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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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The beloved “Nano”
Last week, Indian automobile industry took a major step. Tata Motors, one of the companies in the revered Tata conglomerate unveiled “Nano” – the long talked about 1 lakh car (1 lakh = 100,000 and 1 lakh rupees = $2500 US). This was a dream come true for Ratan Tata…
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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 customer service complaints!!
My previous post was about the horrible customer experience at the Apple store. I find out that I am not alone – there are more and more stories on the internet how their customer service is bad. Here is a recent post on San Jose Mercury News – very much…
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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 !!
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Wonderful customer experience – Fallon Clinic
My previous post was about how product managers should think more about customer experiences. I had mentioned about how I have had the most memorable product experiences when I bought my iPod and my iMac. Here is another one that is service related that has truly been enjoyable. For the…
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Customer experience – how often do you think about it?
Not often !! Think back to all the products that you have bought in your life – for how many of them has the buying/first usage experience been so good that you have remembered it. In my case – exactly two – iPod and iMac. In fact, I was so…
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What can we learn from the New England Patriots?
Over the last week, I cannot tell you how embarassed I have been to say that I am a New England Patriots fan? I have loved the Patriots since I moved to Boston in 1996. Them going to the Super Bowl my very first year here in Boston helped of…
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Remove the unnecessary so that necessary can speak !!
This morning, while walking through Terminal 3 of the San Francisco airport to get to my gate, I happened to notice the design museum display near the moving walkways. The museum is titled “From Prototype to Product: Thirty-three Projects from the Bay Area Design Community“.Behind each display, were quotes of…
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Who is a customer?
I was visiting the Nilgiri’s coffee shop on Brigade Road, here in Bangalore when I came across the following quote of Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Indian Nation. I thought this was one of the best definitions of a customer that I have read: A customer is not an…
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Keep your customers informed !!
Many a times you may have to let your customers know about some bad news – implementation taking longer than expected, your inability to deliver on a committed feature on time, a bad bug in the just released software patch. In all these cases, be upfront with the customers on…
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Voice of the customer – Tip#7 – Tackling the language barrier
Unless your product is used only in the US, you as a product manager should make sure that you are listening to the “global” voice of the customer. Customers in other countries typically have vastly different needs than customers in the US. Localization of your product is something you should…
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Product Innovation – what is it really?
“Innovation”, “product innovation” are being used by everyone these days. A google search on “product innovation” returns 169 million results. A search for books on product innovation on Amazon returns over 10,800 books. Sure enough it is one of the most frequently used business buzzword these days. We all have…
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What to look for in a product manager?
I have been asked quite a few times over the past couple of years in what skills are needed to do well as a product manager. While there is no guaranteed recipe for success as a product manager (a very versatile, wear-multiple-hat role), I look for some specific generic skills…
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Top 11 things I learnt at SolidWorks in the last 11 years !!
After 11 fun years at SolidWorks, I am leaving to pursue a new career opportunity. I consider myself lucky to have worked at such an awesome company during a time when it grew from a startup to a force in the CAD industry. In 1996, it was the second job…
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Voice of the customer Tip #6 – Don’t listen to the same voice
You have decided to get out of your office and embark on the journey of discovering unmet needs of customers by talking to customers and listening to them express their unmet needs. One of the pitfalls to avoid is talking to the same customers – customers that you know very…
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7 ways to tame the email monster
I am sure everyone is inundated with emails these days. We also have become notorious in generating a lot of these emails at work. As product managers, we are constantly required to stay in constant touch with our team members in development, quality assurance, sales, documentation, product marketing, press, PR,…
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How true is this in your company?
