Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy

Year: 2009

  • SEO Basics for Software Product Managers

    I am sure you have heard about Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to by its abbreviation of SEO. If not, which planet have you been living on? Welcome back to Earth! SEO efforts in companies are often handled by someone who knows more or is very interested in SEO (smaller…

  • What is good enough? “Lame Duck” vs. Phased Releases

    As a software product manager, you are more than likely called to make the decision whether a product/service is ready for prime time.  Often it is a challenge because there is a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders to release it. There is a fine line between what I call…

  • 3 ways software product managers can work effectively with development teams

    As a software product manager, I spend a lot of time working with my development team in making sure that they are well aware of the customer pain points and the requirements of the solution we are trying to build. I have heard from time to time from my colleagues…

  • 6 “bootstrapping” tools for software product manager

    You are a software product manager trying to start a software company on your own. Or you work for a startup or a small software company and don’t have much money to spend. But you still need to design a good user experience, do early usability testing with your prospects,…

  • Customer Visit: 2 creative ways to get a budget

    Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is a travel ban in companies, so as a product manager, how do you get a travel budget so that you can get out of your office for on-site customer visits? It is hard, but here are two creative ways you can…

  • What is product simplicity?

    The KISS principle – Keep it simple stupid – something all of us as software product managers have heard one time or another. But when it comes to products, what exactly is product simplicity? Product usability and simplicity typically falls into three different categories, in my perspective. This perspective is…

  • Death by a thousand paper cuts ….

    In my last post, I discussed the benefits of doing an on-site customer visit where you get to observe customers/prospects use your product or competitive products to get their job done. In my experience doing these visits, I often discover what I call “death by a thousand paper cuts” issues.…

  • Five reasons why customer visits “rock”

    I am a big fan of customer visits – ones where a software product manager visits customers on-site and observes them using your or competitor’s product. Now why do this? What are the benefits of doing this over talking to the same customer/prospect over the phone, while at a conference/trade…

  • How does a software product manager find usability testing participants?

    In the last post, I talked about best practices for doing usability testing. But how does a software product manager go about finding participants for usability testing. Here are some tips: 1) Define your target user who will benefit from the product/feature you have developed. If it is an IT…

  • 10 Best practices for doing Software Usability testing

    I have been doing software usability testing for the past 10 years or so and here are 10 rules I go by every time I do a usability test. I have taken the liberty of calling it “best practices” only because these work for me really well. Take that as…

  • Lots of data, no actionable information

    I am big about making “data driven” decisions. I have written in the past as to how wiring your product can help you make data driven decisions. You cannot make the right decisions unless you know what is happening in the market, in your product. Data can be collected in…

  • Software Product Manager’s tip on Optimism vs. Reality

    As a software product manager, we have to be cheer leaders for our team. We have to make sure our sales team, marketers, developers, the QA team are all staying pumped up about the products that we have asked them to sell/market/develop/test. But optimism that is not well grounded in…

  • How many customers does a software product manager need to visit/interview?

    As software product managers, we are chartered to unearth painpoints by interviewing customers/prospects. But how many do we have to talk to before we feel comfortable that we have talked to enough? How many is too many? I have always used the following guidelines which I picked up from the…

  • User communities – The 100-10-1 rule

    Very often, when building user community sites or sites that will predominantly be driven by user generated content, the question that always gets asked is how many users do we need to attract to ensure that there is a steady stream of new content that is generated on the site.…

  • Agile Product Owner – New Name, Same Old Problem

    This is a guest blog post by John Mansour, Founder and Managing Partner of ZIGZAG Marketing In the world of agile software development, the confusion over product owner versus product manager is hardly new. This problem has existed as long as software and product managers have been around. It merely…

  • 5 symptoms that software product managers are worrying more about competition and not customers

    In the video presentation soon after Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said “Obsess more about your customers than your competition.”  I could not agree more with him. Here are 5 symptoms that you, as a software product manager, are worrying more about your competition and not…

  • 7 things about product pricing

    Here are 7 things I have learnt about product pricing. #1 If price is your ONLY product differentiator, you are selling a commodity. And if your competitor is much larger than you, you may not have a prayer – they can run you out of town by giving the product…

  • Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life

    Couple of weeks back, I was invited to write a guest blog post on On Product Management. My post was titled Awareness, Persuasion and Shelf Life. I hope you enjoy reading it. If you do, please leave comments either on the post there or here.

  • Prevent your development team from turning into “blind men”

    Involve them in exactly ONE customer interaction whether it is a customer visit or a customer phone call! Not more, not less, exactly ONE and you as a software product manager would have done them the greatest disservice. There is no better way for you to taint your team’s perspective…

  • Business Lesson from Wimbledon Finals 2009?

    What an amazing Wimbledon Men’s final it turned out to be between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. An epic battle of 4+ hours, 77 aces, 77 games, the fifth set alone lasting 90 minutes. Roddick brought his A+ game to try to beat his arch nemesis Federer who had beaten…

  • Keep it human

    Susan Oakes of M4BMarketingBlog asked me if I would be willing to write a short tip for her upcoming post on “How to Keep your Customers Loyal”. The post outlining some great tips should be coming out anytime now. Here is what I submitted. Keep it Human In the times…

  • Contact Us but facilitate it ….

