ProductMarketing.com

Slide or documents, not slideuments

Company standards and many event organizers seem to require bad presentations. The trick: make a set of slides to punctuate your points; make a document to fully explain your points. Don't distribute both. 

Share this presentation with those around you. Maybe 2011 will be the year when we finally learn how to use PowerPoint and Keynote.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Video Thursday: John Cleese on creativity

Jason Z blogged about this wonderful ten-minute YouTube video with John Cleese. 

Here's my favorite quote:

People who have absolutely no idea what they're doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing.

In particular, he reveals the power of observation. Ideas do not come from your laptops.

So, have you observed a customer (or non-customer) lately? 

NIHITO. 

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Graphics add to the conversation

Between 2000 and 2008, measles deaths dropped by 78%.

Contrast that with the typical, socially correct, diverse but lame, business graphic that we so often see.

If a picture paints a thousand words, this picture paints zero words. In your next presentation or blog post, be sure you use a graphic that adds to--rather than detracts from-- the conversation. 

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

How Google Works

Infographic by PPC Blog

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know

Recently, I discovered one of the reasons the speeches are so good… TED’s organisers send upcoming speakers a stone tablet, engraved with the ‘TED Commandments”.

via timlonghurst.com

Learn the 10 Commandments of public speaking--particularly true for productCamps--in Tim's post.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Dan Pink's DRIVE

I'm reading Dan Pink's DRIVE. Excellent book.Check out the video....

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Don Norman's talk from Business of Software 2009

Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down. Which button do you press? Now, spend five minutes watching this video of Don Norman speaking at Business of Software 2009.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Social media & product management June 2010

Our friends at Brainmates shared this presentation on social media.

brainmates - Social media & product management June 2010

View more presentations from brainmates.

In particular explore the concepts starting at slide 19 for how to include social media in every stage of your life cycle.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

How much is a good logo worth?

Here's a surprising public spectacle...

Foliovision.com writes:

In January we helped Mark Levison's Agile Pain Relife [sic] consulting make a very successful Typepad to Wordpress transition. Behind the scenes there is a very interesting design case study, we'd like to share.

and later:

Alas, homemade logos are often not as effective at presenting one's brand as a designer version.

Interesting strategy: scorning your customer on your blog. Personally, I think most logos are a waste of money and I'm not too impressed with the work shown here but come on! Scorning your client in public is just wrong. Here's what the client has to say:

Imagine my surprise when I noticed a blog post that mentioned me by name, discussed my business choices and denigrated my own logo. I contacted folivision to raise my concerns but they were dismissed. I would quote Alec’s remarks to me in private, but that would violate my promise above. Suffice it to say I can no longer recommend foliovision since you don’t know whether they will treat your discussions with any confidentiality.

How much is a good logo worth? I dunno. $0.00?

Posted via web from Steve Johnson on product management

on my reading list

Got a nice email from a client today who wrote:

I met you during a session this past February. Our company has an extremely Pragmatic-focused product management department [YAY!] and I wondered if you might have further book/course recommendations in the following areas:

• Presentations -- Presentation Zen (Garr Reynolds) and The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (Gallo)
• Facilitation -- Innovation Games (Hohmann) 
• Market research -- The Market Research Toolkit (McQuarrie)
• Finance/accounting -- I haven't read it but I've heard good things about Finance for Non-Financial Managers (Gene Siciliano) [which I have now ordered to read on my next international flight]
• Competitive strategy -- The Marketing Playbook (Zagula & Tong) 

Also, Death by Meeting (Lencioni) which isn't quite what you expect it to be about.

What I'm reading right now: 

• Start with Why (Sinek)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
• In A Sunburned Country (Bryson) [I'm headed to Australia before too long!)

More books suggestions at http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/books/product-management-books

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Ted Talks to TV

Thought-sparking TED talks that have won legions of followers on the Internet are spreading to television stations around the world. TED talks will be provided free to television broadcasters who are encouraged to build programs around them.

Read more in http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100506/tc_afp/lifestyleitinternettelevisionted

Watch the great TED presentations at http://www.ted.com/ or

download from iTunes.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Friday fun: certified/ certifiable

Francis writes, 

I had the pleasure to get the certification programme in Practical Product Management.  I'm still getting a lot of value from the best practices.  Thank you for that. In a presentation I mentioned that our entire PM group is "Certified" by Pragmatic Marketing.  Also, I use the Pragmatic Marketing "Certified" banner in my mail etc...

