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.