Effectivus Product Management » product management

The Product Manager’s Toolkit

Chris — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:00:20 +0000

“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.

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Post tags: Book review, lifecycle, theory

The Early Adopter Gullibility Curve

Chris — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:00:41 +0000

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”

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Post tags: fun, lifecycle, process, theory

Make the tough stuff look simple

Chris — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:54:58 +0000

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.

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Post tags: design, FX, Matador, product

Has Dyson lost his way?

Chris — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:38:33 +0000

I know it is an act worthy of excommunication amongst the congregation of inventors, innovators and technology entrepreneurs to criticise Sir James Dyson. All those stories of success in the face of huge challenges, the amazing 5,126 prototypes that it took to develop the Dual Cyclone™ technology (vacuum cleaner) and “15 years of frustration”, makes criticism heresy.

The latest product to come from the legendarily inventive stable of James Dyson is the “Dyson Air Multiplier”™. This is a £200 ($300) desk fan.

The website shows people being amazed by the fact that air is coming from the device without any visible means of propulsion. It is clever, darned clever, reportedly taking “every discipline form Dyson’s 350-strong team of engineers and scientists to develop”; clever, but dumb.

Apparently by not having any blades (I bet it does – you just can’t see them) it prevents buffeting. Buffeting? Is buffeting a major cause of annoyance in the office environment? Is that seriously an unmet need? I know that I find buffeting unpleasant, but only when my Bloody Mary ends up in my lap at 30,000ft.

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Post tags: design, markets, users

Give it a (code)name

Chris — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:51:16 +0000

Four of us sat in the musty compartment as the train rattled southeast from London’s Victoria towards Canterbury. We were a strange mix of characters, brought together that morning because we were all part-time tutors at Canterbury College of Art.

I was supplementing my meagre postgraduate allowance by introducing architecture and graphic design students to these whacky machines called computers, which, in 1980 had yet to have any noticeable impact on their lives.

John Warwicker, who was teaching Graphic Design, was telling us about the band he belonged to and their plans for their first album. They had come up with the novel idea of not having a name at all, but simply a graphic symbol:

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Post tags: fun, Matador, vision

Hippocratic Oath for Product Managers

Chris — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:45:16 +0000

On June the 3^rd 400 students graduating from Harvard Business School took an oath to “serve the greater good”, “act with the utmost integrity” and guard against “decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions, but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.” It is not exactly a Hippocratic Oath, which was sworn to Apollo and starts with a promise to share your goods with your teacher and his children, but an oath nonetheless.

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Post tags: culture, vision

Invention, discovery and the role of collaboration

Chris — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:55:25 +0000

The latest post on Carl Knibbs’s blog is a great practical guide to generating product ideas. This got me thinking about the nature of ideas and invention. People tell me that I am creative, that I surprise them with ideas, that I say funny and unexpected things. I’m an inventor and have a patent to prove it. Despite this I rarely feel like I am the source of an idea.

So where do ideas come from? My personal experience is that they come almost entirely from outside; from books that I read, people I talk to, things that I see. Sometimes an idea comes immediately, sometimes much later. For example, I am currently reading Bill Buxton’s excellent Sketching User Experiences and I’m really struggling to get through it because it keeps prompting all sorts of interesting ideas that set my mind off in different directions.

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Post tags: clients, fun, ideas

Adhocism: power to the people

Chris — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:03:32 +0000

Browsing my bookshelves this afternoon I came across “Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation” written by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver and published in 1972. From the back cover:

“Adhocism is the art of living and doing things ad hoc – tackling problems at once, using the materials at hand, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or “proper” approach. As a principal of design it begins with everyday improvisations, such as bottles for candle holders and tractor seats on wheels for dining chairs.”

It was a remnant of the 60s, a “just-do-it-man!” philosophy that went alongside The Whole Earth Catalogue: “an encyclopaedia of alternative ways of living and suppliers of the means of doing so” (hey, don’t knock it: apparently Steve Jobs has described the Catalogue as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web).

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Post tags: design, ideas, users

When is a Feature Request a Customer Requirement?

Chris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:21:45 +0000

The sales guy and I were on a barnstorming sales tour of Los Angeles. I say “barnstorming” as no exaggeration as he was a legendary sales director whose focus was always on winning the next deal. On one trip he had insisted on squeezing in one more customer visit after checking in at the airport; “they won’t go without us now they’ve got the bags and we can just drop the hire car at the kerb and phone the hire company on the way to the gate” he had reassured me.

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Post tags: fun, lifecycle, product

Competitive Edge

Chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:58:11 +0000

For those of us caught in the bloodbath of competitive battles (what Kim and Mauborgne call “Red Oceans” in their book “Blue Ocean Strategy”), what we dream of at night is competitive edge. What is the “killer feature”, “special offer”, or failing that just plain dirt on the competitor which you can use as an ace in closing deals with customers?

The textbooks talk about feature leadership, leading edge products, pushing the frontiers, agility, forward thinking, They encourage us to disrupt the normal market mechanics, not just to compete on faster, smaller, easier and ultimately, cheaper.

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Post tags: design, product