My colleague from London then pointed to me that "Certified" means to be Declared Legally Insane in UK...

Sure enough, according to Cambridge Dictionaries online, to certify is:

to state officially that someone is mentally ill. As in:
As a young man, he had been certified and sent to a hospital for the mentally ill.

However, the same dictionary defines certified as: having a document that proves that you have successfully finished a course of training.

So product managers who complete Practical Product Management can be certified or else we'll have to certify that you're insane.

Q&A for product management

Red Canary's Shop Talk offers several perspectives on product management from some top minds in the Toronto area. Read the post at http://www.redcanary.ca/?p=648

The questions:
1. Tell us about the best product you’ve ever encountered? Why do you like it?
2. How do you know a great product manager when you meet one?
3. What’s your favorite interview question?
4. When is the best time for a start-up to hire a product manager?
5. What has been the defining moment in your career?
6. Mistakes. What was your biggest?

My answers:
1. Best product: I like all of Apple's products and I love my Kindle but the best? Right now I'd have to say my Kensington presenter's remote. It has five features—next slide, last slide, turn off the slides, laser pointer plus a memory stick to hold your presentations. It must've been a nightmare getting the developers to NOT add additional features.
2. Great product manager: A great product manager sees patterns. We're not looking for one request, one story, one mistake, one data point; great product managers see the patterns in the aggregate. Like watching the game film on Monday morning, you can see what really happened from an overall perspective.
3. Interview question: What's your favorite Microsoft Office program? Your answer tells me how you organize your thoughts and where you fit in the product management triad. (And no one has yet said Microsoft Project). Learn more about the product management triad.
4. When to hire?: Just before your first failure. A founder has a great idea for a product. He quits his day job and starts a company. Success! (Of course, we don't often think about the 99 others who didn't have success). But then, what's the next product? And the one after that? That's when you need a product manager, to bring market facts and patterns from the world as it is now, not how the founder saw it a decade ago, not how the developers imagine it to be, and not what the sales people can sell once to a deal they're working.
5. Defining moment: I had the joy of working at a really well-run company as my first vendor job. It took me years to realize that they were the anomaly. The book I'll write some day is titled "Everything I thought everybody already knew about running a software company."
6. Mistake: Letting my people teach me to micro-manage them. I promised myself I wouldn't yet they were so used to being second-guessed, they tried to get me to continue my predecessor's bad behavior. It took me a few weeks to figure out that they took my opinion as a mandate. Once I understood, I assured them that I wouldn’t question their decisions if they were grounded in company strategy and market facts.

How would you answer?

Your enhancement process

Here's how your customers think you process their enhancement ideas. 

I used to do a simple presentation for customers (and sales people) that illustrated how ideas turn into features. Carl Knibbs suggests this process: 

See Carl's post at http://www.carlknibbs.net/blog/2010/2/10/how-we-build-the-product.html

Customers want to know that you have a process for planning and prioritization. Most customers don't really mind being told "no"-- they mind being ignored. So the next time you have a group of customers onsite, think about a simple presentation (and maybe it's a single slide) that shows your planning process. Maybe you should show them your prioritization system and get their feedback. For more on prioritization, see http://pragmaticmarketing.typepad.com/productmarketing/2010/02/setting_prioritites.html

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Requirements and Reality

Saeed at http://onproductmanagement.net offers this clever presentation comparing our desired state and reality.

Diagramming Product Management #1 - Requirements and Reality

View more presentations from Saeed Khan.

It wouldn't be funny if it wasn't so true.

Keep 'em comin', Saeed.

Posted via email from Steve Johnson on product management

Friday fun: imagine computing in the trillions

My friend Barb shared this with me: imagine computing not in the billions but in the trillions!

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

This presentation uses animations very well... and the cute people icons actually help, instead of distracting. (Anyone remember those annoying string bean people?) Notice as well the SPEED of the animations; most animations in presentations are waaaaaayyyyy toooo sllloooowww.

