Steve Johnson on product management

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Product management evangelist and guitar player.

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Archive for

April 2010

 

How do you prioritize?

mobilecrunch.com reports:

We just got word from Aliph that their $99 Jawbone Icon headset will be gaining support for the A2DP (music streaming) protocol tomorrow, by way of a free update made available through their AppStore-esque headset customization portal, MyTalk

A2DP is the #1 request in the Jawbone discussion boards... as shown here, 8 pages of discussion, the busiest thread. 
Jawbone

So... hat's off to Aliph for listening to their customers.

Are you listening to your market? Market evidence is the key to building a backlog that is prioritized for the market, rather than being a list representing opinions and politics. 

If you need help in bringing the market's voice into your product management, we're delivering the Practical Product Management and Requirements That Work seminars in Tampa on May 15-17. Come learn the best practices for how market evidence drives product decisions. 

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Barb Nelson on "Strategy to Execution in These Trying Times"

Logo_10204

At the next session of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association:
Join Barbara Nelson from Pragmatic Marketing who will discuss
Strategy to Execution in These Trying Times

Learn which high value activities will:

  • Give you market insights
  • Drive alignment between executives and workers
  • Communicate the strategic vision to marketing, sales, development
  • Provide market feedback to help you adapt and improve along the way

Sign up at https://www.123signup.com/Member?PG=1521315182400&P=15213151494403519100

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

How to Set Up a Sales Tracking Process

Who wants to dwell on a major sales defeat? You fought the good fight, now it is time to move on, right? A thorough post mortem can be painful, and there is always the next big deal to chase, another hot prospect in the pipeline to pitch. But moving on without reflecting on why you lost a sale can be a mistake, sales experts say. By analyzing the accounts that got away, a sales manager can uncover underlying weaknesses in his or her offering, identify areas upon which the sales force can improve, and learn valuable information about key competitors.
via inc.com

Companies find that win/loss analysis reveals more than why they won or lost a single deal; they find patterns in the sales process. Inc offers these 7 tips for doing win/loss in your company.

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Rich Mironov on ROI

Your intended buyer isn’t the CEO, but instead some line employee or manager.  Every sizeable purchase order has to be explained and justified and “ROI’d”.  If you don’t help your intended buyer explain the specific savings that come from buying your product, it’s much harder to get a purchase approved.  So part of your ‘sales enablement’ job is to give the buyer (the customer) a simple tool to quantify savings.  In this situation, only numbers and dollars count - you’re not allowed to justify purchases based on ‘strategic value’ or vague improvement or handwaving.
via mironov.com

We hear it all the time: "I can't sell the product without an ROI calculation." My friend Rich has a great approach to explaining the value of the product using ROI. If part of your ‘sales enablement’ job is to give the buyer (the customer) a simple tool to quantify savings, you'll want to read this.

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Is Your Website Hot? | Revenue Journal

In the Google-driven purchase - which is how most purchases are conducted now - the customer has never been to your site before. They've never bought from you before. When they first come to your site, the first thing they see is either hot, warm, or cold. That's why home pages are declining in importance - and product-specific landing pages are increasingly important. When you land on a product-specific landing page, you are HOT. When you come in to a company's home page - in the course of searching for something specific - you are usually cold. If you're lucky, you might be warm.
via revenuejournal.com

Kristin take a look at web sites and offers some great tips on improving yours. Is your website hot or not?

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Robby Slaughter's Totally Unscientific Technology Cognition Chart

We've all seen the technology adoption life cycle but Robby Slaughter has done a nice job of adapting it. He logged it on his blog under humor but I think it explains nicely the path many of us go through. 

Technology-cognition-chart

Source: Robby Slaughter's blog

For some products, I have gone through the cycle to expertise while my friends have made it to competency or even defeat. That's why I'm technical support for everyone in the neighborhood--and anyone who has met a member of my family. 

For people who have discovered the Kindle, most stay at competency and just buy books to read (and of course, that's okay). I however have been using Calibre and Mobipocket Creator to create my own Kindle books.  Since receiving my iPad a couple of weeks ago, I've probably used it 10 hours a day, reconfiguring the gmail settings on email so my email isn't trashed, exploring how to convert PowerPoint files to Keynote format, learning how to create epub ebooks. So for some products, I spent the days to become expert while others spend hours becoming competent. And that's still okay.

What's interesting is how Technology Fluency has an impact on our understanding of buyer and user personas. In our persona templates (available in Pragmatic Marketing seminars), we ask you to rate the personas' computer skills and types of application they're comfortable with. You may want to add these eight "technology fluency" from "blissfully unaware" to "discovery" for buyers and "defeat" to "expertise" for users. 

Robbie leaves us with this thought: 

Design technology and marketing campaigns with each role in mind. Market to people where they are, not where you think they should be!

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Is Your Product Priced Right?

When launching any new product, pricing is an important component to consider. We must price the product to fit in with our overall value proposition.  Are we positioning the product as a high end expensive, valuable product or a bare bones low cost product? What do our customers want? How much will they pay?
via outsideinview.com

Pricing is always a topic of interest to the strategic product manager. Jennifer offers her outside-in View with some great tips on pricing.

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Announcing ProductCamp RTP, May 22, 2010

Announcing ProductCamp RTP, May 22, 2010 - Share In The Innovation! 

ProductCamp RTP is soliciting new topics and discussions. Please submit abstracts here, including:

1) Working with sales teams
2) Leveraging communication and team work
3) How to leverage social networking to increase communication internally within your company
4) Challenging the status quo
5) How to innovate within your organization
6) Making strategic decisions
7) What makes up a good roadmap?
8) What else do you want to hear?  Agile development (Ok, it is always relevant), working with marketing, presentation skills, what else?

ProductCampRTP will follow the Open Grid Scheduling process for specific session scheduling, but the basic outline is below.

Pragmatic Marketing is pleased to be a sponsor for ProductCamp RTP.

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Where are your development standards?

Most organizations would benefit from standardized development guidelines. Some product managers try to put these in requirements but they really belong in a development (and design) standards document. Development guidelines imply performance and constraint requirements, those non-functional requirements that often make the difference between a good-enough product and a great product. 

In a related topic, have you started using Personas? A good persona document also includes performance and constraint requirements, such as the skills of the persona and their computing environment. If you know Robin has Windows 7 and Sarah has a Mac, you know what operating systems you need to support. Since Curt is working in construction, you'll know he may not have access to power or WiFi. Because Nana is unlikely to travel outside her home country, her phone doesn't need an international calling plan. 

Don't confuse requirements with implementation. (See On Reqs and Specs for more on this topic).

Apple Human Interface Guidelines for iPad

Click here to download:
iPadHIG.pdf (5.64 MB)

More at http://developer.apple.com/ipad/sdk/

You can download the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx 

(side note: the properties of the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines PDF are "fake TOC." I dunno; just make me laugh.)

Posted by Steve Johnson 
 

Friday fun: For your convenience... a price increase.

Don't you love marketers who claim almost everything is "for your convenience"? 

The Wall Street Journal happily has increased prices for direct delivery... for my convenience. 
Wsj_priceincrease

What are you and your sales people doing for the customers' "convenience"? 

Posted by Steve Johnson