Cauvin

Pragmatic Marketing has a framework for creating and marketing successful, market-driven products. A grid familiar to many product managers and marketers depicts an overview of the framework: The left side of the grid shows the more strategic marketing activities, while the right side of the grid shows the more tactical marketing activities. On the far left side of the grid, we find research activities such as understanding market problems, the competitive landscape, and distinctive competence. On the far right side of the grid, we find presentations and demos, sales or other "special" calls, and event and channel support. The grid is an enormously useful tool for finding the gaps in your company's marketing efforts. Most of us who have taken Pragmatic Marketing classes know that most companies are severely deficient in the left side of the grid. They either have no coherent strategy or have developed strategies without a thorough understanding of the market. Does y...

Before becoming a product manager, I was a software engineer for about eleven years. During my career as a software engineer, I interviewed for many different positions and many different companies. Some of the companies had perfected their interview process; they employed such methods as: Analysis and design sessions Coding quizzes Design pattern questions Development process question/answer sessions The candidate's performance during each segment was fairly objective and straightforward to assess, and hiring managers felt confident that a candidate would excel on the job if she performed well. Any software engineering "rock star" felt confident that she would come close to acing these exercises and quizzes. Now, as an experienced product manager having recently interviewed at various companies, I'm struck that 95% of product manager interviews yield almost no useful or reliable information for assessing how well the product manager would perform on the job. Unfor...

Recently, several of my favorite bloggers have debated the role of product management in agile product development: Adam Bullied asked if the notion of an agile product manager is baloney . Enthiosys argued that agile does and should change how product managers do their jobs . Saeed argued that agile only need affect product management incidentally and at the margins . You'll find my thoughts dispersed throughout some of the comments in these blog entries. If you're an executive interested in the debate, here's what you need to know. First, read a blog entry I wrote in June 2005 entitled "Agile Product Management" . In it, I lay out some of the basics of waterfall and agile methods. Second, read a blog entry I wrote in September 2005 entitled "BUFR" . In the entry, I contended that the two main causes of problems with waterfall methods are big up-front design (BUFD) and big up-front requirements (BUFR). Third, note that the most important set of proble...

Over at the On Product Management blog, Saeed asks us to complete a brief survey on what the biggest problems are in technology product management. I answered roughly as follows: Q1. What do you see as the biggest problems facing the technology product management profession today? Too much tactical activity in the absence of sound strategy. The lack at most companies of a skilled interaction designer or user experience professional role. Q2. What solutions would you suggest to address these problems? Educate executives about the importance of strategy and how to best determine it. Hire skilled interaction designers or user experience professionals. Q3. Which of the following best describes your role/department? Product Management

Over on the Accidental Product Manager blog , Dr. Jim Anderson writes that cost-based pricing of a product is a bad idea, and that value-based pricing is the way to go. Cost-based pricing and value-based pricing are two different ways a product manager can decide on the price of a product. A cost-based price is the cost of producing a unit of the product plus a certain margin. For one example of applying cost-based pricing, see Adam Bullied's blog entry on the pricing new products . A value-based price reflects the value of the product to the customer. The way I suggest pricing a product based on value is to use negative pricing . Dr. Anderson points out that price and volume have mutual feedback effects: Since your unit cost is changing with volume, your price will determine how much you sell. This will then impact volume which then impacts unit cost. As a result: So what’s wrong with cost plus pricing? Simple - cost plus pricing will cause you to over-price your ...

Back in November, Seth Godin wrote about a frustrating experience almost all of us have shared. You call customer service, navigate a long sequence of touch-tone prompts, only to be informed that the office is closed. In Godin's case, he endured nine prompts. If a typical product manager or business analyst presided over the development of this telephone navigation system, I can imagine how it went. "Let me talk to your subject matter experts (SMEs) ." "What are the departments a customer might need to contact?" "Let's draw a chart showing the different paths through the phone system." Contrast this approach with the following focus on real requirements . The product manager or business analyst converses with customers and customer support to understand the problems that they are trying to solve and avoid by calling support. The problems don't just include the reason they call support in the first place. They also include potential proble...

