Pragmatic Marketing is running our 11th annual “state-of-the-profession” survey for product management and marketing professionals. Completing the survey only takes a few minutes, and you’ll get valuable data on where you stack up against the rest of the product management community with regard to experience, salary and bonus, hours spent in meetings, emails sent and received, and time spent on strategic and tactical activities. Full results are typically published in January.
You can also see the results of past surveys.
Hibernating an Idea
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If you’re a type-A person, you believe that you can do anything. If you’re innovative and entrepreneurial, and are crazy enough to believe you have the idea and drive to change the world in the form of a company, you might even qualify as insane. However, there comes a time where you need to shut down an idea, even if you think it is still good, because you can’t make the time or energy to see it through. That time for me is now.
Earlier this year I wrote a little about a project that I had started on the side, which I called Leaf. Leaf is a project I’ve had in my mind for several years, and continued to change it and develop it, even banging out a little code, until my wife finally said “if this idea is eating you up, you need to get serious about it or kill it.” So I did – after thinking about it for a long time, I eventually hooked up with Kevin Koym and his team at TechRanch Austin, a local tech incubator.
TechRanch was running an 8-week crash course at the time called “Employee to Entrepreneur (now called Venture Forth).” The premise of the class was how do you go from idea to implementation and make the move from being an employee to running your own business. Each of the dozen or so people in the class had different ideas and were at different stages of development. The class was eye opening: I was doing it wrong. We all gravitate towards our comfort zone, and in my case I was trying to scratch an itch myself and write my own code, not following my own advice and being the President of my product (or company, for that matter). Most startups don’t make it past the idea phase, let alone get funded, and I was falling into that trap. After the idea phase, most companies fail to focus enough – the second trap I fell into. I can’t lavish enough praise on the TechRanch team, they know what they are doing and if you’re in the Central Texas area I encourage you to become a rancher – they have lots of free and low-cost options for you to engage with their community.
I invested a good deal of time and money in hatching an alpha version of my idea as an experiment to see if it had legs. To get out of my own way I even hired an (excellent) prototyper in Ninth Yard to build it for me so I could focus on the product management. Damon (my developer) would tell you that he probably thought I was crazy because most entrepreneurs don’t come to the first meeting sporting wireframes and database maps. I did.
We had an intense period of time where we had the idea under development, going through revisions and ultimately unveiling it at ProductCamp Austin. That created some controversy, but ended up for the best. The idea had some traction and a couple hundred people got online and tried it out. I ended up learning a ton and have a list a mile long of what needs to change, both in the product and the positioning. Unfortunately, that list is as far as those ideas will probably go.
Effective immediately, I’m mothballing Leaf . I’ve found that with two kids and a new role, I have a time deficit. Leaf might be something someday…or not, odds are against it. It’s easy to be envious of the 20-year old zillionaires that had “obvious” ideas and got there first. However, I’m not envious (OK, maybe a little), because I learned a ton in my failure. “The Idea” is necessary but not sufficient for success. That is one of those sayings that seems obvious from the outside but when you’re holding the idea that you think will change The World it rings hollow. Execution, talent, and quick traction are equally if not more important than your idea – because rarely will your idea end up as you originally envisioned it.
If you tried out Leaf during its brief lifetime, thanks! Hopefully some day it will return, more tightly focused and helping you do something you need. Until then, it is in hibernation.
Ride the Pipeline
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If you’re a regular reader of this space, you know that I don’t write plug articles. In fact, I regularly turn down authors and PR people who try to buy or bribe space here. It’s not that this blog is a super-hot spot for eyeballs (it’s not), it’s that the people who come here are strong product leaders that others want to reach. I respect that and try to honor your time by only writing about products or events I have personal experience with, like ProductCamp. Today I am going to take a little bit of a flyer and get behind something new because I know the people involved and its potential to be great: Pipeline 2010.
Pipeline is a virtual conference about innovation, product development, and portfolio management best practices. Like ProductCamp, it’s free to attend. You attend from your computer and can view several different speakers on a variety of topics, including Chris Trimble, Braden Kelley, and my friend and fellow Pragmatic Marketing instructor John Milburn. You can pick and choose from the topics you view and you’re not locked into a day and out for travel and other expenses. It’s nice to see a corporate conference get smart about the reality of our budgets for travel and expenses in the current economy, and even better to see them picking up some un-conference principles like unstructured scheduling. I will be interested to see if and how the virtual conference addresses the networking aspect – how do I interact with and meet the interesting people I would have met at the coffee station? How do I corner a keynote speaker in the hallway after their talk to drill down on a point they made? I’ll report back on these.
Planview is the company behind Pipeline 2010. They are good people and have sponsored ProductCamp Austin for the past year, along with lending the wonderful Audrey Montgomery to the PCA planning team for logistics and volunteers.
Pipeline 2010 will be held online on November 10, 2010 from 8AM – 3PM CST, you can register here.
Our Newest Release is Live!
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On a personal note, my wife Mandy and I welcomed our son Jack to the world just over a month ago. Thankfully the deployment went smoothly, because unlike SaaS there are no rollbacks once you go live.
