ProductMarketing.com

Vote for me! at pCampAtl

I'm attending the product management pCamp in Atlanta on June 6. Sessions are posted on UserVoice (a very cool tool. Check it out if you haven't used it). If you're attending next Saturday, please vote for my session on The Strategic Role of Product Management.

Friday fun: Kindle 3 spoof

Watch The Kindle 3 on CollegeHumor

How to go from sales engineer to product manager?

I'm often asked about how people transition into product management. Few people seem to plan to be a product manager; they mos often stumble into it. And you almost always know very quickly whether you've made a good choice or a bad choice. While product management isn't for everybody, it can be a great job, particularly if you're being the business leader instead of the clean-up crew.

Jeff Lash at Ask A Good Product Manager recently asked me to reply to an inquiry about moving from sales engineer to product manager. It's a fairly common path into product management. Read my response here.

If you're interested in product management but don't really know exactly what it is, read my free ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management.

Altlanta pCamp June 6

ProductCamp Atlanta is an "unconference" for product managers and marketers in Atlanta. It's being held on June 6 at the GTRI Conference Center in Midtown. You can get all the details (and also register) at http://www.pcampatl.com or http://www.barcamp.org/ProductCampAtlanta. Judging by some of the topics people are proposing so far this should be a great learning opportunity to learn and collaborate with other product management and marketing professionals.

Pragmatic Marketing is a sponsor of this event. Sign up and see us there!

Living in an Agile World webinar

Sue Raisty-Egami of Sure Product Consulting joins me today for the Living in an Agile World webinar series. She'll discuss Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams while I provide sarcastic remarks. Join us!

Friday Fun: Can you tell time?

My friend Jim turned me on to this great math clock from Etsy:

I posted this morning at about 1000 binary. (That is, I posted this at 8am or 2^4)

OH COME ON! This is cool!! Geek cool, I admit. And for only $20, it can be yours!

UPDATE: I was reminded that I meant 2^3, not 2^4. Silly binary language!

The New Rules of Sales Enablement

Teach a man to fish....

My friend David Scott of World Wide Rave fame alerted me to this new ebook, The New Rules of Sales Enablement, from Jeff Ernst, the VP of Marketing for Kadient. The ebook describes the disconnect between sales tools and the people who use them. It challenges conventional wisdom of what marketers and execs think sales people need. If you're responsible for sales tools, you should definitely read this.

What's needed is the right (and most current) information in the sales people's hands just when they need them. But just poking new tools out to the intranet doesn't seem to be working. Sales people are using old, out-dated material that they've developed on their own. In fact, the typical sales rep spends almost a full day every week creating their own sales tools. (How much does that scare you? It freaks me out!!) And 90% of what marketing produces is not used by sales people! (Yikes!!)

Two notes: What will you do differently for your sales people based on this information? And could you do a similar ebook for your customers? Notice that Kadient is in the sales-enablement business but the ebook didn't try to sell anything. The ebook gives concrete ideas for improving the relationships without shouting "come buy stuff!" Of course, if you want more, I'm sure they can help you out.

Music as Product

It seems to me that product marketing in technology is very similar to what's happening in the music business today. The record companies are trying to find the next big thing by copying the last big thing. Meanwhile, new artists, like The Alternate Routes, are using the internet to gain instant access to their fans, bypassing traditional media. Sounds a lot like The New Rules of Marketing... using social media and the internet to get your story straight to your audience, bypassing traditional advertising and PR.

(Caution: some language in this video is not safe for work)

Now apply the ideas for the music industry to your business. Would a subscription model make more sense? Could you use ebooks and video to get your message out? If you have a direct sales channel, should you consider using an alternative channel anyway?

How is your business like the music business? And what can you learn from their successes and mistakes?

Friday Fun: Why we need to evolve from ST:TOS to ST:TNG

In honor of the recent release of the confusingly titled Star Trek (2009) by J.J. Abrams, I'm reposting this sidebar from The Pragmatic Marketer: Volume 3 Issue 5.

Why we need to evolve from ST:TOS to ST:TNG

I have found that the key to success in technology companies is an understanding of Star Trek. Most engineers, developers, and technical people are familiar with these characters. Perhaps the Star Trek characters are most familiar because we work with them every day. The characters of Star Trek give us the typical personas in a technology company.

Is your company The Original Series or The Next Generation?