I have found this picture to be very hilarious and after having talked to different people working in different companies, I am led to believe this is very true in a lot of companies. (I give the credit to the original creator of this picture whose name is unknown to…
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Software as a service
One of the hot topics these days is the concept of “Software as a service” (Saas). Earlier this decade, there was a lot of hype around ASP (Application Service Providers) and when the dot com bust happened, ASP was one of the victims. Though ASP and SaaS are not exactly…
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Bazaar Buzz – New title for the blog
Well I am not good at naming things and that becomes obvious given how many times I have renamed my blog. It started with “Temple of the customer” – agreed a mouthful, then went to a bland and generic “Voice of the customer”. I think I have finally settled for…
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Powerpoint turns 20
Well, the big news this week is how the software that is respected, loved, hated all at the same time depending on who you talk to, turned 20 years old. 20 years after Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin rolled out Powerpoint 1.0 for Macs in 1987, Powerpoint remains the most…
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Business Card Innovation
As I had mentioned in one of my previous posts on Incremental Innovations, you come across some simple product innovations that make you say Wow, why didn’t someone think about that before? This weekend, I attended the TieCon East Conference at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. There I met…
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Hear the “user vocabulary” – Voice of the Customer Tip #5
How many times have you read marketing brochures, datasheets etc. shook your head and really wondered what the product that is being described is meant to do? Marketing collateral is full of “flexible, scalable, reliable, robust, next generation, empowering, state of the art, ….” – you get the idea. I…
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Voice of the Customer Tip #4 – Practice active listening
Customers are wishing someone would listen to their needs and concerns, as opposed to talking to them. You sales people, your marketing people, your competitors and everyone else is talking to them about the products they should buy. But companies that are successful listen and observe their customers. So before…
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Voice of the Customer – Tip #3 – Five Why’s
It is very typical while talking to customers that they ask you for a very specific enhancement. As a product manager, you should make sure you do not fall into this trap of accepting that the solution proposed by the customer is what they want. Customers are good at what…
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Voice of the Customer Tip#2 – Role of Explorer
As a product manager, you could be asked to visit customers to help close a sales deal or to trouble shoot a customer problem along with a technical support person. None of these visits can be considered as part of your effort to listen to the voice of the customer.…
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Voice of the Customer Tip #1 – Start with softball questions
Whenever you start talking to users whether it is face-to-face or over the phone, first of all make them feel at ease. Users tend to be a) skeptical whether vendors trying to sell them something int the guise of a conversation and b) fearful of exposing their ignorance of the…
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Listening to the “Voice of the Customer” – Tips
I have been working with customers for the last 11 years in determining their unmet needs and then creating products/solutions to solve those unmet needs. Over these years, I have learnt a lot about how to do these customer interactions while I have made several mistakes. I have decided to…
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2.0 Mania?
By the way this is Gopal Shenoy 2.0 writing this blog? I felt that if I don’t have a 2.0 next to my name, I am going to be considered old. There is a 2.0 behind everything these days – Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Where 2.0, Business 2.0, PR 2.0,…
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Handling social media – Authenticity is the key
Social media – no matter what you read, you are bound to hear this term. It is the popular “phrase of the current times” – is it a buzzword though? I do not think so. Given how blogs, user reviews have influenced my purchasing decisions over the last couple of…
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Incremental Product Innovations that wow you!!
You come across certain incremental product innovations that make you say “Wow” and then make you wonder “why did’nt anyone think about these before?”. Here are some of them that have come to my mind where I have said the above: 1) Hotel check-in self service kiosks that also allow…
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Web Innovator’s group meeting
I attended my second web innovator’s group meeting held last night at the Royal Sonnesta hotel in Cambridge. The event is hosted once every two months by David Beisel, who now works at Venrock (VC firm) in Cambridge. There were maybe about 150 people in attendance – felt like the…
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Herb Chambers Honda Complaints- Worst ever customer experience
I was under the belief that car dealerships had got their act together these days because of the internet. I was under the belief that the days where they could play hard ball tactics with customers and get away with horrible customer service were gone. The underlying reason why I…
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Word of Mouth – #1 influencer in B2B purchasing decisions
Keller Fay Group last week released the results of a study on influencers in B2B purchasing decisions. The study was based on an online interviews with 700 executives in the US and UK conducted between March and April, 2007. The results indicated that the #1 influencer in B2B purchasing decisions…
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Presentation skills – do you care about your customer needs?
One of the key tasks that a product manager has to do is evangelize your product to customers, prospects, industry analysts, partners etc. You have to sell the benefits of your product to these audiences. Having just returned from another conference – the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC, I continue…
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The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace by Penelope Trunk
Guy Kawasaki interviewed Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success on the nine biggest myths of the workplace. Here they are: You’ll be happier if you have a job you like. Job-hopping will hurt you. The glass ceiling still exists. Office politics is about backstabbing. Do…
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Transferring from Vox
For the last 7 months, I maintained a blog on Vox and now I am leaving Vox to start my blog here. If you want to find my old blogs, please visit them on Vox. The main reasons for me to decide Vox were: 1) Anyone who has to leave…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 