I know we can't duplicate this technique in Powerpoint or Keynote but it's a handy reminder that each animation should add real value to the presentation.

on better presentations

Death by PowerPoint

View more documents from Alexei Kapterev.

Focus each slide on one idea. Use graphics to convey emotion. Don't use your presentation as a script.

Good advice.

on presentations

One aspect of product management that we often neglect is presentations. We do lots of plodding slide-slide-slide presentations and this comprehensive set of slides approach may be right for selling and training. Yet for persuasive presentations, try this:

Another great presentation is Identity 2.0 with Dick Hardt, founder & CEO of Sxip Identity.

"Ideally we'll never meet any of our customers"

My friend Len wrote me: I just saw something that completely floored me and it make me think about you and Pragmatic Marketing. Apparently Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame was at a conference speaking about one of his new companies and he actually said - "Ideally we'll never meet any of our customers." He goes on to tell a horror story about when a customer came to the company office, apparently on a whim, to tell them how much he loved their stuff. Consequently they took down the sign to the office to keep something like that from happening again. You can see the video here; the clip is about 2 minutes in.

Certainly the whole "ideally we'll never meet our customers" is astounding but moreover, I think it explains the appeal of social networks to technical people. I'm barraged daily by requests via LinkedIn--and now Andreessen's new service--to be friends with strangers. It seems to me that social networks are the technical person's way of interacting without interaction; it's "let's be friends without being friendly." I just don't like the idea of automating friendship. And because it's automated, it's highly scalable. You can be friends with a million people that you don't know. But is that friendship?

My other observation is the danger of having two audiences. A live interview is focused on the people in the room and I wonder if Andreessen would have said the same things in the same ways if he'd been talking to only the web audience. A rule of giving presentations is to speak to the most easily offended person in the room. But who is in the room in a webcast? When giving a live presentation, you get clues from the audience--laughter or whatever form of audible or visual feedback-- which you don't get during a recorded session. In a recorded session, you'll use different presentation techniques, probably be less funny and colloquial, and stay more focused on the topic. Speaking to both a visible and invisible audience is hard! Who should you focus on?

Some technical people and companies seem to be saying, "This business would be so much easier if we didn't have to meet those darn customers." Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Sam offers another interpretation:

Some of the greatest software businesses of our day are businesses with no sales force, no support team, and barely no marketing department. Some companies have built products that are so in tune with their users, so in line with their markets, that mass adoption (and riches) occur by the brilliance of the solution to the problem their products address. I can agree with that. I want that for my product.

Much of traditional software product management has taught us to rely on internal channels like the sales team and the support team to get feedback about the market. We have learnt to rely on them to make sales possible. And so, we "copout" of our responsibilities as product managers to built truly great products that need little selling, little marketing and little support to succeed. Trust me, although the creators of Gmail have had no face to face contact with customers, it doesn't mean that they haven't been closely engaged with customers. That it happens online with all the barriers that that creates speaks more of their product management skills than of an attitude problem.

I see Marc Andreesen's statement as a reaffirmation of discipline and not taking the easy road, than of snubbing real users.

Rethinking presentations

Product managers often give presentations to colleagues, executives, customers--and we all probably suffer from "too much"--trying to say too much using too many slides.

Guy Kawasaki writes, "I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I'm in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc."

From Presentation Zen, "In the world of PowerPoint presentations, then, you do not always need to visually spell everything out. You do not need to (nor can you) pound every detail into the head of each member of your audience either visually or verbally. Instead, the combination of your words, along with the visual images you project, should motivate the viewer and arouse his imagination helping him to empathize with your idea and visualize your idea far beyond what is visible in the ephemeral PowerPoint slide before him. The Zen aesthetic values include (but are not limited to):

• Simplicity
• Subtlety
• Elegance
• Suggestive rather than the descriptive or obvious
• Naturalness (i.e., nothing artificial or forced)
• Empty space (or negative space)
• Stillness, Tranquility
• Eliminating the non-essential.

We've come to use PowerPoint as a teleprompter, resulting in too many of us reading slides. Could you make your point using fewer slides? Could you make it ten slides? Come on, net it out. What's your point? Use the student note section to add supporting information. Move your company logo off the page into the printed matter. Let the slides remind you of the point; the slides are themselves the point.

Let's hope 2006 is the year when we do better presentations using fewer slides.