Category: marketing
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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…
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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.”…
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Cross selling to existing customers
This morning, I had to get an oil change and I drove up to the local Jiffy Lube. They charge $35 for an oil change. When I pulled in, they pulled up my car record and based on the mileage, they told me about the Honda recommended maintenance I have to…
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How “Human” is your business?
One of the wrong arguments you hear from businesses is “… but we are a B2B company and not a consumer company – so it cannot work for us”. But they forget that customer interactions in a B2B company are still between people. You are dealing with a purchasing manager,…
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Five reasons why analyst reports will become extinct
Research analyst groups such as Forrester, Gartner, Yankee Group, Aberdeen and others that publish the various industry reports and sell them to customers and vendors should be really worried about this part of their business. Here are the five reasons why? 1) Analysts sell expensive, static and hence quickly outdated content –…
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Radio station needs your fund raising ideas
Product managers and others, here is an opportunity to get creative. A well known radio station here in Boston is looking for your help in coming up with some creative ideas on how they can do fund raising. Currently, they do this via their broadcast, but unfortunately this results in…
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Why did Facebook and Google forget their users?
Recently Facebook did a major UI upgrade that caused an uproar in the user community. People screamed because the new Facebook UI was just awful and made the user experience terrible. Google last week brought out the new iGoogle UI and it is awful. To make matters worse, they did…
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Demo candy may not be sweet after all
Hey, it is Halloween time, so let us talk about some candies. Heard the term “demo candy”? – almost all of you probably have. Features that are thrown into a product because it appeals to the emotions of the buyer but basically a feature of less practical value. But there…
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WBUR/NPR is not “On point”
I listen to WBUR/NPR every day on my 50 min drive to/from work. I listen to the BBC World news (and it really is world news) at 9am and to OnPoint with Ashbrook at 7pm. At last, I had found one radio station that I looked forward to listening to…
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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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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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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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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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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…
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Software product manager’s elevator pitch?
When I interview software product manager candidates, the first question I ask them is to give me their elevator pitch in one minute. Many candidates resemble a deer caught in the headlights and I am very surprised. If you cannot explain who you are, what you can do for the…
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Software Product Manager’s toolchest
I have been thinking lately of all the software tools and resources I use everyday to get my job done and to get better as a software product manager – here is my list in no priority order. 1) MS Office 2) Outlook 3) Google 4) GotoMeeting, Webex – to…
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Is Saas the real solution to address software piracy?
Software vendors have been struggling to find a solution to thwart software piracy with very limited success. Anywhere from 70-90% of software used in Asian countries like India, China, Vietnam and in the former Soviet republics is estimated to be pirated. There was nothing you could do when pirates made…
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9 elements of a good functional spec
A while back, I had written why a functional spec is needed in addition to a PRD. So what does a good functional spec need to contain? Here is what I consider elements of a good functional spec. I tend to use smaller paragraphs or bullets to make it readable.…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 