Month: November 2007
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3 types of words in positioning statements
Other day, I was talking to Jon Hirschtick (founder of SolidWorks and my previous employer) and we were talking about positioning statements. Jon had an interesting way to put it – he said words in any messaging consists of three types of words: Blather words: In other words, marketing buzzwords…
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It is not what you say but how you say it !!
Have you seen the latest HP’s TV ad that features Burton snowboards? In the ad, the narrator says ” … it still did not catch on, people just did’nt get it. Maybe it was not what we were saying, but how we were saying”. This is true with many products.…
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Pain points vs. Requirements
I was involved in a conversation last week where we were trying to unearth customer pain points. One of the software product managers explained that main pain points were integration and scalability. This is what set me thinking about the difference between pain points and requirements. The two are not…
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Balancing Strategy vs. Execution
Product Managers are responsible for managing the business of their products. This requires one to have a product strategy to ensure that the product continues to remain relevant to the marketplace in midst of new market trends and changing customer needs and also continues to provide a good size market…
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Need more than a PRD? Functional specs to the rescue
Product Managers are all familiar with writing MRDs (Market Requirements documents) and PRDs (Product requirements documents). Are these enough to communicate to engineering all the customer requirements that would result in engineering building a product that is usable by customers to solve their problems? Unfortunately in my experience, a PRD…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 