ProductMarketing.com

How do you prioritize?

mobilecrunch.com reports:

We just got word from Aliph that their $99 Jawbone Icon headset will be gaining support for the A2DP (music streaming) protocol tomorrow, by way of a free update made available through their AppStore-esque headset customization portal, MyTalk

A2DP is the #1 request in the Jawbone discussion boards... as shown here, 8 pages of discussion, the busiest thread. 

So... hat's off to Aliph for listening to their customers.

Are you listening to your market? Market evidence is the key to building a backlog that is prioritized for the market, rather than being a list representing opinions and politics. 

If you need help in bringing the market's voice into your product management, we're delivering the Practical Product Management and Requirements That Work seminars in Tampa on May 15-17. Come learn the best practices for how market evidence drives product decisions. 

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Barb Nelson on "Strategy to Execution in These Trying Times"

At the next session of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association: 

Join Barbara Nelson from Pragmatic Marketing who will discuss 

Strategy to Execution in These Trying Times

Learn which high value activities will:

* Give you market insights
* Drive alignment between executives and workers
* Communicate the strategic vision to marketing, sales, development
* Provide market feedback to help you adapt and improve along the way

Sign up at https://www.123signup.com/Member?PG=1521315182400&P=15213151494403519100

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

How to Set Up a Sales Tracking Process

Who wants to dwell on a major sales defeat? You fought the good fight, now it is time to move on, right? A thorough post mortem can be painful, and there is always the next big deal to chase, another hot prospect in the pipeline to pitch. But moving on without reflecting on why you lost a sale can be a mistake, sales experts say. By analyzing the accounts that got away, a sales manager can uncover underlying weaknesses in his or her offering, identify areas upon which the sales force can improve, and learn valuable information about key competitors.

via inc.com

Companies find that win/loss analysis reveals more than why they won or lost a single deal; they find patterns in the sales process. Inc offers these 7 tips for doing win/loss in your company.

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Rich Mironov on ROI

Your intended buyer isn’t the CEO, but instead some line employee or manager.  Every sizeable purchase order has to be explained and justified and “ROI’d”.  If you don’t help your intended buyer explain the specific savings that come from buying your product, it’s much harder to get a purchase approved.  So part of your ‘sales enablement’ job is to give the buyer (the customer) a simple tool to quantify savings.  In this situation, only numbers and dollars count - you’re not allowed to justify purchases based on ‘strategic value’ or vague improvement or handwaving.

via mironov.com

We hear it all the time: "I can't sell the product without an ROI calculation." My friend Rich has a great approach to explaining the value of the product using ROI. If part of your ‘sales enablement’ job is to give the buyer (the customer) a simple tool to quantify savings, you'll want to read this.

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Is Your Website Hot? | Revenue Journal

In the Google-driven purchase - which is how most purchases are conducted now - the customer has never been to your site before. They've never bought from you before. When they first come to your site, the first thing they see is either hot, warm, or cold. That's why home pages are declining in importance - and product-specific landing pages are increasingly important. When you land on a product-specific landing page, you are HOT. When you come in to a company's home page - in the course of searching for something specific - you are usually cold. If you're lucky, you might be warm.

via revenuejournal.com

Kristin take a look at web sites and offers some great tips on improving yours. Is your website hot or not?

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Is Your Product Priced Right?

When launching any new product, pricing is an important component to consider. We must price the product to fit in with our overall value proposition.  Are we positioning the product as a high end expensive, valuable product or a bare bones low cost product? What do our customers want? How much will they pay?

via outsideinview.com

Pricing is always a topic of interest to the strategic product manager. Jennifer offers her outside-in View with some great tips on pricing.

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Announcing ProductCamp RTP, May 22, 2010

Announcing ProductCamp RTP, May 22, 2010 - Share In The Innovation! 

ProductCamp RTP (Research Triangle Park, near Raleigh, NC) is soliciting new topics and discussions. Please submit abstracts here, including:

1) Working with sales teams
2) Leveraging communication and team work
3) How to leverage social networking to increase communication internally within your company
4) Challenging the status quo
5) How to innovate within your organization
6) Making strategic decisions
7) What makes up a good roadmap?
8) What else do you want to hear?  Agile development (Ok, it is always relevant), working with marketing, presentation skills, what else?

ProductCampRTP will follow the Open Grid Scheduling process for specific session scheduling, but the basic outline is below.

Pragmatic Marketing is pleased to be a sponsor for ProductCamp RTP.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Where are your development standards?

Most organizations would benefit from standardized development guidelines. Some product managers try to put these in requirements but they really belong in a development (and design) standards document. Development guidelines imply performance and constraint requirements, those non-functional requirements that often make the difference between a good-enough product and a great product. 