    All companies on their website have an About Us or Contact Us section. However, not all companies provide their phone contact information on their website and instead ask you to fill out a web form or email them if you want to contact them. This unfortunately sends wrong messages. The…

  • Product Camp – New York

    Are you a product manager who lives around New York City or will be in NYC during the weekend of July 18? Do you want to learn about product management from other product managers who are walking in your shoes everyday? Look no further, ProductCamp is coming to town on…

  • Adding customer value by subtraction

    As product managers, we are trained to look for ways to add value to customers such that they are willing to buy our products. Now, what does adding value actually mean? Adding value, does not necessarily mean that customers have to necessarily see an uptick in their revenues after they…

  • Leverage the baby steps …..

    You bike the 180 mile PMC challenge from Sturbridge, MA to Provincetown, one pedal at a time … You walk the 20 mile Walk for hunger one step at a time … You run the Boston Marathon one mile at a time … You process the 100 emails in your…

  • Dogs, Cows and Kids …

    In every company, product managers have more things to do than you have time for. So how do you decide which products to fund? which projects to work on? and more importantly what NOT to work on? After all, if you have more things to do than you have time…

  • 4 tips for collaboration – What? When? How? Who? and in that order

    As  product managers, our work lives revolve around working with cross functional groups. Leading by influence and not much authority, our jobs are to motivate people to get things done for the benefit of the paying customer. Sounds easy right? But when different groups have their own goals and priorities,…

  • Always question data – at least twice

    Question all data you collect or are presented with. First of all, make sure you are collecting the right data. If you don’t measure what matters, the data is garbage.  I have written before on using the right metric. Once you are sure that you have collected the right data,…

  • Activity is not equal to progress

    Lot of activity does not necessarily equate to progress. It sounds cliche but it is true. Just because one is busy does not mean one is making progress. Having focused goals and then making sure majority of the activities relates to those goals is paramount. Identify goals, create metrics to…

  • Homogeneous or Heterogeneous – What is better?

    Which is better? It depends. Southwest Airlines flies only Boeing 737’s to reduce maintenance costs. EMC wants their customers to buy all of the data servers from them. Microsoft wants everyone to use IE. Michelin wants to be the single supplier for all tires for Toyota. Pratt&Whitney wants Airbus to…

  • Do your customers know that “you” exist?

    In one of my previous posts, I had talked about educating customers on all the different product enhancements you have made to solve their problems. But there is another problem that needs customer education. The phone conversation goes: Product Manager: “Mr. Customer, I am the product Manager from company X.”…

  • Two questions software product managers must always ask

    1) “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” Ask the internal stakeholders who are pitching new ideas to you, ask this of customers who are asking for new features and repeatedly ask yourself to make sure you are not deviating from it as you are getting caught up…

  • Do your customers know?

    How often have your customers asked you for functionality that you already have in your product – functionality you have had in the product for a year or two? I have had this happen often enough in my career. There are two causes for this 1) You forgot to tell…

  • Messenger of problems?

    It is very easy to identify problems. What is difficult is figuring out how to solve them? Ones who do the latter are valued and get ahead. Sounds like cliche? Absolutely. But it still surprises me when I run into “messengers” of problems. Many want to bring a slew of…

  • Futility of “feature wars”

    If you as a software product manager is arming your sales force with detailed information on all of the features in your product(s), you are arming them with information to fail. If your sales team is engaging in a “feature war” with your competitors, you are bound to lose to…

  • How organizations can get caught napping …

    If you the product manager is thinking: 1) We are the market leaders and the well known brand and we set the tone in this market or 2) I fully understand the market segment that will be interested in buying this product or 3) We have the marketing muscle to…

  • Understand why your customers buy

    I had written a previous post on making it easy for customers to buy your product. If your pricing structure is complex, a customer who was about to hand over the money to you is going to walk away. I call this the “last mile problem” in selling a product.…

  • Businesses are not ready for social media, unless ….

    By now, you all have heard enough about social media this, social media that – folks in your office saying we need to create a business account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the other zillion social media sites out there. But are businesses ready for this. My answer is No.…

  • Understand the reason for the madness, before you imitate it

    Have you had the instance where someone in your product development team says during a product discussion – make it like the Google home page, or make it work like Amazon does it, or see how well IBM’s website does it. If they are doing it, they should be right.…

  • Become a software product manager only if …..

    Here is a question I received the other day – “I am a business analyst now in product management team and my boss identified me as a candidate for Product management. I am excited about the opportunity, but don’t want to accept something just t0 fail. Can you please answer…

  • How much customer “capital” have you earned?

    As a software product manager, there is nothing more valuable than having concrete information about the market – customers, competitors, partners – all folks that influence the “external” world outside your office building. No one inside your office is buying your product, but then why do we make a lot…

  • How wired is your product?

    You have a great product, you have a large customer base. Awesome! But how tuned in are you to how your user base is using your product? How wired is your product? Web products can get you good deal of information such as page views, number of unique visitors, how…

  • 5 Suggestions product managers can adopt during the New Year

    Here are 5 suggestions that I recommend product managers adopt during the New Year. 1) Be “market” and not “marketing” driven – Talk to as many customers as possible in understanding their business, why they use your company’s products, what they like about it and what they don’t like about…