Category: worth the read

Trendspotting January 2010

Posted by joshua duncan – February 3, 2010

Ad Age’s Want to Be a Smarter Marketer? Here’s What’s Worth Learning:

Numbers, schmumbers. The quest to measure the success of new media in marketing has staged a dangerous illusion that massive traffic is the holy grail. Richer veins of loyalty and brand advocacy (with smaller cohorts of consumers) are paying off more handsomely for brands in the near and long term.

Entrepreneur on 10 [and 1/2] Trends to Watch:

Everyone’s eating lower on the food chain these days. Consumer spending is down more than 30 percent from this time last year, to an average of $57 a day, according to a Gallup poll. And even those who can still afford to spend are beset by “luxury shame,” which means high-end retailers are out, and discount shopping is in. Wal-Mart’s earnings increased more than 5 percent this year, while Neiman Marcus reported a 14.8 percent drop in sales.

Gapingvoid’s “selling by giving”, or, “gift economics”:

I could see that in another five years, ANYONE who wants to market ANYTHING successfully- be they small mom n’ pop shops to large companies, will have to be fluent in Gift Economics, to a level that seemed COMPLETELY alien only a few years ago.

Microsoft’s Study on Data Privacy Day:

Our study found 70% of surveyed HR professionals in U.S. (41% in the UK) have rejected a candidate based on online reputation information. Reputation can also have a positive effect as in the United States, 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the U.K. and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent; almost half stated that it does so to a great extent.

Photo credit: MoreInterpretation’s Flickr

Category: stats, worth the read
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Favorite Product Management Posts Jannuary 2010

Posted by joshua duncan – January 31, 2010

I have decided not to wait till the end of the year to publish a best of 2010. The list will be way too long and you’ll never have time to read it all. Instead, I am going to focus one month at a time on some of my favorite product posts that I think are worth reading (or reading again).

Enjoy!

Outside-in-view -A New Roadmap to Consider:

As I peruse my product roadmap, I was thinking about what the benefits would be for a product marketing roadmap, how would we change behaviors? We could start product positioning sooner, define the product benefits, do internal education while product is being developed, test potential messages as we test the features – matching critical product launch elements to the product roadmap process.

My Product Management Opinion – The Power of Advanced Research for Product Management

But, are you making the most of some of the advanced research techniques that have become more accessible over the last decade? Do you understand your market’s preferences for specific features or messaging? Do you know how various segments will react to price changes? Can you conduct robust competitive what-if analysis?

Strategic Product Manager – Art or Science?

Since building and delivering software or other high-tech products is generally done with the goal of making a dollar and sustaining a business, I sure hope decisioning is not done within the realm of “human creativity” but with quantitative predictions.

Where the Product Management Tribe Gathers - Product Management Leadership – Converting Theory into Action

Product management leadership is all about action. It’s converting the theory of product management into sustainable methods. It’s organizing, guiding and enabling a team and teaching them a common language that builds momentum as a team, creates consistency in your activities and ensures product management maintains a level of credibility across organization and with executive management.

Software Product Manager – Software product manager’s first 30 days at a new job ….

Understand people dynamics – This is the most important part, more important than even your product in the first 30 days. You have to start building relationships from day one. Every company has some form of internal people dynamics that you need to observe and learn as you get used to your new position especially in a new company.

Mohan Sawhney – Do Dedicated Devices Die? Principles of Convergence

My take is that, like all questions in marketing and strategy, the right answer is – it depends! I believe that convergence (and the consequent death of dedicated devices) is a function of several contingent factors. So, rather than taking one side or another of this debate, I would like to reflect on som principles that will help predict whether we will see convergence win out in a specific context.

Rocketwatcher’s Everything You Say Matters

In your own company you can probably think of a dozen messages like the LinkedIn subject line, that you are putting in front of your customers everyday. Do they all reflect your company’s value as much as they could?

Do Dedicated Devices Die? Principles of Convergence

It’s 2010 & Everything Matters

Posted by joshua duncan – January 10, 2010

So, the first week of January is already over and I have not gotten around to making any New Year’s resolutions. I am blaming it on a case of strep throat that went through the family, building up speed until it took me out of commission for a several days.

Instead, I am going to start off with a couple of articles that I think are worth thinking about as 2010 gets going.

More…

Voice of the Customer

Posted by joshua duncan – December 28, 2009

Over on the Customer Experience Matters blog, Bruce Temkin has started a conversation on the 7 key customer experiences to focus on in 2010. The article is worth the read but it was point number two that caught my eye, “Acknowledge that you don’t know your customers”. Bruce highlights the challenges of getting to know your customers and recommends the following:

Start here: Create a voice of the customer program with a cross-functional team that focuses on four “LIRM” components: listening to customers, interpreting the feedback, reacting to the insights, and monitoring results from actions over time.

