Archives for the 'Tactics' Category
Using New Media for Product Marketing
As Product Marketers, we can use new media such as blogs and forums in new ways to both get better product feedback, and to get our message into the market.
Cisco Marketing Has Gone Crazy…Like a Fox!
Cisco is trying to use new media in innovative ways to connect with a highly technical target market. One of these methods is an online game called Edge Quest.
ProductCamp Austin Announces Location and Austin Ventures as a Sponsor!
ProductCamp Austin is a free, one-day ‘unconference’ for product managers and anyone involved in product management or product development. It will be held on June 14, 2008 in Austin, Texas at St. Edwards University’s Professional Education Center.
Why Product Management is Open Source’s Fatal Flaw
Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is great - I have released code under the GPL, LGPL, and similar licenses. There are mountains of FOSS available right now for download from sites like SourceForge and others that save businesses millions of dollars. More importantly, open source software offers feature sets and mixes that often [...]
Development: Leave Us the $Foo Alone!
Jeff Lash has a good post up about Delegating. There are some interactions you need to have - like regular tradeoff meetings with Development. As a general rule, programmers hate meetings. A lot of that has to do with the fact that prior to you, they had some “Marketing” airbag pull them [...]
Do You Have Great Customers or Power Pissers?
Great Customers are the one’s who want to be your best friend. They are hyper consumers of your product, the ultimate power users, they’re on your forums helping novice users and advocating for you. They might have become this way because your product inspired so much passion in them that they are now [...]
To Startup or Not to Startup
A few months ago, John Milburn of Pragmatic Marketing approached me about writing an article for their magazine about my experiences building a product management organization in a startup. After a lot of collaboration and some good debate, we have an article in this issue of The Pragmatic Marketer entitled “To Startup or Not [...]
Margin Analysis
Financial analysis is a key skill for any great Product Manager, yet it is one of the least discussed, taught, or blogged about. Maybe it’s because finances are not sexy or “the accounting team will handle it.” If you are CEO of your product, you had better have a handle on your products’ [...]
Managing a Liscensed Product
Jeff Lash asked me to answer a question on his new site Ask a Good Product Manager. The question was from someone who had the title of Product Manager but was really in a no-win situation as the go between at a company wedged between a client and the software application company. It’s an interesting [...]
Core Teams and Tradeoffs
We all live in a World with tradeoffs. When you write a requirements document, is every requirement non-negotiable in order to ship the product? If so, you’ve traded off completeness for time or resources. If you’re like me, time is your biggest enemy, so even if the requirements outline the ideal solution [...]
