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Start With The Customer Marketing Podcast #6 – Drinking Your Own Champaign

September 18, 2011 By

After a summer hiatus, the Start with the Customer Podcast is back! In this episode I am honored to be joined by Larry McKeogh, product management expert and founder of Rocky Mountain ProductCamp and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain consulting.

We started off the call catching up on the lastest news from ProductCamp Utah, followed by a discussion on the different ProductCamp approaches. We spent some time talking about Larry’s presentation from PCamp Utah and the skills necessary for being a successful product manager. From there we continued on the topic of “The Power of the Customer” and where crowdsourcing can play a part in product development. We concluded the call with some parting shots on the latest news from Yahoo and the challenges of managing a turnaround without a clear strategy.

I hope you enjoy the show and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes.

Show Notes:

Runtime:  46 minutes

Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , , , , ,

Start With The Customer Prodcast #3 – All Hat, All Cattle

April 18, 2011 By

In this week’s edition of the Start with the Customer Prodcast (a product focused podcast), I am humbled to be joined by three product superstars – April Dunford, of Rocket Watcher,  Jim Holland, of Product Management Tribe, and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain.

We started the call playing armchair product manager while discussing the latest news of the Blackberry Playbook launch – from their product strategy to their misses with the launch and messaging. We then continued to the topic of customer conversations and the power of the product story.  We concluded on the challenges of product marketing alignment within the organization and how it needs to work.

Enjoy the show and would love to hear your thoughts!

You can listen here:

Or download through iTunes.

Show notes:

Runtime:  36 mins

BlackBerry Playbook Launch

Customer Conversations

Product – Marketing and Management

  • Where’s the fit in the organization?
  • The Pragmatic Marketing Framework
  • Aligning product and marketing – keeping them close
  • A shared understanding of the market
  • From an agile development perspective, where does the Product Owner fit?
  • The blurring of the lines between Product Marketing and Marketing
Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Start with the Customer – The Podcast

March 28, 2011 By

Welcome to the first episode of the Start with the Customer podcast!

I am a big fan of podcasts and have been listening to several for a couple of years now. You just can’t beat the education and the convience of listening on your way to work or on the road. Plus the fact that all of this is available for free is absolutely incredible.

I had been kicking around the idea of putting together a “prodcast” to talk about marketing, product management, and product marketing for sometime now. I convinced  Jon Gatrell, of the Spatially Relevant blog, and Scott Sehlhorst, of the Tyner Blain blog, to join me for a trial run to see how it would work.

We picked a couple of topics, hit record and close to 45 minutes later we wrapped up the first episode. Would love to hear your thoughts on the podcast and what you would like to hear more/less of in the future.

Enjoy!

You can listen to it here or download it directly from iTunes:

 

Show notes:

 

Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Finding the Voice of the Customer with Jose Briones

February 1, 2011 By

One of the toughest challenges of going to a conference is picking which sessions to attend. Usually, there are time slots during the day when there is nothing jumping and other times where you wish you could be in three places at once.

I recently missed hearing Dr. Jose Briones speak and after seeing his presentation, realized I missed out on a good one. Jose’s presentation, My Boss Told Me To Get The Voice of the Customer, Now What?, covered the challenges of gathering customer feedback and introduces a new approach to improve your results.

I was able to catch-up with Jose after the conference and do a quick video interview (apologies, the camera briefly loses focus in the middle of the video):

What really grabbed my attention about Jose’s presentation was that fact that he called out the different approaches one needs to take with a VOC depending on where the product is in the development life-cycle. The gist being that if it is new innovation you need to take a different approach than an update to an existing product.

Really appreciate Jose talking the time to share his thoughts on the topic and look forward to hearing more. The entire presentation is available below and you can find more about Jose online and on Twitter.

 

Image Credit:  Flickr


Filed Under: feature, interview, Product Management, Product Marketing Videos Tagged With: , , , ,

What Is Marketing? (How To Turn A Birthday Party Into A Birthday Experience)

January 14, 2011 By

I came across this video earlier in the week and just couldn’t resist sharing.

While meant to be taken lightly, the video does an outstanding job of illustrating marketing strategy. All it really takes is three little steps,

  1. Determine your end goal
  2. Use the best tools for the job
  3. Don’t forget the mini-pony

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Filed Under: Product Marketing, random Tagged With: , , ,

What You Should Really Ask Your Customers?

January 6, 2011 By

Paul Gray from Brainmates recently wrote a blog post on Five Questions Product Managers Should Ask Their Customers. In his blog, Paul lists them as:

  1. What are the reasons that first led you to buy our product?
  2. What problems does our product solve for you?
  3. What do you like most about our product?
  4. What do you like least about our product?
  5. If you could change one thing about our product what would that be?

While these questions make sense, I’d like to offer a slightly different approach that might be more beneficial and rewarding:

  • Don’t start with your product. Most organizations don’t buy a product. They invest in your company. Rather than asking them the reasons that led them to buy your product, ask them ‘why did you choose us’. You might realize that they care less for the next version of your product and more about how you can help them gain internal adoption.
  • Forget the features. Most customers don’t know what features they want. They do however have a good idea for what they want to use your product for. Rather than focusing on their problems, ask them what use cases they are solving or wish they could solve. I guarantee that while you go through this outcome driven approach, they will not only tell you what they like, don’t like or wish to see in your product but you might realize that they want to use your product for a completely new scenario (and potentially great revenue opportunity for your company)
  • Ask them if they would invest in you again. Yes, invest in your company again. You might be surprised by the answer. In fact, while there is little chance that they might say ‘no’ (they probably would not have accepted to talk to you in the first place), there is a strong likelihood that they will say ‘yes’ followed by ‘but’ and a few good pointers that you can greatly learn from. For example, yes but if we were to do it again, we would invest less in the software to start with and a little more in the supporting services, or yes although I would also consider this other vendor that has recently entered the market etc. Ultimately, lots of great insights that you would not have gotten otherwise.

One last point: as you engage with your customers, make sure to not only talk to the direct users but all the stakeholders who are indirectly impacted by the value your product brings to the organization, starting with the senior management team.

They are usually the ones holding the purse.

Image Credit:  Flickr

Filed Under: feature, Product Management Tagged With: , , ,

Voice of the Customer

December 28, 2009 By

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.

Filed Under: Worth the Read Tagged With: