Yes, there is indeed such as thing as a bad buyer. Sales people can't understand it but customer support people sure can. My friend Bob has a great post on this.

He writes,

How many of you have been burned by a customer who shouldn't have bought your product but did? When a company spends perfectly good money on a vendor solution it doesn't need or can't possible use successfully, the vendor loses more than the buyer - because buyers have this strange habit of talking to each other.

Go read Bob's post. I can't think of anything to add (although I really ought to say something about the Speedo).

My friend Scott has an interesting post on the overwhelming nature of email. He reports that Michael Arrington has 2400+ unread emails in his inbox. Here's a long-standing problem that many of us have, although perhaps not taken to this extreme. Join the discussion on how to solve this problem.

People (and markets) know they have problems; they just don't know how to solve them.

• Our email problems are legion (not even counting spam). We get too much of it; we can't find specific messages later; we often reply the same thing again and again.
• We knew we needed to connect individuals and businesses long before we had access to the internet. 
• I've known about Kensington's presenter's remote for years but rarely is one provided when I do speak at conferences.
• Wireless phones have too many buttons!
  
• TV remotes have too many buttons.
• The Amazon Kindle solves a big problem but dang! it has too many buttons.
  

What other problems have we lived with for years?

Meanwhile developers and engineers know about solutions but don't really know about market problems. So they assume that their problems are the same as everyone else's. Are your developers, your peers, your execs "regular people"?

That's where product management comes in. We need to build the bridge between the market's problems and the developers' solutions. But alas, in many situations, the product management role is merely to prioritize what development has already decided to build.

Where do those ideas come from? The effective product manager knows that problems come from the market.

I've been invited to speak at this year's Business of Software conference held on September 3 & 4 at the Seaport hotel on the Boston waterfront. The speakers so far include Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah and Jason Fried... plus me, of course.

More on this conference as it gets closer.

My friend Annie Peng Cui at Kent State University is doing a survey for her dissertation on the value of product management. Let's help her out. Take the survey here.

When developing personas, you may not need as much primary research as you think. Call your HR department and see if they have a hiring profile for the title of your persona. Thanks go to Mike for that great tip!