog post. Use scenarios explain "Steve wants to have a photo in his blog post." Or perhaps "Steve has taken a dozen pictures of the winter storm. He wants to put one of those pictures on his blog with a link to the collection of pictures."

Instead of saying "the user might want to do" this or that, a use scenario is a specific, illustrative situation. And thus, keeps us from the edge cases of the implausible and from the vagueness of non-specific.

The American Cancer Society defined their use scenarios extremely well; they followed the transaction from the beginning to the end. My office made a donation recently in memory of a family member. The American Cancer Society sent me a notification in the mail and included a ready-to-use Thank You card with a return envelope. Beautiful. Think this through. After a funeral, the bereaved family gets dozens, perhaps hundreds, of memorial gifts. As with a wedding, etiquette requires that you acknowledge the gift. But while a wedding is a period of great anticipated joy, a death usually is not anticipated and certainly not joyful. While the wedding bride may not be completely thrilled with writing hundreds of thank-you notes, a bereaved family after a funeral must dread it. The American Cancer Society has made it simpler to pen a short note and get it in the mail without all the drudgery of addressing the envelope. They looked at the gift from the standpoint of the 'customer' and the customer's usage. After the giver or 'buyer' transaction was complete, they also helped the receiver or 'user' with their part of the transaction.

We get so caught up with tasks that we miss the goal; we get some involved with buyers that we often forget the user. What is your customer trying to accomplish? Write some use scenarios from their point of view and from beginning to end, and you'll be delighted with the outcome.

Roger Cauvin tagged Steve Johnson and Barbara Nelson. Here are 5 things you might not know about each of us:

About Steve:

• 1. I paid my way through college playing guitar in bars. All the beer I could drink plus tuition money. Now that's a sweet deal.
• 2. I got married when I was 20 and we had kids early; I'm almost 50 and the kids on are their own. Empty-nester is what it's all about.
• 3. I have read, in their entirety, the Old Testament, New Testament, the Koran (in English), and the Book of Mormon.
• 4a. My son is the bass player for the Alternate Routes, a great new band. Oh, wait... a lot of you know that.
• 4b. My daughter is a sales person.
• 5. I really like sales people. Well, most of 'em. I love sales people who understand their business and their products, and help their customers buy. I scorn sales people who put their personal quota above the best interests of the company and their clients.

About Barb:

• 1. I feel 20-something but have a grandson who's almost a year old. The cliche about how we should skip the children and go straight to the grandchildren is too true!
• 2. I'm in the planning phase of a major house renovation. (What was I thinking?) As we make choices, I'm trying to keep focused on "what problem does this solve?" and to avoid letting the project costs run amuck. Sort of like building software...
• 3. Although I travel a lot for work, I still love to travel for pleasure. Favorite cities: Paris, San Francisco (close to home), London, New York, and Victoria. Favorite islands: Santorini and Kaui.
• 4. I've been married almost 34 years. (Not possible, I'm 20-something.) My husband makes me laugh, keeps me centered, inspires me to be a better person, and let's me be crazy once in a while.
• 5. I just learned to play canasta with my 82-year old aunt and 90-year old mother. My husband says I'm now officially a grandma.

We tag Robin Lowry, The Cranky Product Manager, Bob Corrigan, Scott Sehlhorst, Adele Revella. Tag, you're it.

by Naseem Javed

The appendage of the letter "i" to a word as an aim to create an icon is silly... momentary, short-term fame and glory may be possible, but to create a long lasting, global, iconic mark is very doubtful. What makes an icon is also the exclusive longevity of its unique name, and for that reason, you have examples of Rolex and not iWatch; Panasonic and not iTV.

Terms like, interactive- portable- device were behind creating the name iPod, and has now become responsible for the race for the letter "i" to be ingrained in just about every product category, from: iCell, iCar, iBank to iBrick and just about every word including iCopy. Feeble minds somehow gravitate towards the copying process and feel secure by joining the happy-go-lucky bandwagon, rather than taking an original approach.

Therefore branding agencies feel very comfortable upon announcing names like iLock, iGrass, or iTravel, to captive focus group audiences, names where the co-dependant participants jump in joy in approval with these so-called brilliant name ideas... most of these naming attempts do not see the light of the next season.

Most will remember the other recent short-lived craze of adding the letter "e" to convey electronic was a huge fad, pursued originally by the electronic wizards and later adopted by the real copycats like eSteel and eLumber or eCement, mostly now in the eCemetry. Millions of dollars were wasted by each such copycat as they played to these expensive loony e-tunes.

There is nothing wrong in being wildly original, gutsy and or at times silly, provided you have a long term strategy of protecting your intellectual property assets. There are Yahoo, Google and many other unusual, light hearted names over something overly rigid and trying to be unique at any cost like, EXZIXIVENT Systems.

Regardless and at any cost, those corporations actively engaged in playing competitive war games in the marketplace and advancing their flotillas of name brand ships must have these new name identities of their advancing brands under the cover of solid intellectual property and a well-planned strategy, and not accidental naming. In a time where a few dollars research on Google will tell you who owns what trademark, and how many others are using a similar name it is still amazing that billion dollar companies with millions in promotional campaigns would get caught up in these i-stupid games.

Apple Computer is still recovering from battle fatigue from their long and bitter dispute with The Beatles over ownership of 'Apple Records', and after paying huge undisclosed settlements over the use of similar names in music has now gotten into other i-soups. The entire Silicon Valley has a long history of naming fiascoes as the same brilliant engineers and hi-tech wizards have very often missed out on matters of iconization. We have now entered into a time where cyber-branding shrinks the globe by the seconds and only professionally structured corporate image and name identities have a chance to play out the real marketing and branding games.

