We have a new puppy in the house. Her name is Bailey. I’ve gotten a few books on dog training and they all talk about thinking of things in the context of how the dog sees it. We must think and act the way the dog would in nature. Sounds a lot like personas, doesn’t it? Our marketing and development and sales should be about communicating clearly with the personas. Problem is, I don’t know very much about dogs in nature. I’ve never actually seen a mom with her litter of pups—or a wolf with pups for that matter. I guess I’ll have to start watching the shows on The Discovery Channel.

So if you’re a product manager, you need to understand your audience and the domain. How are you doing this? You should be visiting clients frequently to update your domain knowledge.

The training books also make the point that dogs have clear roles. In this case dogs are pack animals who follow an alpha dog. Uh-oh, I don’t know much but I’m pretty sure that I need to establish myself as the alpha dog. And I don’t really know how to do that either so I’m just being harsh. Is that the same?

Raising a puppy has me thinking about roles in development, particularly agile. In my experience, developers want clarity in roles and clear processes. Developers definitely want to hear the voice of the customer before they start building things. Unfortunately the product manager, who hasn’t established credibility yet, is trying to become the alpha dog by being harsh: trying to control the schedule and the specs and the prototypes. Regardless of your development method, the product manager should be the person who illuminates the market to the development team. In Scrum, your role is referred to as the Product Owner, not the Scrum Lord.

I'll be talking about product management's role in an agile environment in August; click here to sign up for the free webinar.

I believe that the Agile Manifesto is a response to bad management, particularly bad product management. Any of the agile approaches to development are focused on delivering products that work. And the key to delivering products that customers want to buy is for product management to understand the market better than anyone else.

Personas, actors, meetings, discussion, voice of the customer? These are all methods that we use to show developers and engineers that they are not the customers of our products. Bonnie Rind explores this further in Do Techies Really Know How Their Product Is Used?

Gopal Shenoy offers some pretty good advice for us all in The Top 11 things I learnt at SolidWorks in the last 11 years. My favorite is, as you might imagine,

7. Be “market driven” and not be “marketing driven”. There is a big difference: Never thought how big a difference adding “ing” to a word could make.

I'm convinced that developers want to be market-driven but no one wants to be marketing driven. Those marketing people don't buy our products, do they?

Buyers and Users are often different. Remember "buying" versus "using" criteria? To provide clarity, we develop persona documents, profiles of the archetypical  customer.

We've been talking--and teaching--about personas for quite a while so I'm really pleased when others add their voices to the conversation. I've been enjoying Adele Revella's blog on Buyer Personas and now Bonnie Rind gives us more of a post-sales take on the subject with Product Personas.

Anyone have some personas to share? I'll be glad to post them in this blog.

I posted my first video to YouTube as part of a contest to present at the Business of Software 2007 Conference in San Jose on Oct 29th. This is either a cool idea or it's just silly but either way, it was kinda fun. The conference planners are using a "New Rules of Marketing" idea that will cause people like me to generate buzz for the conference through our blogs. So, vote for me on the conference page (you may have to scroll down the page to see my video).

I got an Apple iPhone for my birthday--that is, I bought one myself but my wife said, "Hey, guess what? That's now your birthday present, mister! And I'm returning the BOSE computer speakers that I already bought you."

So anyway, I bought it while traveling, hooked it up to my PC in the hotel room, connected to the internet, and the phone activated immediately. I was actually amazed at how wonderful the experience was since I'd heard  that many people had bad experiences. Happily I didn't.

This weekend, I took my daughter and her friend to see Harry Potter at the IMAX theater. [Man! That's a big screen! And that fight scene in the room with all the prophesies! Sweet. And did anyone else question their filing system?] But despite a sold-out show and over-the-top buzz, the theater seemed surprised that all these people were showing up. They were completely unprepared--so much so that the patrons took the law into their own hands and policed the queue. [How bad is it to jump a line for a kids' movie! Yeesh.]

But my experience is nothing compared to the story from James Stoup about buying a fan from Honeywell. (Don't drink anything while you're reading it!)

What's the difference between a product-driven and a market-driven company?

