ProductMarketing.com

Maine Mangles Medicaid

Scott Sehlhorst posts this autopsy of the requirements failures in Maine's medicare project:

Allan Holmes, for CIO Magazine just posted a scathing and detailed autopsy of the disastrous Medicaid Claims System project run by CSNI and launched in January of 2005. Requirements elicitation failures combined with incompetent vendor selection and project mismanagement lead to a $30,000,000 oops for the state of Maine, jeopardizing its credit rating. The system failed to process 300,000 claims in the first 3 months of operations, causing many health care providers to close their doors--and presumably causing citizens of Maine to go without needed services. Maine is the only state in the union (as of April 2005) not complying with federal HIPAA regulations.

Read more in Maine Mangles Medicaid....

Understanding Marketing Psychology and the Halo Effect

from Advertising Age: "Marketing and psychology are closely related. If psychology is the 'systematic study of human behavior,' then marketing is the 'systematic study of human behavior in the marketplace. The halo effect also works in marketing. What's behind the phenomenal success of Apple Computer? In a word, the iPod." Read the full post...

Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management

Scott Sehlhorst comments in Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management: "Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis - check out the details here."

Survey: Lack of direct contact with customers

from Lack of direct contact with customers:

Marketers on every level have internalized the bottom-line message. Marketers in our survey report that the customer data they are most concerned with for planning programs are value and profitability, and that increasing organizational discipline is important for the purposes of improving market and revenue growth. But when we put aside the grand vision of marketing and dug down into the details, the disconnects were somewhat startling.

The most troubling finding from our study is that marketers appear surprisingly detached from their customers. Marketers report an overwhelming reliance on their CRM systems as a primary source of customer data, with very little insight gained through customer service, distribution channels, customer organizations or communities, or even online customer networks.

The World's Most Innovative Companies

BusinessWeek discusses the World's Most Innovative Companies:

A close watch of customer insights can also bring innovation to even the most iconic and established products. Back in 2003, 3M began noticing and monitoring two consumer trends. One was troubling: Customers were using laptops, cell phones, and BlackBerrys to send quick memos or jot down bits of information. Every thumb-tapped message or stylus-penned note on a personal digital assistant meant one less Post-it note.

The other trend, however, was encouraging: the rise of digital photography. While observing consumers, 3M researchers asked to see their photos. What followed was always a clunky process: Consumers would scroll through screen upon screen of photos or have to dig through a drawer for the few shots they printed. Nine months later a team of one marketer and two lab scientists hit upon the idea of Post-it Picture Paper, or photo paper coated with adhesive that lets people stick their photos to a wall for display. 'We listened carefully to what consumers didn't say and observed what they did,' says Jack Truong, vice-president of 3M's office supply division.

"We listened carefully to what consumers didn't say and observed what they did." Brilliant! Read more in The World's Most Innovative Companies.

How to use timeboxes for scheduling software delivery

In Requirements That Work, we discuss a technique for organizing product release candidates that is known as 'timeboxing.' Scott Sehlhorst describes this technique in more detail in his post How to use timeboxes for scheduling software delivery.

April newsletter posted

from April newsletter: "It is generally believed that 'easy-to-use' and 'powerful' are contradictions in design. 'My mom should be able to use it' translates into making an easy interface while 'I want absolute control over the placement of items in my document' requires a powerful interface. It's as if 'Easy' and 'Powerful' are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Read more in Data Driven Design.

Pragmatic Marketing Merchandise

Here is your opportunity to 'Live the Grid!' with Pragmatic Marketing merchandise. Go to Pragmatic Marketing Merchandise for shirts, posters, coffee mugs, and more.

Software Development Pitfalls: Planning

When Product Managers push to accomplish their goals for a product--more sales, more customers, more profit--they must struggle to identify and overcome the obstacles and limitations of their individual product, team, and company. Each company's weaknesses are unique, and require careful focus and willpower to overcome them with a solution whose uniqueness matches the problem.

As a Product Manager, chances are you find yourself working with a software development function that is challenged when it comes to planning. And so much of the success of reliable development of competitive capabilities depends upon good planning. Read Software Development Pitfalls: Planning for a discussion of how to better understand the planning of software development -- and how to overcome some common hurdles.

"New Rules of PR" in the Viral Hall of Fame

David Meerman Scott's "New Rules of PR" has achieved on the #3 spot on MarketingSherpa's Viral Hall of Fame for 2006. David is an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing's Effective Marketing Programs which advocates the value of blogging and web content in the course.

How to Remain Sane

"How to Remain Sane" is the flip side to The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy. It's meant to help you avoid being driven crazy by your competition. This isn't a top ten--it's only a top five because the key to maintaining your sanity is to keep things simple.

Read How to Remain Sane by Guy Kawasaki.

Competent users and software requirements

Scott Sehlhorst comments:

When we're designing software we need to keep in mind that most of our users will be competent--neither experts nor beginners. Alan Cooper's studies tell us that user skill levels follow a bell curve. He talks about competent users as perpetual intermediates. Some users drop out of the bell curve when they stop using our software. The rare user becomes an expert. Most users only learn enough to get their real job done.

Read more in Competent users and software requirements.

Posted: Issue 2| Outsourcing for Product Managers

Pragmatic Marketing's March/April issue of productmarketing.com explores outsourcing for Product Managers, strategies for surviving product management, and marketing materials for software that did not contain any real information.