Category: business
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Airtel’s Opportunistic innovation
In the past I have written about incremental product innovations that wow you! On my visit to India, I came across such an innovation via the local telecom provider Bharti Airtel. Since the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2004, getting a SIM card for your mobile phone in India requires paperwork…
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What is your personal portfolio? Think like a graphics designer ….
I get asked all the time on how folks can transition into a product management career from say engineering, QA, sales etc. Here is my short answer – think like a graphics designer. If you have interviewed graphics designers, they always come in with a portfolio that shows the work…
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Product Management vs. Project Management vs. Product Marketing
One of the common confusions that exist in the software industry are the roles of product management vs. project management vs. product marketing. There are different definitions depending on the vertical, company etc. Here is a set of slides that I have put together on the three roles. Would love…
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3 sources for competitive analysis
As software product managers, understanding your competition needs to be a very important ingredient of our work DNA. We must gather as much information as possible on our competition so that we know what they are upto both strategically and tactically. It will also help us understand what moves we…
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3 C’s – Market Capital, Customer Experience, Your Career
Here are the slides from my recent product management seminars at Bangalore and Hyderabad, India. The three takeaways (what I called three “C”s) were the following: Market Capital: If you as a software product manager want to build credibility within your organization, gain as much market capital or customer capital…
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Christmas Gifts for Software Product Managers for less than $100
It is that part of the year where everyone is thinking of gifts. If you are a software product manager and you are looking to improve your software product management skills by spending $100 on yourselves, here are three books I recommend for you (I have no association with any…
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Customer’s Wants vs. Needs
A customer’s wants vs. needs – This subject has been part of numerous conversations I have had in my working life. Every time I go to India on vacation to visit my family, I always think about this topic. I come back from these trips thankful of what I have…
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Need a head and a date
As product managers, we have to work with a lot of departments – engineering, qa, order admin, finance, shipping etc as part of creating the product and then putting that product into the market. Doing all of this, involves choreographing and managing a lot of activities, so that the final…
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Benefits of early usability testing
You do not need an Alpha/Beta software product to do usability testing. In fact, if you wait until then to do usability testing, you have waited too long. This late, making changes based on usability feedback will be costly and time consuming and apt to break something else. The resistance…
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Google Chrome vs. Cuil – Product Management Case Studies?
By now, many of you are well aware of two new products that came out this summer (and if you have not, you were probably enjoying the summer a lot more than I was) – a new browser from Google called Google Chrome and a new search engine from a…
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Saas model will collapse in two years – What?
In a mind numbing interview with ZDnet, Lawson Software CEO Harry Debes made the prediction that Saas software model is bound to collapse in two years. Even if I try to put aside his opinion (however dumbfounded it is), what I cannot comprehend is how a CEO of a public…
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Product Manager’s new friend – Google Forms
I just discovered the forms functionality in Google docs. What an awesome piece of functionality that will help me a ton as a product manager. In a nutshell, it helps you create a form on the fly (think about creating a simple survey) and email it to a bunch of…
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Differentiating in an overcrowded market
Ever wondered if any product management is needed for commodity products such as pencils, pens, toothpaste etc. where the customer needs have not changed for years? Alain Breillat of Picture Imperfect has a great post on how to create product differentiation in an overcrowded market?. It is a fascinating read…
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LinkedIn Answers – A goldmine for Product Managers
If you have not been to LinkedIn Answers, you should check it out – it has a great section on product management. There is a wealth of information there on market research, pricing, product positioning and a ton of other stuff. Have a question? post it there for free and…
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Competition validates your existence
Have you heard – this is a huge untapped market, we are the market leaders and we have no competition? Such a market does not exist and the above statement is nothing but a myth. If you have no competition, you are probably in a market that does not exist.…
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Why do salesmen lie?
Shown below is an email I got yesterday (unsolicited I should say) from a company called SalesDiesel (this is a real company, they have a website and indeed do what they claim in this email). So why do I have an issue with this? 1) The email is addressed to…
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Does a vendor being #1 matter to buyers?
10 years back in Chicago, a colleague of mine was shopping for a Honda car. He went to one of the Honda dealerships. The salesman started giving him the standard pitch about the car and then told him that he should buy from him because they are the biggest dealer…
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Companies should not be “customer” focused
Yes, companies should not be “customer” focused first, I strongly challenge them to be “employee” focused instead and then the customer focus will come. I have been a great proponent of being customer driven, listening to customer’s unmet needs and then creating products that serve those needs. But when it…
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How a great asset becomes your greatest liability
Thank you Manny Ramirez for the last 7 years – but Red Sox nation will be just fine without you. When you become more than the team, it is time for you to move on. You were a great asset but there is a point a great asset becomes a…
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Do slides for webinars need to be different?
Recently, I attended a webinar. The slides were full of text and the presenter read word by word – you very well know what I said – Text on a Powerpoint slide is your greatest competition. When I gave feedback about this to the presenter via email, the response from…
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WebInno 18 from Web Innovator’s group
Couple of weeks back I attended the Web Innovator’s group event. The group has come a long way since last year – much larger room, more than 500 people (some very talkative ones who will not shut up in spite of pleas from the audience). Three main stage demos from…
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Five reasons why I blog and my eight blogging recommendations
I have been asked the question – “Why do I blog?” twice recently – once by a reader of this blog from as far away as New Zealand. Great question and one that I had to ask myself before I wrote this post. So here are my reasons (Listed in…
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Why customers walk away?
Kristin Zhivago has an awesome post on her blog titled Gone! The reason customers leave. I would strongly recommend that anyone who touches a customer (sales, tech support, product management, professional services, executives) read it. I had written last year about how customers are lot more tolerant of a vendor’s…
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Eight traits of good hiring managers
Good managers mostly hire good people and sometimes hire the wrong people whereas bad managers always hire the wrong people. This is the conclusion I have come to in my 15 year career. What do I define as a bad hiring manager? – one who does not have good managerial…
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Software Product Managers – “What is in it for the audience”?
My presentation at BPMA was well received last night. I asked the audience to walk away remembering three things from my presentation. Here they are: 1) You are the presentation: The audience has showed up to listen to you. You have the message and hence you are the presentation. If…
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Gas prices changing marketing?
The sky rocketing gas prices seems to have had an impact on marketing messages and offers. Here are some that I have come across recently 1) Across town – message on a restaurant’s billboard – “Come in and have a juicy burger for less than a gallon of gas” 2)…
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Product Manager’s key to success
I just happened to see this quote from Bill Cosby. “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody” How appropriate for product managers? All product managers should have this quote stuck next to their desks so that it is in your…
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Product Management lessons from the latest iPhone debacle
The media (social and real) is abuzz with how Apple botched the launch of the 3G iPhone last Friday. Yes, they could have done it a whole lot better but I don’t think it is going to make much of a dent on the how many of these phones Apple…
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Need your help – my BPMA presentation
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am giving a talk at the BPMA this coming Thursday on how to effectively do presentations using Powerpoint. If any of you are attending, could you please let me know what you would like me to talk about. If you are not…
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Next Web Innovator’s meeting – Tuesday July 15th
The next web innovator’s meeting is scheduled for this coming Monday July 15th. If you live in the Boston area or will be in Boston on Monday, you want to check this out. Where: Grand Ballroom, Cambridge Royal Sonesta, Cambridge, MA When: Tuesday July 15th, 6:30pm Attendance is free. Why…
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Permission Marketing gone astray – InfusionSoft
Couple of weeks back, I came across this company called InfusionSoft. I signed up to download something that looked interesting to me called “9 proven techniques to double sales”. To do this, I had to fill out the following form. When you do this, they send you a link via…
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I am presenting at BPMA – July 17th, 7pm
I am going to be presenting at the BPMA’s (Boston Product Management Association) event on July 17th. The topic is titled “What’s in it for the audience?” and will discuss how to do presentations effectively. I have sat through many awful powerpoint heavy presentations, have taken presentation training myself and…
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Finally a US citizen
I have come a long way since I landed in this country with two suitcases on August 17, 1990. I had no idea where I was going except that I was going to do my Master’s program at Colorado State University. Did not even know where Colorado was. On July…
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Product Review – Recopack – Go green when moving
The green movement is going mainstream – corporations are throwing their weight behind it – from Google leading the effort in installing solar panels, GE designing more energy efficient locomotives or light bulbs to every company encouraging consumers to get electronic bills/statements instead of the old fashioned paper ones in…
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Software Product Managers – What are you selling? Product, category or need?
