Category: product management
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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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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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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.…
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Small decisions can impact product success …..
Last weekend, I volunteered to spend an hour at our local grocery store handing out flyers to shoppers on an upcoming Town hall vote on Grafton school feasibility study. We had a simple decision to make – do we hand out the flyer when shoppers are coming into the store…
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Five guidelines to prioritize feature requests
As a product manager, you are very likely to have more feature requests than what you can put out in a given release. In my case, a good product manager’s job at release planning is figuring out what to eliminate from consideration – you have to make hard decisions –…
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Small nuggets … Big payback
Recent news article about the airlines report how they are looking at flying slower to save fuel costs. Consider these numbers from the above article ….. $42 million – Southwest Airlines will save in fuel this year by extending each flight ONE to THREE minutes. $13.6 million – Jet Blue…
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Corporations ask for Mac, Apple says not interested …
The latest Business Week cover story reads Mac in the gray flannel suit and talks about how more and more corporations are now allowing their employees to use Macs in the office. Apple on the other hand has shown no interest in catering to this market. The above article is…
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You want to talk to customers – ask me, I was a customer once …
Have you heard this one before – I have – internal pundits claiming they know what the market wants because at one point in time (read “eons” ago, before your market segment even existed), they used to be in the customer’s shoes. “Hey, I used to do product design” or…
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Where do your customers get information?
When interviewing customers to determine their needs, take the time to also ask them where they get information that keep them up-to-date in their profession. 1) Are there organizations that they regard in high regard that a recommendation from such organizations is considered valued? 2) What magazines do they read…
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First experience on a US long distance train
I have been living in the US for the last 18 years and I have never traveled on a train over a long distance. This week, I had to travel to New York and decided to take the Acela Express. What a remarkable experience – I don’t think I will…
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Product Integration – Usability killer?
I used to own (until it was stolen:-( ) a Magellan Roadmate 700 series portable GPS system. The system was so simple to use – it did one thing – GPS and it did it very well. The controls were very easy to use and programming it for a trip…
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Working with recruiters – set the ground RULE !!
Once I finished my previous two posts on job hunting tips, I was asked by a friend who is now looking for a job on how to work effectively with recruiters during a job hunt. I have recently spoke to some HR Directors/Managers where this issue has come up as…
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Job hunting cheat sheet
In my previous post, I referred to a 1-2 page cheat sheet that I used to create for each company (say Company X) to which I had applied. Here are the key things that I used to have in the cheat sheet. 1) Market space – what industry is Company…
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Ten job hunting tips for a product manager
I had mentioned in my last post that I would post tips from my experience looking for a job as a product manager – in fact I had to do this twice in the last 7 months. So here is what worked for me … Remember one thing – job…
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Email and 7%
I happened to come across the notes taken during the Effective Networking seminar (run by Diane Darling) that I attended a year back. One of the things that was mentioned was that communication power is based on: 55% body language 38% voice/tone 7% words This means, whenever you send an…
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Love the customers who hate you
I have been a big proponent of online communities and social media – I have written at least two blog posts on this. So when the latest Business Week arrived with the main section titled “Consumer vigilantes” I could not put it down. The most interesting article among many dealing…
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Passion vs. decibels – How to manage vociferous customers
In my product management career, I have always had some users who were more vociferous than most of the others. Their decibel level when they asked for new enhancements or yelled at you for the bugs in the software was orders of magnitude higher than majority of the users. The…
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Help your customers buy …
I bought a new car last week. I was very clear what I needed – a Toyota Camry Hybrid and knew the exact options I needed. I did all my research on the web in reading user generated reviews, dealer invoice prices and so on. After spending about 3 hours…
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Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits
Customer visits have always been one of my pet subjects because the only way I have learned to deliver good products is by getting out of the building and talking to real people who buy or will buy my products. At SolidWorks, customer visits was ingrained into our working culture…
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Free products like gmail – do users have a say?
For the last week, gmail has just stopped working for me. Boy, it has not been fun, being locked out of your personal emails. I also use google docs and the story is no different here – I am locked out of my documents as well. I have tried everything…
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Are you agile?
I have heard this question being asked a lot of times – do you use agile development methodology? How about scrum, how about spikes? I heard this asked yesterday. To tell you the truth, I have some idea what agile is but to me it sounds very much like the…
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Customer Service Experience
How often have you called customer service at credit card companies, airlines, medical benefits and you have been asked to enter information such as your credit card number, your zip code, your social security number, your frequent flyer number etc. and then finally when you get to a live person,…
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How best to ask for resources?
Imagine that you have to make a business case to your upper management for a product/project you want to get funded. There are two ways a product manager can ask for this: 1) I need $$$$$ and XXXXX number of people to do this project? 2) I have this idea…
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State of You?
As a product manager, you are quite busy doing product roadmaps, gathering requirements, working with cross functional teams, getting the messaging right,writing positioning statements etc. You are busy trying to do all the work with less time and resources available at your disposal. In the midst of this chaotic professional…
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3 types of words in positioning statements
Other day, I was talking to Jon Hirschtick (founder of SolidWorks and my previous employer) and we were talking about positioning statements. Jon had an interesting way to put it – he said words in any messaging consists of three types of words: Blather words: In other words, marketing buzzwords…
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It is not what you say but how you say it !!
Have you seen the latest HP’s TV ad that features Burton snowboards? In the ad, the narrator says ” … it still did not catch on, people just did’nt get it. Maybe it was not what we were saying, but how we were saying”. This is true with many products.…
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Pain points vs. Requirements
I was involved in a conversation last week where we were trying to unearth customer pain points. One of the software product managers explained that main pain points were integration and scalability. This is what set me thinking about the difference between pain points and requirements. The two are not…
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Balancing Strategy vs. Execution
Product Managers are responsible for managing the business of their products. This requires one to have a product strategy to ensure that the product continues to remain relevant to the marketplace in midst of new market trends and changing customer needs and also continues to provide a good size market…
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Need more than a PRD? Functional specs to the rescue
Product Managers are all familiar with writing MRDs (Market Requirements documents) and PRDs (Product requirements documents). Are these enough to communicate to engineering all the customer requirements that would result in engineering building a product that is usable by customers to solve their problems? Unfortunately in my experience, a PRD…
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How useful are the error messages?
Have you got error messages when using applications that have made you wonder whether a real person wrote these messages? It has happened to me numerous times. The best error message I have ever seen is when Pro/PDM, a CAD data management product from PTC once crashed with the error…
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Apple is all about sales – customer service sucks
Yesterday, my Mighty Mouse, only 10 months old and the one I purchased with my iMac, stopped working – all I could do was scroll down and not scroll up. I decided to take it to the nearest Apple store in Natick – about 25 miles away. I also had…
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Consumer in charge? – Great Video
Here is a great video that I came across produced by Geert Desager of Microsoft – watch for yourself, it is fun !!
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 