You may know that Austin led the global product management community in holding the first ProductCamp . About ninety product management and other professionals spent a Saturday in June in the air conditioned comfort of the St. Edwards Professional Education Center. ProductCamp is like BarCamp, an informal conference in which professionals meet to share ideas about technologies, tools, and practices. I'm pleased to announce that Austin's second ProductCamp is taking place in January. We are expecting over 175 of Austin's most talented product management, marketing, and product development professionals to attend. This time the event will be at the UT College of Communications building. WHAT: ProductCamp Austin WHEN: January 24, 2009 WHERE: University of Texas, College of Communications CMB Building (Studios 4B-4E) 201 W. Dean Keeton St. Austin, Texas 78712 For more information on the event, or to sign up to lead a session, visit the wiki . Register for free here . Pragma...

Laura Ries makes two primary points in her recent blog entry : If your product is innovative or the established brand leader, it should own not just a word or idea in the mind of the customer, but should also "own" the category itself. I.e., customers and prospects should equate or strongly associate the category with the product. If your product owns a dying category and you introduce a new product in new or healthy category, don't put the new product under the same brand umbrella. Instead, create an entirely new brand . Some choice quotes: [L]eaders many times become the generic for that category. The brand becomes a short-hand device for talking about and asking for a particular category. Kodak is not in trouble because people don't love the Kodak brand anymore. Kodak is in trouble because people don't use conventional film cameras anymore. Moving Kodak to the digital category makes no sense at all. When your brand owns a category in the mind and your catego...

In August of 2005, I pondered , "Why Pay for a Logo?" Logos can be important, but it doesn't require deep thought to create them. It's just a matter of following certain simple (albeit counterintuitive) guidelines . Now Seth Godin recommends : [T]ake the time and money and effort you'd put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead. But when you do choose a logo, keep in mind that your impulse to create one with "meaning" is probably a bad idea .

Solution selling is a sales approach in which the sales person probes into the prospect's pain points and puts together a package of offerings to address them. Rather than selling a single offering, the sales person combines several offerings for the specific customer. (For a comprehensive introduction to solution selling, I recommend SPIN Selling .) Just as sales people should consider solution selling, product managers should consider solution management . Consider how some companies structure their product marketing. A friend of mine works for a company that sells hardware, software, and services. Each hardware, software, or service offering is a "product" in this company's terminology. The company's product managers manage these individual offerings. They determine the roadmap for each product, communicate the requirements to developers, and govern the marketing of each product. The company's business clients, however, almost never buy any individu...

On his Tyner Blain blog, Scott Sehlhorst has a richly informative entry on software as a service (SaaS) . What makes his treatment of the topic noteworthy is his focus on practical customer benefit rather than on the hype that typically surrounds SaaS. Based on Scott's entry, here is how I boil down the problems with licensed software that SaaS solves for customers: Deployment time and expense. When a new version of the software comes out, it can take considerable time and money to roll the software out, especially in an enterprise environment. With SaaS, upgrades require little or no deployment time or expense for the customer. Administration time and expense. Typically, when software is installed at an enterprise site, administrators monitor and manage the installation to ensure it is functioning properly. With SaaS, the provider handles site administration. Lack of accessibility. If the software is installed locally on individual computers, and a customer needs to use s...

Now that we have had more than a year to assess the success of Apple's iPhone, let's see how the predictions of the marketing gurus panned out. Laura Ries predicted that Apple would initially sell a lot of iPhones, but that ultimately the product would flop. I think it's safe to say that the iPhone has not flopped. Apple sold four million of them in a recent six month period. Ries has recently revisited her prediction . Seth Godin predicted that the iPhone would be successful, and that Apple would sell more than two million of them in 2007. I suspect he was right about the 2007 sales. From a marketing perspective, the most important observation about the iPhone is that it has not turned out to be so much of a convergence device. While much of Apple's initial marketing touted the iPhone's merging of music, Internet, and phone capabilities, that perception in the mind of the consumer has not taken hold. In fact, 51% of iPhone purchasers say they will use an iP...

Are you an executive who has recently adopted Scrum or another agile approach to product management and development? If so, Pragmatic Marketing's Stacey Weber has some important observations that will help you understand the roles and skills you'll need on your team. (See my concise description of Scrum first.) First, your product manager (often equated, unfortunately, with the product owner in Scrum) should focus on the problems to be solved, not features: How often have you already envisioned the solution before you’ve stated the problem? Begin with the problem-oriented requirement: “Every [frequency], [persona] has [problem] with [result].” Then work with a user interaction designer or business analyst to define the solution. and Take a look at your team’s backlog. Is it features? Or, even finer-grained tasks than that? A Product Manager’s primary responsibility is to know the market – to discover urgent, pervasive problems that people are willing to pay to have solved. ...

