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 message could be construed as any [...]
Filed under: business | 4 Comments »
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 July 18th. I will be [...]
Filed under: business | 1 Comment »
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 buy your product. For example, your [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »
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 inbox one at a time … (unless you [...]
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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, a product manager’s job often [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing, product management, team communication | 1 Comment »
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, never trust your first analysis of the [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: business, marketing, product management | 1 Comment »
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 use nothing but their engines for their jets.
But then…
Boeing cannot [...]
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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 in the weeds.
2) Is this going [...]
Filed under: business | 10 Comments »
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 the customer
2) Your product is too [...]
Filed under: business, customer needs, marketing, product management | 3 Comments »
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 problems to their bosses – [...]
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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 the competitor who is smart [...]
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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 push new products out or
4) We have the [...]
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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. Pricing structures sometimes are very [...]
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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.
It is easy to fall into [...]
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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 the below for me?
1. Challenges [...]
Filed under: business, customer needs, marketing, product management | 3 Comments »
As a 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 of product decisions depending on “I [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 4 Comments »
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 they move through the funnel, [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, marketing, product management, product usability | Leave a Comment »
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 it. Plan to talk to at [...]
Filed under: business, leadership, marketing, product management | 6 Comments »
