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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…
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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…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 