A surprisingly large number of technology companies don't have any formal product management. That is often because the founders or other principals are fulfilling the role.
We can help by taking a broad view of your product in its markets; help you understand whether there are market opportunities you are missing, or whether the product could be more competitive.
Book review gets robust criticism from author
“The Product Manager’s Toolkit: Methodologies, Processes and Tasks in High-Tech Product Management”, Gabriel Steinhardt, Springer Science+Business Media, 2010
I was immediately drawn to this book by its title; there are so few helpful books on product management for the high-tech industry. I read a huge amount around the subject not only in order to keep myself up to date, but also to offer my clients pointers to books that they might find helpful, so I was happy to read it for review.
In it, Steinhardt sets out to provide ‘a consistent and holistic managerial approach to product management’. He points out, quite rightly, that every technology company seems to have a different definition of what Product Management means. He defines the role as covering both the product planning activities of figuring out what a product should be, but also the product marketing ones of presenting its benefits to the customer. He puts those two roles alongside the roles of Sales Engineer (often called product specialist, evangelist, pre-sales support, etc) and MarCom Manager.
What does the mythical kill switch tell us about consumer adoption?
We are used to thinking of product adoption in terms of the adoption curve and spend lots of time worrying about our Early Adopters versus our Early Majority, but what are we to make of the conspiracy theorists?
I mention it because every few years there is a rash of articles in the technology press about users who have become convinced that manufacturers have designed their products to spontaneously die after some specific amount of time. Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph reported on “The myth of the Sony ‘kill switch’” which has apparently been going on for 20 years. The Sony laptop battery fiasco last year won’t have helped, but that wasn’t what lit the fire in Japan recently. Apparently, “a bug in selected E-Series Bravia TVs meant they’d only last 1,200 hours, before refusing to power on or off. This conveniently adds up to about 3 hours watching per day for one year, the exact period of the television’s warranty. Sony issued a software patch to fix the problem.”
What is perhaps more revealing are some of the comments posted on The Telegraph’s website from users claiming to have suffered from a “kill switch”
How technologies, like special effects and small children, should hide their light under a bushel.
On one of my regular visits to our customer Industrial Light and Magic in the early ‘90s I was talking to one of the matte painters I love to watch users (whether artists or technical whiz kids) as they work. You learn so much from them. Only that way do you get a real understanding for their pains and needs. Sandy was drawing around the blue stockings on an actor, frame by frame, with amazing care and precision. She explained that they were going to have to remove the lower legs so that it looked as if the actor had had them amputated. The first stage was to isolate them.
Now usually you can hope to draw one frame and then move forward several frames, draw another, and then have the software generate the in-between shapes. If the motion is relatively simple, they match, or nearly match, the image, leaving the artist to do some simple fine-tuning. This is called “in-betweening” and we had written that functionality into Matador for just this purpose. Sandy knew all about this as she had helped us specify the functionality, so I asked her why she was not using it. In answer, she zoomed out so that I could see that the actor was sitting on a swing, hung from a mast, on a boat rocking on the ocean, shot by a camera on another boat. Simple the motion was not. In fact it was so complex that no amount of clever in-betweening was going to help her. I shook my head in disbelief at the skill and dedication required even to consider attempting this shot, never mind to bring it off convincingly.
Fulfilling unmet needs is not enough
The importance of naming new concepts and product ideas
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