More seriously, Jack is eating (oh how he eats!), sleeping (not enough for our tastes yet), and generally doing what he is supposed to do. Our daughter Addie is starting to figure out the big-sister routine and that she isn’t the only game in town any more. We joke that she has perfected the art of the temper tantrum. I am just waiting until she is old enough and I can pull out the old Bill Cosby line about “I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it! Don’t matter to me, I can make another one look just like you!”
To bring this back to Product Management, my mind has recently been on the topic of stress. Product Management and running groups of product managers is a stressful job. If you are anything like me, stress comes in waves: new job plus new baby, or new job plus new house, and so on. I’m going to outline a few stress management techniques that work for me below, and I encourage you to add your own in comments. YMMV!
My first and best stress reliever is exercise. I believe that many of the best product management pros are “type A’s” who want to take the world on their shoulders. That weight bears down on you over time. If you are like me, you are also a very competitive person. Before I took my new role with Pragmatic Marketing, I played basketball twice a week; not just for the exercise, but for the competition. Probably more for the competition. I’m rarely the best player on the court but I guarantee that I am the one who hates to lose the most and goes all out the most. Now that I’m traveling a lot, I needed to adapt. Fellow instructor John Milburn has been getting me into running.
I hated running. There is no competition – it’s you against…the road? The clock? Yourself? My first couple of runs were brutal, and I struggled to make it a mile or two. Then I downloaded a couple of apps for my iPhone that have really helped: first is Couch to 5K. C25K is an app that is a “running coach” and puts you through a program to get off of your couch up to 5K level in 9 weeks. It’s working, and it makes it fun because you aren’t just running for running’s sake. The second app is the Nike+GPS app, which uses the iPhone’s GPS capabilities to map your route and provide you distance, speed, and other stats that you can share on facebook. The neat thing about this app is that when you start your run it will make a Facebook post for you, and any of your friends can comment against that post and “cheer” for you, and you’ll get the sound of a cheering crowd over your playlist each time it happens as you run. Hokey, but fun.
The second method I recommend is decompression time. Do you go straight from home to work to home and back? Bad idea. Insert some time between those, even if it’s just grabbing a coffee or doing something by yourself for 20 minutes. Your spouse will thank you.
Last, turn your work off, at least for a little while when you are at home. For the sake of your family, don’t Blackberry at dinner. Your email will still be there after, and you’re not getting fired for not answering email between 7 and 9PM.
What other stress management techniques do you use? …Drop me a line and put them in the comments below…
ProductCamp on the Austin Tech Scene Podcast
By · CommentsProductCamp Austin was recently featured on the Austin Tech Scene podcast with Michael Cote and Brandon Whichard. Also, in the leadup to ProductCamp, we finally scored some coverage from MSM when the Austin American Statesman blogger Omar Gallaga wrote two pieces about the unconference scene in Austin and why ProductCamp is thriving where other camps are struggling or changing formats.
The Importance of Knowing Your Buyers
By · CommentsI had to run to the local grocery store tonight to grab some items and decided to pick up a birthday card for my father. Here is a picture of the card selections:
It’s hard to see, but there is at least 400% more selection of “Birthday for her” than “Birthday for him.” It’s an interesting coincidence that the ratio is about the same for males and females sending text messages. The greeting card companies and the retailer aren’t dumb, this is very intentional: they know that women expect a card for their birthday and that they look for more personalization. While I was in the aisle, there were three women browsing and I was the only male. Not scientific, but I am willing to bet that you’d see similar results in most groceries.
On the buying side, aside from being selection limited, the for him options were also modeled in a choice-directed fashion: there was only one or two choices for “humor” or “grandpa.” The card company and retailer know that male buying patterns are quick strike, vs. the more deliberate compare-and-contrast for the female market. Which is exactly what I was after – a quick choice that would be acceptable. The irony? I would not even have thought to get a card (until maybe the day before), except for my wife reminding me as I walked out the door.
What’s interesting for me is how much room there still is to improve on this market. I’m content to choose from 30 cards at retail because I am OK with good enough, but that doesn’t mean my problem is sufficiently solved. My buying patterns, and I am guessing that of many men, are different online. Online I am a researcher, compulsively drilling down on specifications and comparing/contrasting. What if a greeting card company took their directed choice model online? Did a choose-your-own-adventure, asked you 10 questions and generated a personalized card from there? Not some cheesy “card” that you print at home but they actually printed it on-demand and shipped it directly to the recipient (or to you). I’d go for that, and the biz dev possibilities with online retailers like Amazon would be huge. Someone really smart could build the middleware between Amazon and iStockPhoto and make some good IP in the emotional choice models and associated verbiage.
Maybe that already exists? Point me to it if it does!
I’m Going to Shave My Head for ProductCamp!
By · CommentsProductCamp Austin just broke through our previous record for registration of 500. I just tweeted that I will shave my head, live at ProductCamp, if we hit 600 registrations. I have a feeling that what little hair I still have left is doomed. Go register for ProductCamp and I’ll see you on Saturday!
UPDATE: Pictures below!