Of course, everyone can equate Spock with the typical developer: quite logical without emotion, using facts and reason to draw conclusions. Spock is willing to spend hours on a problem despite pressure to make a quick decision. As we saw in Star Trek IV (the one with the whales), Bones implored Spock to make a guess. Spock: “Guessing is not in my nature.” Yet in many cases, a development “guess” is adequate to make decisions.

Unfortunately, sales people are often like Captain Kirk: action without thought, asking for the impossible and frequently violating the prime directive. Meanwhile, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy is like many marketing people: emotion without logic, frequently complaining about what they aren’t: “Damn it, Jim. I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.” Thankfully, we have Scotty as a stand-in for our product managers. Scotty initially tells Kirk that whatever he wants is impossible and fifteen minutes later, says, “Okay, you’ve got warp drive.”

Where is the president in all of this? Back at Starfleet, without a clue of what is really happening in the field. Alas, in many companies, the sales people are running the show; the VP of Sales is really the COO.

As our company grows, we need to evolve to be more like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here we have Captain Picard, acting as our president; Commander Riker is our sales people. Data, in the development role, continues to use logic, as Spock did, but attempts to understand the human elements of man, as Spock rarely did. Beverly Crusher, in the marketing role, is a good doctor, as was McCoy, but she also understands the business of the starship, can and does serve as an executive officer with understanding of all roles, and uses scientific metrics to evaluate the health of the crew.

In “Relics” (Episode #130, Season 6) Scotty has survived for three quarters of a century by keeping himself suspended in molecular limbo in the ship’s transporter system. When he and Geordi La Forge attempt to work together, Scotty listens in horror as Geordi delivers an accurate assessment of the situation to Captain Picard and Commander Riker.

SCOTT: (Shocked) “Ye didna tell him how long it was really going to take you?”

GEORDI: (irritated) “Of course I did.”

SCOTT: “Oh... Laddie. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want them to think of you as a miracle worker.”*

*source: http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/nextgeneration/season6/tng-604.txt

Here is the difference: Picard can be trusted with accurate information while Kirk cannot. Picard never makes promises that his crew cannot keep while Kirk frequently does. And the crew knows it… in both cases. The “old school” acts more on instinct and hope while the next generation acts on procedure and knowledge.

Is your company like the Next Generation or stuck in the Original Series?

What's the best...?

What's the best pizza sauce? There isn't one. Best coffee? Nope. Turns out that there isn't a best anything because people are not the same. Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

Without mentioning the term, he's talking about personas.

A persona is a representative buyer or user of a product--an archetype. But most product categories--like pizza and spaghetti--have multiple personas. Not everyone needs the same generic thing; turns out, people aren't generic after all.

What's the ideal phone? Depends on who uses the phone: your sales people want one set of features; your grandma wants another set; your daughter another.

Watch Gladwell's video on TedTalks and then read more in my article, Buyer and User Personas. If you need help incorporating personas into your product management, attend one of our seminars to learn how to use this powerful tool.

Real Life Twitter

What if you sent out tweets in real life?

Watch Real Life Twitter.

And be sure to attend my webinar today on The Strategic Role of Product Management in Agile Environments. Twitter on #pragmatic.

Product management and agile

Product managers and product marketing manager are adopting agile--some are embracing it, some are suffering it. We've long been supporters of agile methods but want to ensure that the market plays a primary role in product definition and backlog prioritization. So what is the role of product management in an agile environment? This week we begin a series of webinars to answer this question, and also to promote our new Living in an Agile World seminar.

Our schedule is:

• May 8: The Strategic Role of Product Management in an Agile Development Environment with Rich Mironov, CMO at Enthiosys
• May 22: Five Common Challenges for Product Managers in Agile Teams with Sue Raisty-Egami, Sure Product Consulting
• June 5: Agile, Roadmaps, and Requirements: Are They Mutually Exclusive? with Barb Nelson, Pragmatic Marketing
• June 19: Interest Goes Where Money Flows: Creating a Market-Centric "Voice of the Customer" Program with Luke Hohmann, CEO at Enthiosys

I'll be hosting each session. Join me this Friday for The Strategic Role of Product Management in an Agile Environment.

Friday fun: "You chose product marketing, part 2"

"You chose product marketing. Now deal with it!" Enjoy part two of the internal product marketing spoof.