ProductMarketing.com

Too busy rushing to read

In advertising, it's called the 3-second rule: get your message across in three seconds or no one will read it. It's a busy world. We've got email, voice mail, IMs and more. We're busy! And our customers are even busier. Kristin Zhivago reminds us to write for the rushing reader. Use active voice, shorter paragraphs, and get your message read.

The devil is in the (requirement) details

In this post, Michael explains the various acronyms used for the artifacts necessary to develop tech products. It's a really helpful summary of the most common terms. Many of the terms refer to the same concepts but by different names. BRD, MRD, and PRD offer various details versions of requirements; FSD and PSD refer to levels of specifications. And as Michael points out, the implementation of these documents differs from organization to organization.

In my experience, companies with too many types of documents are attempting to correct the emptiness of one document type by expansion into another. "The MRDs we're getting are not detailed enough so let's introduce a PRD." Product managers who write poor market requirements are often supplemented with Requirements Analysts who write good requirements. So an MRD is actually a poorly written PRD. A poorly written FSD is supplemented with a well-written PSD.

Maybe we would have fewer roles and fewer artifacts if each were well defined and appropriate performed. You get overlap and redundancy if you have too many types of documents. Read On Reqs and Specs for more on this point.

Perhaps this expanded set of documents isn't that they're poorly written but that the writers have smashed together the artifacts from a dozen different methods. Meetings today often take on a tone of folklore as each person describes a process and set of documents from the old days, from an old company, from an old (or new) book. If you're writing SRS documents, someone has read Weigers; if you're writing stories, someone has read Beck.

A requirement is a statement of the problem to be addressed; a specification fully describes it solution. In the end, I fear that many companies are reacting to poor execution in one group by introducing rigor in a downstream document written by another group. Alas, no amount of documentation can overcome incompetence or malevolence.

Be clear on the objectives and content of each document in the process and then hold the writers to that standard.

Always looking for a large unmet need

Intuit does many things right including seeing problems that others have missed. They introduced Quicken and Quickbooks despite dozens of competitors and became the dominate player by focusing on the problems that regular people were having. And now they're entering health care billing to help people get their arms around the ridiculous morass of bills and past due notices.

In Less Insult From Injury, BusinessWeek Online's Susan Berfield writes,

They visited dozens of people in their homes to see how they handled all of the bills and statements generated by the health-care system. Their conclusions were that people would spend hours to get even a few dollars out of their insurance companies, and that they wanted some way to assert control at a time when their lives had been upended by health concerns.

As Chief Executive Steve Bennett says: "We are always looking for a large unmet need that we can solve."

CIOs seek Business-Savvy IT Professionals

from August 2006 Survey: CIOs Put Out Help-Wanted Sign for Business-Savvy IT Professionals:

CIOs are looking for business-savvy technologists to build new systems. Large and midsize companies are ramping up hiring in programming and systems development; also in demand are professionals in project management, business-process redesign, business analysis and systems integration. The message to IT professionals is clear: A need exists in the U.S. for talented technicians who can be businesspeople, too, especially if they can function in a global economy.

Successful product managers combine technical prowess, market empathy, and business savvy. Looks like CIOs now realize the value of this skill set.

the "best" techniques for applying for a job

In Dear Libby, Guy Kawasaki summarizes in one place all the "best" techniques for applying for a job: knowing the company, the product, the job, and the hiring manager--and then tailoring your messaging to those. Every word matters and he explains why certain phrases were chosen. Pass this along to your children, nephews and nieces and your friends' kids who are just entering the workforce.

Update: Stephanie Tate is the university relations manager for Yahoo! who took a look at the cover email and resume and critiqued them.

Let's make people want it (another view)

In Let's make people want it , we commented on the table saw that won't cut fingers. But my friend Tim pointed out that I missed the buying and using criteria aspect. He writes,

He's focusing on the table saw user persona, who really don't want their fingers cut off. While this is good, he's ignoring that he has to market to the manufacturer's buyer persona for his invention in order to be truly successful. He's created more problems than benefits for the manufacturer persona. They see additional costs that need to be offset and he isn't taking that into account.

Right or wrong, the manufacturer persona does not have the problem that he is fixing. They are not held responsible for their customers injuries due to the policy of acceptable risk. Their customers still need to buy table saws to cut wood even if they do occasionally get their fingers cut off.

Tim's so right: how often does a product fail because we neglect to identify all the personas in the value-chain? Sure, one type of persona may want it but we also have to get it from here to there, which means we have to identify--and market to--all the buyers along the way.

Websites that changed the world

Amazon used to be a large river in South America--but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here are the stories of the 15 most influential websites to date. Read more in Websites that changed the world.

Let's make people want it

Design News reports: "Vindication arrived for Stephen Gass on the afternoon of June 28, 2006, when someone finally agreed with him. It had been nearly seven years since Gass invented his skin-sensing table saw, and in that time he'd begun to wonder if anyone would truly see the wisdom behind his device. Acting on a petition from Gass, engineers at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recommended that the government begin a "rulemaking process" that could result in mandatory safety standards for table saws. Days later, the agency's commissioners shocked the power tool industry by concurring with the recommendation. They saw the wisdom in his petition. Suddenly, the ultimate outsider joined the game, and now he was holding a strong hand.

My friend Jake writes, "In other words, This guy has technology that's pretty cool but no manufacturer wants, so he decides to have the courts tell them to want it."

This reminds me of the Treasury Departments on-going attempt to introduce a $1 coin; they're solving a problem we don't have with a product that we don't like. Is government mandate a marketing strategy of last resort?

Extreme Product Management (XPM)

When Stacey Mentzel and I wrote the article on Extreme Product Management, we knew the term "agile waterfall" would create a controversy.