What I really like here is the cross-functional team recommendation. If customer knowledge is not shared through the organization there is bound to be disconnects. You don’t want sales working on one set of customers while the product development team is building something for a different set.

Using the team approach should help alignment and dicementation of customer knowledge. Another idea here is to make the voice of the customer team a rotational assignment. This should help make the point that understanding the customer is important for everyone in the company.

Wisdom Can Be Shattered

Posted by joshua duncan – December 22, 2009

Product Marketers crave data. Data on the industry, the competition, customers, and just about everything in between. Data helps build business cases, derive features, justify decisions, and launch new products all together. The problem is that data can become an Achilles heel.

Jeff Stibel describes it perfectly in his article “Why Wise Leaders Don’t Know Too Much“,

Wisdom can be shattered by too much information.

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Dr. Anderson’s Secret Product Management Career Advice

Posted by joshua duncan – December 8, 2009

Dr. Jim Anderson’s blog, the Accidental Product Manager, is a great resource and full of insightful PM lessons and advice. Dr. Anderson recently sweetened the deal with a “Secret Product Manager Career Guide” when you sign-up for his newsletter. I just finished reading the eBook and highly recommend you take a peak yourself. I have highlighted a few of the gems worth sharing below:

Chapter 3: Don’t Just Be A Problem Finder – “A good way to kill your career is to become known as the person who always shows what is wrong with every new idea. Here’s a news flash: you were hired to make problems go away!”

More…

Avoid the Fidelity Belly

Posted by joshua duncan – November 7, 2009

The Washington Post had an article a few weeks ago that I think is worth a second read. The post is from Kevin Maney, author of the upcoming book “Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t”. Kevin discusses how good product leaders make the right trade-offs:

Products or services that offer just so-so fidelity and so-so convenience fall into a no-man’s-land of customer apathy that I call the “fidelity belly.” That’s where music CDs and newspapers find themselves today. The most successful products and services tend to be either high in fidelity or high in convenience — one or the other, but not both.

The term “fidelity belly” is really sticking with me for some reason. You must avoid the fidelity belly at all costs!

——-UPDATE———

See The Fidelity Belly (part 2) for more on the belly.

The Fidelity Belly (part 2)

Customer-Centric Thinking at NetApp

Posted by joshua duncan – September 24, 2009

I have been reading Dave Hitz’s book, “How To Castrate A Bull“, on the ups, downs, and ups of the company he founded, NetApp. During his story, Dave provides great rational for the need of customer-centric thinking when developing new products.

In the early days of the company, his team was developing products for small departments and had a great understanding of the customers. However, as the company grew and they started building solutions for large enterprises and government institutions, they realized they needed to include a new type of customer thinking. Dave explains:

…..At a start-up serving customers like your-self, you unconsciously do the right thing; to mature that start-up into a large company serving other large companies, you must learn to consciously study and understand their special needs….

….If you are missing customer-centric thinking, you get an elegant design that works great and ships on time, except customers don’t care very much about the problem it solves. They might admire it as a technical achievement, but they won’t buy it.

Great advice from Dave. As you start to expand your product offerings, you must recognize the changing needs of the new customers you are trying to win.

BTW, Dave chose a very interesting title for his book alluding to fact if handled properly, risk can be managed and profitible. He also does include instructions if you do have a bull that needs tending….

Great Deck: What’s Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

Posted by joshua duncan – August 1, 2009

From Slideshare:

What’s Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Category: marketing, worth the read
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The Waterline Principle

Posted by joshua duncan – July 27, 2009

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I just finished listening to Jim Collins’s new book, “How the Might Fall“. One of may favorite quotes in the book was on risk management:

Bill Gore articulated a helpful concept for decision-making and risk-taking, what he called the “waterline” principle. Think of being on a ship, and imagine that any decision gone bad will blow a hole in the side of the ship. If you blow a hole above the waterline (where the ship won’t take on water and possibly sink), you can patch the hole, learn from the experience, and sail on. But if you blow a hole below the waterline, you can find yourself facing gushers of water pouring in, pulling you toward the ocean floor. And if it’s a big enough hole, you might go down really fast, just like some of the financial firm catastrophes of 2008. To be clear, great enterprises do make big bets, but they avoid big bets that could blow holes below the waterline.

Excerpt from the book in Business Week here.