Boooo! It's Halloween and I'm preparing for all those darn kids to come by the house. They barely even say "trick or treat" for gosh sake! I tried giving them a short session on roadmapping, positioning, requirements, and the repeatable sales process but they only seem to care about candy. Good thing that Susan bought some, eh?

Happily I get to celebrate All Saint's Day by traveling to Toronto for Toronto pCamp on Sunday, November 2. I plan to talk about The Strategic Role of Product Management in an Agile world.

Maybe those kids will listen.

Red Canary has published statistics on product management in Canada using excellent data visualization tools from IBM. Check out some of their stats while you're waiting for Pragmatic Marketing's Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey. We're going to open up the data collection phase soon. Those who respond get a first look at the results.

If you haven't done so, sign up for our newsletter so you'll know when the survey begins.

Our promotional webinars are "new and notable" on iTunes. Go to Podcasts, Video Podcasts, and choose Business and voila! there we are. You can't tell which ones are mine so you should just download them all and listen to them. (Hint, I like to talk about The Strategic Role of Product Management.)

The PLATFORM strategy is one of the five strategies recommended in The Marketing Playbook by Zagula and Tong. Rather than assuming customers want one-stop shopping, the platform strategy encourages third-parties to extend your product with accessories.

The famous case of dBase III shows how an extensible solution led to an industry full of thousands of VARs actually adding value to the basic dBase III platform. Then, as explained by Rick Chapman in his book In Search of Stupidity, the execs at Ashton-Tate decided to kill the third-party market but instead destroyed the dBase product. The dBase platform created the third-party community but the third-party community ultimately created the success of the platform.

People spend much more on the accessories than for their iPods and Blackberries. Didn't you buy the better headset, the bluetooth, the car mount?

I have a Toyota Camry. It has a nice little cubby with a line-in jack for my iPod. Uh, how do I select songs? Oh yes, open the cubby, remove the iPod, choose your playlist, put it all back in the cubby, and enjoy! Hmmm, sounds like the dashboard designers didn't want anything to interfere with the elegance of their design. It seems that Toyota (and all car manufacturers) would rather sell me rims and sports apparel than a phone or iPod mount that integrates with the dashboard.

Thankfully, the team at ProClipUSA has the solution. They have figured out clever ways to shove a mount into the joints and openings of most car models. First, tell them what car you have and they'll tell you what mounts work; then tell them what device you have and voila! you have a holder for your iPod, your Blackberry, your GPS, your whatever.

You'd think that the car designers would offer these dashboard "extensions" for the most popular third-party devices or perhaps they should set up a partnership with ProClipUSA. Instead they assume a "closed" posture and miss an opportunity.

Should you pursue a platform strategy? You could. You can create a better customer fit without using your own resources. To do so, provide APIs and partnering programs to extend your product without doing everything yourself.

Blogger's have pointed out to me that Alltop is now following product management.

I'm pleased that my blog is featured and I notice that I'm in the center square. Hey! that's the Paul Lynde position. What does that mean?

A clever programmer and webmaster of 365specialdays.com offers this clever applet that maps the DNA of your website. (Oops, I used 'clever' twice in one sentence.) Here's the architecture of Pragmatic Marketing's web site.

Chores! I'm funny about chores--like I'm a ten-year-old or something. I'm a procrastinator and my wife knows it so she praises me when I do a chore that I've been putting off. Even though I know I'm being patronized, I still like the praise.

When was the last time you praised your development team? For that matter, when was the last time you said anything positive about the product to the people who create it? Have bugs, design flaws, unhappy customers turned us into shrieking shrews?

Facebook recently passed a milestone: 10 billion photos posted online. They write:

To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.

Do you and your team celebrate successes? Or is it just one week after another of slogging through the backlog? The Friday Demo is the day to celebrate. Look what we've done, ma! The team has been working hard so make sure you take the time to appreciate what they've done. Oh, and give them a chance to give YOU praise for the customer visits you've documented and the context you've provided.

"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise." -- Mary Kay Ash

It's ten times cheaper to keep a customer than to get a customer, according to Ryan on NBC's The Office. That's why we encourage marketers to include plans for customer retention as well as customer acquisition.

If you need current research to support your retention programs, read more in Ardath Albee's write up of the 3rd annual report on Customer Experience Impact by RightNow Technologies and Harris Interactive. She's done the analysis so you don't have to; she writes,

• 87% have stopped doing business with a company that provided a bad experience.
• 84% will tell others about their bad experience—22% of them blog about it or post negative feedback online.
• 58% will pay more for excellence in service—even in a down economy

• 62% of companies don't view the customer experience as critical for the future

Look ma! I'm on iTunes. Our marketing folks have posted all the Pragmatic Marketing webinars on iTunes.

If you enjoy the webinars, please leave a nice customer review on iTunes. Also check out our Tuned In webinars.

Our Tuned In podcasts are now available on iTunes. Download sessions on Tuned In product teams, social media, cultures, buying experiences, and leadership. Since this is my blog, let me specifically point out my two sessions, Tuned In Product Teams and Aligning the Tuned In Process with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. You can also download these podcasts from our Tuned In web page.