Scrum is an agile approach to product development that is centered around brief, informal stand-up meetings. The term "scrum" originated in the game of rugby. A rugby scrum is a way of resuming a game that has paused due to an accidental foul or the ball having gone out of play. Opposing players engage head-to-head and compete for possession of the ball, which is thrown into the fray. A "media scrum" is an impromptu press conference in which the media gather around a political figure and bombard her with questions. Thus "scrum" has come to refer more generally to a short, informal gathering. In the Scrum approach to product development, scrums are frequent (often daily) stand-up meetings in which each member of the product team states his immediate goal and any risks or obstacles he is facing. The scrums typically start at precisely the same time every day and are often time-boxed to 15-20 minutes. Other Scrum practices include: Iterations ("spri...

Are you left-brained or right-brained? Supposedly, your brain lateralization determines how you view this animation. Some people see her rotating clockwise. Others see her rotating counter-clockwise. Some see her unpredictably changing the direction of her rotation. Supposedly, people who see clockwise rotation are right brained. People who see counter-clockwise rotation are left brained. I originally came across this animation here .

If you haven't already seen Seth Godin's blog entry on it and checked out Brand Tags , take a look now. A brand is not just a name or a logo. It's a set of associations imprinted in the mind of a customer. At the Brand Tags site, you can say what various popular brands mean to you. You can also see what words other people have associated with brand names. Best of all, you can view a set of these "brand tags" and guess the associated brand name.

You're choosing a logo for your company. In all likelihood, you either: Have some creative folks on your team design it. Hire a creative marketing firm to design it. Then, of course, your team sits down, reviews a bunch of candidate logos, and each one of you spews out a bunch of thoroughly unscientific, personal opinions about which one is "better". Fans of this blog know (because I have beaten them over the head with it) that the best logos are blank slates (where the non-name portion of the logo conveys little or nothing about your company or product). And you generally should choose a logo with a single color that is the opposite of a major competitor's . But how tall, and how wide, should your logo be? Al Ries tells us logotype should fit your eyes : 1 unit high and 2 1/4 units wide.

You may have heard of BarCamp , informal conferences in which developers meet to share ideas about technologies, tools, and practices. Spurred by Paul Young (of Product Beautiful fame), a group of product managers in Austin is organizing ProductCampAustin , which is a similar event for product managers. WHAT: ProductCampAustin WHEN: June 14, 2008 WHERE: St. Edwards University's Professional Education Center (PEC) 9420 Research Blvd Echelon III Building Austin, Texas 78759 Sponsors include Pragmatic Marketing , NetStreams , AIPMM , and AustinPMM Forum , Seilevel , and Austin Ventures . There are two ways you can get more info or get involved: Go to the wiki (collaborative web site) and sign up as a participant. Join the planning group on Google. Everyone interested in product management, marketing, and development processes is invited, but we encourage attendees to participate (volunteer for setup/teardown, speak, lead a roundtable, set up wifi...

Idris Mootee recently blogged a response to an AdAge article (paid subscription required) by Al Ries. Here are some excerpts from the Ries article: "What makes a powerful automobile brand today is not innovation, but a narrow focus on an attribute or a segment of the market." "Innovations outside of a brand’s core position can undermine a brand." "Most brands don't need innovations; they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for and then what they need to sacrifice to get there." Yep, sounds like vintage Ries. But Mootee disagrees: Mr. Ries is so wrong on this one. Mootee counters: What the automobile industry needs today is NOT a narrow focus or an attribute or another brand. They have been doing that for decades and look at Detroit today. Really? When I ponder the Detroit automobile industry, I think "scattered", not "focused". This counterexample from Mootee is not convincing. As a matter of fact, it tends to supp...

Pragmatic Marketing's Steve Johnson has written an e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management . In it, Steve argues that strong product management is key to the success of a company when it is strategic and focuses on identifying and solving market problems. A key graph from the book is: Increasingly we see companies creating a VP of Product Management, a department at the same level in the company as the other major departments. This VP focuses the product management group on the business of the product. The product management group interviews existing and potential customers, articulates and quantifies market problems in the business case and market requirements, defines standard procedures for product delivery and launch, supports the creation of collateral and sales tools by Marketing Communications, and trains the sales teams on the market and product. Product Management looks at the needs of the entire business and the entire market. What can you, as a corporate execut...