ProductMarketing.com

Raleigh/Durham ProductCamp

Organizers have announced a ProductCamp in Raleigh, NC on May 16.

At ProductCamp there are no "attendees", since everyone is an active participant in some way: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, sharing their experiences, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering.

ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn, share, and network with professionals involved in Product Management, Marketing, and Development in the Research Triangle Park area.

Hope to see you there.

Wondering what Twitter is all about?

(Those of you who love Twitter probably won't enjoy this video.) Follow me on Twitter.

Travel budgets slashed?

Product managers tell me that their travel budgets have been slashed. How do you visit customers or attend training when there's no money for travel?

Smart product managers are looking for local customers to visit. How many client companies exist within a drive of your office? Most product managers have a few dozen local companies that would be glad to have some time with a product manager. Sure, everybody's busy but you'd be surprised how much time customers will give you once they realize that you're not trying to sell them anything. Watch them use your product; talk to them about new problems that they're encountering. Shadow a user for a day and you'll learn a dozen things that could be improved in the product.

Don't forget that sales people are still traveling and always need technical help. There's always travel money available for sales calls. Go on a few sales calls with a sales rep and then stay an extra half day to visit someone in the area (without the sales rep).

As for training, Pragmatic Marketing's travel budgets are still in place. Can't come to us? We'll come to you! Learn more about our onsite classes. 

Friday Fun: The world in 2019

Microsoft offers this view of the world of technology in 2019. Looks like we'll have easier interfacing and more handheld computing devices. And good news! if you watch carefully at 0:35 you'll see that the Pragmatic Marketing Framework is still the standard for product management a decade from now. :-)

Are you ready to be a technology manager?

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they can overrule the hierarchy.-- Jeff Bezos

QUIZ: ARE YOU READY TO BE A TECHNOLOGY MANAGER?

If I don't understand it, it must be...

A) Hard
B) Easy

If you answered "B" then you are ready to be a manager. Some managers think anything they don't understand must be easy. They give vague assignments; they make simple requests that create huge projects; they make promises that their teams cannot keep.

One of my favorite quotes is "Nothing seems hard to the people who don't have to do it."

If you are a product manager who answered "B"-- if you think developing, promoting, and selling products is easy--you need a harsh dose of reality. Spend some time working closely with those groups to see how many hours it takes to turn out quality work. Or if you really want to see the results of your decisions, spend a week shadowing the folks in customer support. You'll see clearly that simple decisions made by corporate folks are extremely difficult to explain to the customer.

If you are a product manager working with people who answer "B"-- if you work with those who think developing, promoting, and selling products is easy--you must often wonder how you can get anything accomplished.

Use facts to show managers the ramifications of their actions. Use roadmaps to show the impact of changes; use retrospectives to show that Project Gazelle was delayed because the contract specifying custom work for ABC Co caused a redirection of limited resources; use surveys to show that only one client wants feature 'x' while a hundred clients want feature 'y'. Use facts instead of your opinions.

Remember, no amount of process can overcome incompetence or malevolence. But tabulated survey results and a good chart can go a long way to showing the results of bad decisions.

ten tips to know if your agile team isn't really agile

Alistair Cockburn offers these ten tips to know if your agile team isn't really agile:

1. The team is co-located, but people are not sitting within the length of a school bus to each other.
2. They’re distributed, and there is an absence of microphones and webcams and one or two meetings a day.
3. They have not delivered anything to real users in the last three months. Some of my agile friends would say that’s much too long, but I’m being generous there.
4. If no user has seen real running software inside the last month.
5. They don’t have the output of last month’s reflection workshop or retrospective on the wall.
6. They don’t have fully automated unit tests, and a large number of acceptance tests aren’t automated.
7. They’re not having a build integration at least once day. Good groups do it every half hour; there are groups that get away with it every other day.
8. They write big requirements documents, and they don’t know how to split those up into smaller pieces so they could deliver a piece of software every month.
9. They have itty-bitty requirements on the order of “here’s what happens when you click here,” but they don’t have long-term vision for what they’re trying to accomplish.
10. People keep saying, “It’s not my job.” One of the things about proper agile development is that there is group accountability for results. Very specifically, if the requirements are not coming in fast enough, whoever has a bit of spare time (programmers, testers, etc.) drops what they’re doing and helps gather requirements; if tests aren’t getting done, people with some spare capacity help test and so on.

Want to learn more about product management in an agile world? Go to Pragmatic Marketing's Living in an Agile World resources.

Utah product management association

Thursday, March 26 brings the first meeting of the Utah Product Management Association (UPMA). The UPMA provides education and networking opportunities for product managers and product marketing managers in Utah and surrounding states.