In a related topic, have you started using Personas? A good persona document also includes performance and constraint requirements, such as the skills of the persona and their computing environment. If you know Robin has Windows 7 and Sarah has a Mac, you know what operating systems you need to support. Since Curt is working in construction, you'll know he may not have access to power or WiFi. Because Nana is unlikely to travel outside her home country, her phone doesn't need an international calling plan. 

Don't confuse requirements with implementation. (See On Reqs and Specs for more on this topic).

Apple Human Interface Guidelines for iPad

iPadHIG.pdf (5777 KB)
View this on posterous

More at http://developer.apple.com/ipad/sdk/

You can download the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx 

(side note: the properties of the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines PDF are "fake TOC." I dunno; just make me laugh.)

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Friday fun: For your convenience... a price increase.

Don't you love marketers who claim almost everything is "for your convenience"? 

The Wall Street Journal happily has increased prices for direct delivery... for my convenience. 

What are you and your sales people doing for the customers' "convenience"? 

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

iPad printing: solved

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/15/ipad-printing-solved

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The "open-ended" cop-out

I have to applaud the Jawbone ICON people for setting up a feedback mechanism for their online MyTalk service. It's fairly cool! It lets you change the voice (from "The Hero" to "The Catch!") and install one of three minor apps on the headset. 

At the conclusion of the survey I get an opportunity to win--wait for it--a free Jawbone ICON. That is, I'm taking a survey for a service I use with my Jawbone ICON and I'm entered into a drawing to win... a Jawbone ICON. Hmmm. Something's wrong here.

But that isn't really my point. 

After asking me a few fairly interesting questions about the application, the last question is: 

Someone must've written a  book on surveys that says to always end with an open-ended question. But "What other products should we develop?" is exactly the wrong question. I doubt they get any valuable insights from this. A better question is "What other problems do you encounter?" but even that I wouldn't have been able to answer. Maybe "What else would you like us to know?" is a good ending. That is, leave space for comments of any type: satisfaction with the device, the service, the survey. 

You don't discover problems in a survey; you validate and quantify what you've learned from personal experiences and interviews. 

Before a survey, someone in product management needs to spend some time observing problems. 

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

length of fuse / commute

http://thisisindexed.com/2010/04/laptops-at-home-green-and-happy/

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Don McMillan on PowerPoint

I was recently reminded of this wonderful sketch by Don McMillan.

Good tips!

Don also has a funny CD/DVD available from http://technicallyfunny.com/merchandise.htm

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever

Seth Godin writes in Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever,

Apple reports that on the first day they sold more than $150,000,000 worth of iPads. I can't think of a product or movie or any other launch that has ever come close to generating that much direct revenue.

Godin provides 10 attributes for launch success including 2) Don't try to please everyone and 3) Make a product worth talking about. 

What brand marketers often miss is that the core of any launch isn't the logo, the theme music, or the brand. Start with a great product and now the rest gets really interesting. Apple doesn't do much brand marketing; they do product marketing. And their brand benefits. 

As Kristin Zhivago puts it, 

"Your brand is the promise that you keep, not the one you make."

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Chicago Product Management group

If you're in the Chicago area, you'll want to check out the Chicago Product Management group, organized by Bernhard Kappe. 

ChiPMA, The Chicago Area Product Management Association, is all about helping Product managers and related fields to get better at designing, building and launching digital products and services. Modeled after the Silicon Valley Product Managers Association (SVPMA, www.svpma.org), ChiPMA's meetings expose members to current trends in innovation, product strategy, product marketing, development approaches and the latest tools and technologies.

On April 15, join them for Rapid Product Design: Six Visual Techniques for Quickly Creating and Communicating Innovative Ideas. 

Learn more at http://www.meetup.com/chiPMA/

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Spirit Airlines to become first to charge for carry-on luggage

Spirit Airlines has become the first airline in the USA – perhaps in the world – to say it will charge fliers for putting carry-on bags into its overhead storage bins. That news came this morning as part of a complicated new fee and fare scheme Spirit announced. As part of that effort -- which Spirit describes as "progressing to the next phase of unbundling" -- customers must pay to join Spirit's "$9 Fare Club" to get access to discounted fees and fares. Tucked away in that somewhat convoluted release is the mention of the carry-on fee. 

via usatoday.com

Once again, a company is focusing on their own desperate attempt to make money while completely ignoring the customer experience. The list of airlines I won't fly has increased by "1".

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

ProductCamp Toronto – It’s on! « On Product Management

It’s official! ProductCamp Toronto Spring 2010 will be held on Sunday May 30 at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto.

via onproductmanagement.net

The organizers have planned three tracks: intro, start-ups, and advanced. Nice! Go to the web site to register and propose topics. Hope to see you there!

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

My iPad arrived

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Poverty & Education

via thisisindexed.com

This may be the perfect explanation.

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

Friday fun: It's gonna be an iPad Weekend

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Stephen Gets a Free iPad
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Yep, mine'll be here tomorrow.