Product managers in the market-driven company look at the entire buying and using experience... beyond just the device or service itself. Apple did it right. The iPhone is indeed gorgeous! Activation was elegant and easy. Alas, for those who had problems, AT&T dropped the ball on customer service (no surprise). IMAX was thinking ticket sales instead of managing the thundering herd. The Honeywell fan? 'nuff said.

Some companies seem to say, "Once we have your money, who cares?" Market-driven companies say, "I want you to tell your friends!" And people do either way. Happy customers tell some people. Unhappy customers tell everybody!

It's five times cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a customer. What portion of your marketing plan contains strategies for keeping customers? 

I'm 50 years old today. You'd think I'd know better at "my age" but lately I’ve been jumping from one task to another to another to another. I’ve read that men cannot multi-task; apparently we multi-thread instead. True or not, it feels true. It seems like I’ve been multi-tasking or multi-threading or something but I haven’t really been getting anything done. In any case, I know I've been thrashing.

From Wikipedia:

In computer science, thrash is the term used to describe a degenerate situation on a computer where increasing resources are used to do a decreasing amount of work. Usually it refers to two or more processes accessing a shared resource repeatedly such that serious system performance degradation occurs because the system is spending a disproportionate amount of time just accessing the shared resource. Resource access time may generally be considered as wasted, since it does not contribute to the advancement of any process.

Jack Trout once suggested that you make a list of everything that you want to do, prioritize the list, and throw the bottom half away. Good plan!

Sounds like I need to plan a Product Management Day!

Do you?

The BBC News reports that Glastonbury Festival organiser Michael Eavis said this year's event was noticeably short of young people because older people with faster internet access had bought up the tickets. Tickets for this year's event sold out over the internet in 1hr 45 minutes.

"The problem with the clientele at the moment is that they're becoming a bit older and a bit more clever and they've got the gear to buy the tickets as they have fast access to the ticket system and can buy more", he said.

"These people are perfectly nice and adorable, but we want the late teens because they help to make the character of the festival so it's really important to get them on board."

Is Eavis saying that he wants different customers? He seems to be saying, "Those darn old people with their crazy broadband are buying too many tickets. How can my concert be 'cool' if only old people attend?" His solution? Make tickets harder to buy. He continues,

"The ticket people aren't going to like it because it'll be a lot more difficult for them but we have to do it, it's absolutely essential," he said.

Who would've thought that old people would be the wired ones? And who would think that "they buy more" would be a bad thing?

Apple Matters concludes that the iPhone is perfect. Hadley Stern writes,

Many people will draw up lists of what is missing in the iPhone. These are the same people who dismissed the iPod because it didn’t have as many “features” as the competition. These people don’t get it.

and concludes

Design is about making decisions about not only what to include, but what to leave out. Steve Jobs has once again shown that an organization led by a strong advocate for design can indeed create products that aren’t me-too. They are perfect.

In a world of "me-too" products, design could be the distinctive competence that your competitors lack. It sure works for Apple.

In this issue of The Pragmatic Marketer:

• The ROI of Being Market-Driven
• Five Slices of Segmentation
• Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software
• Product Management Axioms
• Navigating Uncharted Territory: How We Developed a Strategic Product Marketing Role

Read more in Issue 3| The ROI of Being Market-Driven.

The consumer tech world went crazy this week with the introduction of Apple's iPhone. Alas, AT&T dropped the ball on activation... as most cynics anticipated. It seems everyone including CNN reported on AT&T's problems. Thousands blogged on it including Declan McCullagh who complained:

I spent innumerable hours on hold over the weekend trying to get AT&T to actually activate the iPhone I bought on Friday evening. They finally did on Sunday, after 39 hours elapsed.

In AT&T iPhone activation, he adds:

Synchronoss, the New Jersey-based company that has a contract with AT&T to handle iPhone activations, says it is "extremely pleased" with the way the iPhone activations went.

"Extremely pleased"? Yeesh!

What would a market-driven vendor do?

Step 1: Understand when a problem exists.

Step 2: Acknowledge it.

Step 3: Speak directly to the solution.

What not to do?
Ignore the problem, claim success, and hope it will all go away.

It's not just on big events like this one. What is your company response to small customer issues? Ignore them? Or make it right... as soon as possible?