Comments for The Product Pipe

Comment on Why I’m a Cow on Twitter by PuristProductManagement

PuristProductManagement — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:22:32 +0000

I find that the real value in twitter (apart from being extremely cathartic) is finding sub sub sub communities which can relate and advise on daily situations. Such as the daily challenges of a product manager!!

Comment on Everyone has an opinion… which is precisely the problem. by saeed

saeed — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:26:26 +0000

There is no substitute for an authentic human relationship with a customer.

Social media tools, like email and discussion forums before them, can facilitate asynchronous communication of information between geographically distant parties, but it is very hard to gain new and powerful insights without spending time with your target audience, observing, listening, thinking, discussing ideas, issues, options etc. with them

I’ve used various arms length means such as surveys to collect *data*, but without face to face communication the next level of insight and understanding is virtually impossible to attain.

Just my opinion. :-)

Saeed

Comment on If I had a hammer by Chris

Chris — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:17:59 +0000

Great post!
Just think of all those products out there that are not doing what we intended. All of them, right? Ok, maybe not, but I’ve seen fancy bits of hardware holding open doors (you don’t need a fire extinguisher it turns out). I’ve also seen products I’ve been involved with being used in new and innovative ways that I had not foreseen. That can be inspirational, after all it is the customer telling you that there is a gap in the market!

Comment on If I had a hammer by Dave

Dave — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:57:35 +0000

Oh geez, ok, I’ll be the commission oriented sales rep. It’s like this – there I was with a truckload of shoes, when she saw a scorpion and said “GIMME ONE OF THOSE SHOES. I tried to explain that shoes aren’t really designed for that and maybe she’d much rather drive down to Ace Hardware and purchase any one of a wide variety of much more elegantly designed and vastly more effectivel scorpion killer thingees.

So she hit me with the shoe, bought it, used it, and put it in the toolbox, where that other lady found it… Whu do you guys keep asking me to protect competent adults from themselves?

Comment on How Sticky are your Products? by Chris Cummings

Chris Cummings — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:35:08 +0000

Hi Kevin -

I just picked up this book after reading your review–I’m really digging it so far, and will probably offer up a review, too, at some point.

Many of the positions the authors are offering up seem pretty straight-forward: Why do we remember Proverbs and urban legends? Because those stories hit the notes you mention above.

Putting these concepts into action, however, is another thing altogether!

- Chris

Comment on Innovation ROI: What’s YOUR best practice for little “i”? by Erwin Bergsma

Erwin Bergsma — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:10:54 +0000

In my last role in PM I was dealing with a product portfolio where approx. 20% of the revenue came from new license sales and 35% on existing contracts. The rest of the revenue came from other services like consulting and training.

An additional challenge was that the 20-35 was 10-60 in some countries, and 40-20 in others. So it was always a balancing act between driving new business and protecting existing business by delivering value for money on contractual obligations.

I therefore used to start by setting a theme for the new release. This theme was primarily driven by business strategy and competitive positioning. (And would thus indirectly protect the installed base and drive new business.)

The new feature-set would be based on the theme and selected from the overall list of enhancement requests collected from all over the globe. Then local teams were asked to prioritize the selected set.

In most cases the priorities were pretty much aligned, but if there were differences it was mostly very similar in each global region (North America, Europe, etc.). So worst case scenario we had to weigh the priorities based on regional contribution to the development, which in its part was again based on share of the overall business.

In rare occasions this approach also created the opportunity for a region to provide additional funding for temporary extension of the development and QA teams to ensure that some of the features that missed the cut were guaranteed. This was only done when there was no risk to the rest of the project and obviously pushed local/regional management to a very clear ROI calculation / business case to justify the additional spending.

Comment on In today’s Economy… is “Tactical” more important than “Strategic?” by Brian Lawley

Brian Lawley — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:59:37 +0000

The fact is that most product managers have so much tactical work to do that they are lucky if they can find time to do the strategic thinking. When people and budgets get cut the average product manager ends up managing more products and this makes the situation worse.

The key to breaking free from this is to get incredibly good at prioritizing and increasing your productivity so that you have a few hours per week to spend on strategy. Check out my webinar on PM Productivity – it talks a lot about this. http://www.280group.com/productmanagementwebinars.htm.

Comment on In today’s Economy… is “Tactical” more important than “Strategic?” by Bruce Sherman

Bruce Sherman — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:22:01 +0000

This shift is on, budgets are tightening and the focus is changing. Many of us are faced with fewer resources going into this year than we had in more recent years. And this includes money and people. Our organization and many others in our industry are trimming the funds that product managers normally draw from for those typical strategic activities. Trade shows, research efforts, analyst events, are just some of those items that will not make the cut. I will be forced to be more creative, more entrepreneurial in my approaches. I will return back to some of the basic tactical activities while we await for the economic waters to calm. The trick is to avoid getting so deep into the trenches that when the time comes to reverse the course I can’t break free.

Comment on In today’s Economy… is “Tactical” more important than “Strategic?” by Michael Kerman

Michael Kerman — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:14:43 +0000

Yes. This does not mean that setting a sound, defensible strategy that leads to profitable growth is not important. It does imply that today’s economy is driving all companies to be more ROI/metrics focused than ever. Strategy can be a bit nebulous and hard to measure until it leads to crisp, productive tactics. I encourage all of the product managers I meet and train to be very focused on hardcore, measureable milestones and metrics, even when they’re dealing with strategy issues. Tactical product management is what most executives link directly to revenue and success. In terms of the timeframe for ROI, it depends on the company, industry,etc. Best-in-class companies are still investing for the future, it’s just that the future, in most cases, is more like 1-3 years vs. 5-8.

Comment on In today’s Economy… is “Tactical” more important than “Strategic?” by Susan Schaffer

Susan Schaffer — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:09:24 +0000

Strategy should drive tactics. Companies that forego alignment to strategic alignment and simply execute tactically will become entangled in a frenzied, generally unproductive flurry of activities.