Category: product management
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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,…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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,…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Yes, it is a piece of cake, but ….
It is quite common for people to say that doing something is a piece of cake. It is very easy to say this especially if you are not the one doing it. I have personally heard this many times from my upper management – “oh, that should be so simple…
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5 lessons for software product managers from the Obama campaign
Here are five lessons that I as a software product manager took away from the presidential election campaign run by Barack Obama. Your party affiliations may vary, but I hope you will agree with these five takeaways. 1) It is the “economy” stupid – There may be a 100 things…
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Managing products in an economic downturn – Part 2
Here are couple more ways how you could manage products in an economic downturn. This assumes that you have enough cash in the bank to stay in business in the midst of slow sales. 1) Can your product help customers do things in a new way: Can your product help…
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Managing products in an economic downturn – Part 1
Currently, we are in a global recession (Yes I am tired of hearing it is coming, for all practical purposes we are in one). Pundits predict this to last a while since we are breaking new grounds with the global financial crisis, two wars, new President and the interlinking of…
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Product Review – Webnotes
I came across a cool little product called Webnotes couple of weeks back. It initially caught my attention when I saw it at the Web Innovator’s group meeting a few months back. Webnotes is a startup based in Cambridge, MA. Basically, it allows you to annotate any web page using…
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5 tips to building a successful user community
If you as a product manager would like to build a user community that will self sustain, here are some tips based on my experience building the foundations of a user community on 3D ContentCentral website that currently has close to 450,000 registered members. 1) What is in it for…
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It is all about the “right” metric
Remember the old adage – You cannot manage what you cannot measure. As product managers, we have to measure revenues, number of licenses, performance of our products and a slew of other things. It is not that we don’t measure, but unfortunately, we measure using the wrong metric. Let us…
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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…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 