The inaugural meeting of the UPMA will feature Glen Mella, President and Chief Operating Officer of Control4. Glen has a rich history working for organizations such as TenFold, Novell, WordPerfect, Dial Corporation, and Frito-Lay/PepsiCo. Glen will discuss his product management and marketing background, how he got to where he is today, and lessons he learned along the way.  His insights will go a long way in helping the attendees learn from his success in developing ideas from product concepts to entrepreneurial opportunities and into financially viable businesses. He will also share what key knowledge, values, and traits, are important to being successful in product management, and beyond as well as some of the best practices he has observed in product management.

Find a product management association in your area.

Friday fun: World Wide Rave (free this weekend)

So you've got your Kindle (or your Kindle for iPhone) and now you're lookin' for books! There are thousands of free books on Amazon plus manybooks.net and feedbooks.com. Remember all those classics you were supposed to read in school? Try War and Peace, The Art of War, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Moby-Dick.

Now add a new classic to your Kindle: World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott. This weekend only, get the book free on your Kindle. 

How else will you create a World Wide Rave?

This weekend: Silicon Valley P-Camp

The world's largest (free) get-together of product managers happens this weekend in Silicon Valley. It is an intense ad hoc gathering of product folks to share, present, network, learn, laugh and discuss. Alas, the event is sold out... if you haven't already signed up, you missed it!

But if you're there, be sure to check out sessions by Pragmatic Marketing instructors Barb Nelson and Mike Smart. Barb is leading a session on "Agile, Requirements, Roadmaps – Are They Mutually Exclusive?" and Mike will be proposing a roundtable discussion on measuring product management performance. And my pals from Enthiosys will be there too. Say "hi" for me.

Music and the Sheraton

Why is it that hotels and airports insist on playing music everywhere? I was trying to do some emails and maybe a blog post in the lobby of the Sheraton this morning but couldn't seem to think. The soft rock hits from the 80s pounded in my head until I realized that I couldn't concentrate. It takes 20 minutes to concentrate... But the typical workplace has an interruption every three minutes. Or in the case of the Sheraton, constant interruption.

What are you doing to create an effective work environment?

Friday fun: verify the requirements, not the spec

A few friends have sent me this photo. It's a new execution of a great joke.

 

Clearly this was called in over the phone.

QA responds: defect found--"underneath" is misspelled.

It's always about the problem

In our training classes, we emphasize the importance of solving market problems. Describing problems encountered by our target personas. It's the problem that drives product requirements. Yet we've become an industry of feature-speakers. "I want this and this and this and this!" Wait! What is the problem??

My friend Luke Hohmann wrote about this in his post "Market problems are still THE problem — even when you’re Agile!"

As teams embrace agile methods, some seem to have jumped backwards a decade, getting back to the thinking that opinions drive feature decisions; this is just wrong. Use market facts to uncover problems that customers are willing to pay to solve. Perhaps it's the pace of agile development, needing new items for the backlog every other week. Or perhaps it's a shift in the power of the "team" over the power of market facts.

If you're a product manager, you need to be delivering quantified market data to your product team; if you're a developer, you should demand it. Otherwise, the team will use their opinions of what they think people want. After all, in the absence of market facts, he who owns the compiler wins.

Are your customers coming to you or are you going to them?

Many vendors continue to see themselves as the focal point of their customers' universe. Remember the "portal" concept? Seems like every vendor wanted to be a your portal to the internet. Comcast, Toyota, Apple, Microsoft... every vendor wanted to be your home page and give you a new email address. The expectation that customers will come to the vendor is rooted in a "vendor centric" mindset. The typical vendor home page emphasizes product and company information. People who attend our Effective Product Marketing and New Rules of Marketing seminars learn a more "customer-centric" approach, designing around personas and problems.

Bloggers expect that people will come to them but increasingly bloggers are going to the people. My RSS feed serves information to over 3,000 people time I post. Pragmatic Marketing offers RSS feeds for upcoming seminars and for all of our blogs.

Honestly, I haven't decided about how much I should put in my feeds. Should I just feed the first 200 words or should I send the whole post? I've decided to do the latter--deliver the whole post--hoping that people who want to know more will eventually come to the site. And this appears to be what's happening. My blog leads people to my ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management, and ultimately to a Pragmatic Marketing seminar.

What are you doing to connect with customers? Surely you want them to find good information when they come to you but you also want to send information to them. If you haven't already done so, investigate blogging and RSS feeds to get valuable information to them.

Get a free RSS Reader from Google and then sign up for one or more of our blogs.

Update: Hey bloggers! Write an article for The Pragmatic Marketer and get featured on our blog roll.