Everything that one tries to sell, in my opinion, starts or ends in one of three buckets. A need sell A category sell A product sell Let me explain in more detail on what I mean. 1) A need sell is the worst place for a product long term. If…
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Charity by a crowd – Monster.com
At the SHRM Conference in Chicago that I recently attended, Monster.com had a huge booth in the expo hall. But they did something that I thought was outstanding. Apparently, Monster used to have a grand party for the conference attendees every year. This year, they decided not to do the…
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Respect the competition and beat them ….
I just got back to Boston after spending three days at SHRM (the largest human resource show) in Chicago. It was a great show and just the second HR show I have attended. There were upwards of 14,000 attendees not including the exhibitors and volunteers. The expo hall was very…
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Zoho – what are you really?
Zoho has been getting a lot of attention lately – from the first reports of its CEO Sridhar Vembu turning down a buyout offer from Salesforce.com to being briefly mentioned in Business week magazine article on Inside Microsoft’s war against Google. In a recent interview with Fox Business, its CEO…
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Social media and impact on marketing?
Talk about social media is everywhere – it is being used by everyone and some don’t even understand what it means. Francois Gossieaux has a very interesting blog post titled “We don’t do marketing with social media – social media is what caused marketing game to change” – a very…
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Vista nightmare over the weekend
OK, this post is more about my first and nightmarish experience with Vista than a product management tip. Over the weekend, my aunt visiting from New York asked me if I could figure out what was wrong with her PC. She said her problem was that she just could not…
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How would your future users behave?
Product Managers pay (or should pay) a lot of attention to finding out more about why people are NOT buying their product more than why people are buying their product. This can be framed based on the current population of users. But we are at a tipping point in history…
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Goto Meeting – Free or not free? – Misleading free trial
The other day I was kinda ticked off that I had to reschedule two customer presentations because Webex just would not work for whatever reason. Webex customer support had all sorts of technical reasons as to why it does not work and what the customer should do (yah, great, it…
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Build products that customers will buy ….
We as product manager are well tuned with doing a market read, determining the unmet needs of the market and then getting someone to build products that will satisfy the need. But there is an important trap that product managers should avoid. History is full of examples of products that…
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Has definition of leadership changed?
Has definition of leadership changed over the years – over the century? Countless books have been written on the concept of leadership – Amazon returns 263,761 results when you search for leadership – The 21 indispensable qualities of a leader, 21 irrefutable laws of leadership, leadership and the one minute…
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Surveymonkey messaging …..
I was checking out Surveymonkey to see if they have made any improvements since I last used it. Among the three survey tools (Zoomerang, Surveymonkey and Key Survey) I have used so far, Surveymonkey is the best hands down. So what impressed me about Surveymonkey this time? Check out their…
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Customer motivation to buy your product?
There is a great article on Business Week titled Johnson & Johnson’s Big Design Challenge which talks about how their design director Chris Hacker is promoting sustainable design. I thought the key sentence was when he says “The key to growing sales is not to load up the packaging with…
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Product Review – Service Magic rocks
Last week, I had to get a tree cut in the yard and then my garage door broke down with the door bent and the rollers popped out. Not knowing who to call, I checked out ServiceMagic. What an awesome experience that turned out to. Within minutes, they send me…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 