Archives for the 'Theory' Category
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
Does Passion Matter?
My last post on Is Product Management Compatible with Passion? kicked up some great comments from the PM blog community. Bob Corrigan at ack/nak and I had a google chat about the topic the other day that he posted on his site, it contains some of his insightful thoughts on the topic.
As a follow [...]
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 [...]
Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?
Fortune is running a fascinating story about Steve Jobs that does a great job describing his character flaws and humanity, but also what makes him able to lead Apple to make products that inspire such rapid passion in their customers. The article made me think about Product Management in relation to a “genius designer” [...]
Ankle Biters: Machine Tools (was: Don’t be a Tool)
Machine tools are tools used to build other tools, like a drill press or grinder. As a Product Manager, our tools are the internal applications and tools we use to support our data gathering, requirements tracking, and project management needs.
If you’re lucky enough to have budget for a nice set of tools for common PM [...]
Ankle Biters: Project Management
This is the first post in a new series I’m entitling Ankle Biters. Ankle Biters are the little tactical things that you need to do to keep the lights on, but aren’t strategic to Product Management and consume resources from the most important job, being the Vox Mercati. I’ll use this series to talk about [...]
Vox Mercati
How do you know when you’ve arrived as a Product Manager? When you’re in a planning meeting with your Executive team and one of them makes a statement about the Market, or what product you should make next, or what they think your customer base needs - and you stare them straight back in [...]
Interviewed!
Derek Morrison is running a neat series of interviews with other Product Management bloggers. I was his 4th interview, and as usual I wrote too much for just one post, forcing him to break it into three parts. That’s what I refer to as brute force marketing - overwhelm your audience with content until they [...]