I appreciate Roger Cauvin's posting about the article. But I'm afraid he might be missing our point. Our definition of XPM is using the minimum process and creating the minimum artifacts to deliver products people want to buy.

A key phrase is "products people want to buy." In order to do this, product managers need time to collect the strategic information from the market. The role of the product manager in an agile process is to provide the problems to be solved, for which personas, in which market segments. Product managers need to understand not only users (which is typically where agile methods focus), but also the buyers.

It is hard to convey complex ideas in a one-way medium, such as written requirements--just as it's often difficult to convey complex ideas in a printed article. Therefore, we embrace the iterative approach of agile methodologies. Product managers need to be involved in getting feedback during the process but not in every iteration meeting.

Extreme Product Management is meant to articulate the role of product management in embracing Extreme Programming. XPM is not about managing the sprints and iterations; when building products (not one-time projects), product managers need to operate strategically and bring in market facts.

Some great free ebooks to check out

David at Web Ink Now writes:

Books are great content. I've often said that the e-book is the hip and stylish younger sister (or brother) to the nerdy white paper.

Web content in the form of an ebook sells. An effective content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content have a clearly defined goal--to sell products, generate leads, secure contributions, or get people to join and deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal. Content takes many forms including an effective content-centric Web site, blogs, podcasts, and e-books.

Read more at Some great free ebooks to check out.

New issue posted: Issue 4| Extreme Product Management

In Issue 4| Extreme Product Management, we explore Extreme Product Management, why the better product still struggles in the marketplace, a framework for creating effective product presentations, and how investment in Customer Advisory Programs helps build business. Coming soon to your mailbox or read the issue online.

Are your users stuck in "P" mode?

Kathy on Creating Passionate Users asks,

How many things do you own where you can't use more than 10% of what they can actually can do? The home stereo you play CDs on but gave up on Surround Sound. The cell phone that can fry eggs, but you still can't get it to vibrate. The software app where half the menus might as well be Latin. So what are we doing to make sure this doesn't happen to our users?

Documentation is an area that product managers often ignore.

Back in the day, vendors produced both system guides (how to do everything) as well as user guides (how to do what you want to do). Where did those usage guides go? (Probably another victim of cost-cutting.) Are your customers novices? If so, they need more than 'how ever menu item works'; they need how to do what they want to do. More examples, more step-by-step. No wonder the "Dummy" books are so popular; they're really the usage documentation we've been missing.

Blogging my newest book

David is Blogging his newest book:

I have started writing a new book tentatively titled 'The New Rules of Marketing and PR' and I need your help!

I'll be blogging the book as I go through the research, writing, editing, and marketing process and I invite you to follow along, to contribute to the process, to offer suggestions, and to argue with me when I get off track. The book will take about 4 months to write. Please join me.

How the world has changed. Writing a book used to be like programming with the waterfall model; write the entire book, send it to an editor, fix bugs, deliver. Nowadays an author can post ideas--in any order--and get instant feedback. Sounds like iterative development to me. It should be fun to watch David's book take shape.

Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard

An amazing glimpse of this promised future has arrived in the form of the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard. This tiny device laser-projects a keyboard on any flat surface... you can then type away accompanied by simulated key click sounds. It really is true future magic at its best. You'll be turning heads the moment you pull this baby from your pocket and use it to compose an e-mail on your bluetooth enabled PDA or Cell Phone. With 63 keys and and full size QWERTY layout the Laser Virtual Keyboard can approach typing speeds of a standard keyboard... in a size a little larger than a matchbook.

Frankly, this is an invention that probably didn't come from product management but from an engineer who said, "Wouldn't it be cool?" Or maybe saw it in a movie and said, "hey, I can do that!" Is it innovation? I dunno? But come on, it is cool!

How Can Product Managers Help Marketing?

Whether you as a Product Manager report into Marketing, Development, or another group, you play a critical role in helping Marketing position and explain the product so that the message resonates with your product's prospects.

The Marketing folks are the experts at taking an image of your software product and polishing it until it really shines. They can make the product message sound truly compelling, and artfully express how you stand compared to the competition.

But except for a minority of exceptional 'marketeers', Marketing is submerged in the day-to-day mechanics of generating the message, the collateral, the supporting materials, and talking to all necessary audiences from media to investors to prospective business partners.

What the Marketing folks don't have, and it's the raw material that they absolutely need to portray the power of your product, is the specific and essential perspective on the business users of your product and why they use it.

Take a look at How Can Product Managers Help Marketing? to see how you as Product Manager--and you may very well be the only one who can do this--can contribute to Marketing in order to make your product's marketing stand out in the busy, crowded, and uncertain software market that we find ourselves in today.

Beginner's Guide to Business Blogging

Blogging is how CEOs and other top-level execs can quickly and easily position themselves--and their companies--as thought leaders in highly competitive markets. Read the whys and hows in ChangeThis :: Beginner's Guide to Business Blogging .

How to get information from your customers without slowing down the sale

How--and when--to get information from your customers is problematic. How many web sites ask you more than you're willing to tell? How many of us use no@none.net as an email address for such sites? (Is it just me?)

Kristin Zhivago comments,

There's a conflict between the information you want to get from your potential buyers--in order to market to them effectively--and the fact that asking for that information can prevent them from interacting with your website or making a purchase. Asking for too much information too soon is like the owner of a retail store 'greeting' you at the entrance and forcing you to sign a guestbook before you can start shopping. Most people would decline and leave the store, which is exactly what is happening on your website--except you can't 'see' them leaving without resorting to in-depth web stat log analysis. How do you find out what you need to know without placing barriers in their way?

Read more in Revenue Journal :: How to get information from your customers without slowing down the sale.