Activity is not equal to progress

April 30, 2009 1 Comment

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 measure progess and then align your activities towards those goals and then measure progress. Otherwise, in this crazy digital world we live in, all we could end up is a long list of meetings we attended and the zillion emails we received and replied to. I have had such weeks where on Friday I have wondered what actually got accomplished. Every month keep a list of items that has added value to your product, company or yourself. After each year, do you have anything that you consider worth adding to your resume? After all, we all have a career to manage.

Filed under product management

Homogeneous or Heterogeneous – What is better?

April 29, 2009 Leave a comment

Which is better? It depends.colors

  1. Southwest Airlines flies only Boeing 737′s to reduce maintenance costs.
  2. EMC wants their customers to buy all of the data servers from them.
  3. Microsoft wants everyone to use IE.
  4. Michelin wants to be the single supplier for all tires for Toyota.
  5. Pratt&Whitney wants Airbus to use nothing but their engines for their jets.

But then…

  1. Boeing cannot survive just making Boeing 737′s.
  2. IT departments don’t want to put all eggs in one basket.
  3. World does not trust Microsoft.
  4. Toyota does not want to single source to Michelin.
  5. Airbus does not want its entire fleet  grounded if P&W engines have a problem.

Isn’t this world so beautiful for the heterogeneity it possesses. So why in business would we ever think we can achieve monopoly? Why do some businesses lull themselves to believe they do not have competition? The question is how much of the pie one can have, you WILL not have the whole pie. Success breeds competition. Otherwise, it may not be a large market after all.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Image: Courtesy of DragonArtz Designs

Filed under customer needs

Do your customers know that “you” exist?

April 14, 2009 2 Comments

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.”

Customer: “Product Manager? Who is that?”

This is not uncommon. Not many people know what product managers do in companies. Some mistake them to be salespeople or customer support. Yes, we are a not well known breed like salesmen, software engineers, finance, customer support etc. We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our customers on who we are and then build the rapport with them.

Once customers find out that product managers have a large influence on the future direction of products they use, you become their greatest ally. But it is up to us to communicate it to them, build rapport with them, listen to them (yes listen, not talk to them) and build solutions that will make their lives easier.

Filed under marketing, product management

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 176 other followers