Just Prove It

If you have a super brand, then let the whole world see it, if you have absolute 100% ownership of that brand, prove it. Proving an absolute ownership only takes a search on Google, demonstrating how unique and one-of-a-kind a name brand is. Today, around the world, 95% of brands do not have full ownership. They may have logos, unique designs, colorful executions, banners and billboards, but as long as there are far too many identical and similar names all over the marketplace, the issue of 100% ownership stays behind. Global icons like Sony, Rolex, or PlayStation are 100% owned, and all over the world there is absolutely no confusion about this whatsoever. Therefore without iron-clad ownership of the name identity, the organization is left holding logos and billboards and this makes the entire advertising and marketing process nothing but an uphill losing battle.

Quick Test: A 5-Star Standard of Naming Critical for 100% ownership.

Your name will earn a single star for your name being very simple, one more for being very unique, add one more for being highly related and pertinent to the type and style of business, plus add one more for having a globally-protected trademark system in place and lastly, add one more star for your name having an identical matching dotcom, for cyber branding and to have a universal ride on the global e-commerce highway.

Now that you have 5 Stars, you can enjoy a great image and name identity profile, as you have the freedom to take your brand into foreign countries without fears and worries, and you have a long term brand equity already building and growing your persona... you are on the right track towards having a great icon.

With 4 Stars, obviously something is lacking, therefore the cost of pushing the message is high and progress is slow. With 3 Stars, the limitations can be very obvious, the struggle keeps the brand spinning and most efforts are being wasted. 2 Stars, the brand is seriously damaged and all the effort of advertising are futile, in addition to a disconnected relationship with the customer and consequent marketing confusion. Regional or global expansion is a serious hurdle. With 1 Star, the brand is dying, and will not survive. With 0 Stars; there is no point in continuing.

Today, there are only less than 1% of 5 Star Brands, while the rest would hardly earn 1-2, indicating the current state of branding and the lack of iconization, while big corporations all over the world are convinced that they have the best name brands. Most have a tendency to deny these key branding issues, while ad agencies continue to iSpend with seemingly endless iBudgets, resulting in an iProblem. The key question of branding is having a clear 100% Brand Ownership.

Conclusion: There are some very serious and very bright projects out there, under the guidance of bright teams working behind, but there is a serious disconnection when it comes to long-term and long lasting naming architecture and branding strategies. What is most critically lacking are the pillars of branding for iconization, leading to 100% OWNERSHIP.

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 80's and also founded ABC Namebank International www.abcnamebank.com a consultancy established in Toronto and New York a quarter century ago. Currently, Naseem is on a lecture tour in Asia and can be reached at nj@njabc.com.

On Tuesday, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple iPhone product. Wow! This thing looks amazing. I hope Motorola, Nokia, and the rest will see the power of great design. Maybe this product will show them that software shouldn't be an afterthought but a key element of the design.

But the name. iPhone? Ugh. It's not meaningful nor is it trademarkable. Well, I guess it is trademarkable except Apple doesn't own the trademark, Cisco does. It's perhaps a clever name for Cisco's VoIP phone, invoking as it does the idea of an internet phone. Yet as far as I can tell, Cisco doesn't own the URL; some company called Nuvio does (or is that really a Cisco company? I dunno). Didn't Apple learn anything from their 20-year battle with The Beatles?

Either way it's a dumb name for Apple. Isn't the whole 'i' thing over already? iPod, iTunes, iLife, iWork, iWhatever. Yeesh.

I want this product but I hate the name. Is the iPhone name a monument to Steve's ego or was it a project code name that went awry. Since it won't ship until mid-year, I'm hoping the product managers can convince Apple to use a good name when they actually deliver the product.

Another book that been languishing on my nightstand is the second edition of In Search of Stupidity by Merrill "Rick" Chapman. I read--and enjoyed--the first edition and was a little reluctant to read it again to find the new stuff but I'm glad I did. This is more than a new edition; it's a remarkable rewrite. Just like version 2 of most software (or version 3 of Microsoft software), this edition is a much better than the 1.0 edition. Chapman has added analysis of the mistakes with concrete advice on how to avoid the same mistakes in future. He also refreshes the edition with examples from current days, showing how mistakes from the past are being repeated again and again.

In particular, Chapman illustrates how those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it. SaaS used to be called ASP, which once was called timesharing. Everything new is old! And because many marketing and engineering folks are in their 20s and young 30s, they don't remember what the oldsters know.

Our industry is really quite young, isn't it? In our product management survey, only 5% of our respondents are age 50 or older; the average product manager is 36 and likely to have an MBA. You'd think that the biz schools would be exploring the failures of the tech industry but Chapman illustrates that we haven't learned much from the past.

Here's an old story from the insurance industry:

Vendor: "Customers want claims paid in a timely and efficient manner."
Customer: "I want my car fixed."

Customers don't care about insurance claims and appraisals; those are the tasks that the insurance company process mandates. The customer's goal is to be driving a repaired car.

When you talk about your products, are you focused on the buyer's goals or are you still focused on the vendor's prerequisite tasks? Are you using the buyer's language or using industry's jargon?

I managed to finish reading a stack of books over the holiday. I never want to take an almost-finished book on a trip, lest I run out of reading materials on the road, so I had a bunch to read. One surprising new favorite was Operation Bullpen by Kevin Nelson. (The book was a gift from Barbara, my colleague and Kevin's sister-in-law.) Fascinating read about a huge autograph scam in the late 90s; millions of dollars of fake sports memorabilia was collected in one of the FBI's biggest raids of recent history. Heck, I don't even own any sports memorabilia and I found it quite fascinating. If you own a signed photo, you need to check this one out!