Startup Musings – An “Oh Crap” moment:

The product release was a textbook example of excellent teamwork and extraordinary efficiency in execution.  The fatal flaw was mainly my fault.  That kind of fatal flaw had happened before on a different platform.   The lead engineer on the project hasn’t seen it before, but I have.  I should have anticipated it and made sure SQA tested for the condition that would have triggered it. But I missed it.  I was colossally lucky someone caught it before it was released into the wild.

Strategic Product Manager – Value Add or Added Value:

If you follow the edict (yes, edict) that value determines prices that determines cost, then your add-ons have value (assuming the cost is greater than zero) and therefore have a price that is greater than zero. So why offer them for free?

Business Insider – Competition Is Overrated: Stop Worrying About It And Just Build A Better Product:

Suppose you have an idea for a startup, and then do some research only to discover there are already similar products on the market. You become disheartened and wonder if you should abandon your idea.  In fact, the existence of competing products is a meaningful signal, but not necessarily a negative one.

Spatially Relevant – Content, Content, Content

As you develop content and set it free, there are some key questions a marketer should ask since while content should be set free, it’s not free to develop:

• Is this intended for the buyer/Analyst/Partners/Sales/Others?
• How will this content influence your audience to do some?
• How does this relate to your existing content/strategy?
• Does this establish a new content theme, if not related to previous content and is it a sustainable theme?
• Is the content reusable?

Neuro Science Marketing – Why Stories Sell

Short testimonials are not a bad thing at all. Letting potential customers know that other real people used your product with success is always a good thing. But turning a testimonial into a personal anecdote will greatly increase its impact. Adding a name, a face, and story will play to the way our brains evolved, and will be both more convincing and more memorable.

This also explains why word-of-mouth is such a powerful tool: if the story is told not by a celebrity or paid endorser, but by someone we actually know, it will be even more potent.

The Experience is the Product - The Phrase That Should be Banned from Product Managers’ Vocabulary

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”  If you feel the need to say this, then you have screwed up.

On Product Management – Why I hate that Henry Ford quote!

You’ve heard it before haven’t you?  It gets used all the time. Even  Steve Jobs has used it in interviews.  Unfortunately, the people who use this quote most often seem to be people who think they have all the answers or want to quash any discussion about getting outside validation of ideas or plans.

Product Bytes – Magical Thinking and the Zero-Sum Road

That gives us Mironov’s Roadmap Theorem #1: you can’t put something new into the current development plan without taking out something of equal or larger size. When stated this plainly, it should be as obvious as the law of gravity.