“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

I read a lot, but I don’t read quickly. So reading is a significant and important investment for me, which is why, when a book irritates me, it often ends up being literally thrown out. (I’m not alone in this, Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat once admitted to me that she’d thrown a book she disliked across her hotel bedroom.) But sometimes, just sometimes, I come across a “cold-cuppa” book.

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Post tags: Book review, process

What they wanted to do was to find new sources of revenue from this IP, but they were caught in the very common trap of already being committed 100% to servicing their existing markets, with maintenance and new releases of their products in those markets. So if they did not have the time to create new products, how were we going to find new sources of revenue?

Effectivus stepped in to help them with the problem.

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Post tags: commercial, projects, strategy, tech

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks to some of the experts who have studied this crash and its causes. There were a series of faults and errors leading up to the crash, making it more likely that it could happen, but none of them actually causing it. What it ultimately came down to was the inability of the cockpit crew to challenge the pilot (who was exhausted and clearly not thinking straight), and of the co-pilot to explain their situation to air traffic control. The crew’s inability to act was not due to poor ability, but the etiquette of the Korean culture. How can it be that someone could hold onto such etiquette in the face of imminent death?

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Post tags: commercial, creativity, innovation, management, psychology

Creativity is incredibly important, without it we can have no innovation, not just the big innovations, but the myriad minor ones that people can make every day. To me, it is the lifeblood of new product development.

I’m also aware that some people find it scary. Creative conversations put them outside their comfort zone. They like the certainty of a known universe and find the exploratory concepts we use to build new ideas rather disturbing and pointless.

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Post tags: creativity, ideas, innovation, luck, management, theory

Some companies undeniably step straight over that line and lie. That poses all sorts of problems for the rest of us, either as marketers in the same market or simply as consumers. How can we spot that they’ve crossed it? How can we differentiate good product marketing from big, fat, porky marketing?

Professor Dana Carney, assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business conducted research into lying using two groups of people: bosses and employees. As reported in the HBR this month, they were asked (by a computer) to steal a $100 bill and told that if they could convince an interviewer that they had not taken it: keep it. Professor Carney measured speed of speech, shoulder shrugs, the level of stress hormone in their saliva, how hard they press their lips together and how much their pupils dilate.

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Post tags: customer, lying, marketing, psychology

Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face in Batman Forever - 1995

For those of you outside the UK who were lucky enough to miss our inconclusive general election campaign, you may have missed one of the smallest, but most influential, moments about which public opinion turned.

As the BBC reported it, on the 28^th April, Gordon Brown was doing the usual walkabout with that false smile plastered to his face. In Rochdale (a gritty northern town), he meets Mrs Duffy who has a bit of a go at him (who wouldn’t?). Firstly about government debt (more than justified, Gordon), then the number of people on benefits (still the same as when you started 13 years ago, Gordon. Finally, she raises the issue of immigration and all the Eastern Europeans taking the jobs (probably no longer a real concern, but The Economist reports that most of the jobs that Gordon created went to them).

Gordon delivers the same old messages (which fail to answer the questions), and gets back in the ministerial car without realising that he is still wearing a Sky News microphone.

Read the rest of Skin deep customer focus

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Post tags: culture, customer, management, mission, users

A sense of perspective can be difficult to achieve, and this particular one was costing us $300 each, but it was unique and we could not have achieved it any other way.

After following the Colorado for a few minutes, the helicopter started to descend towards what looked like a tiny landing area. Finally it banked dramatically, and battling the crosswinds, finally settled on the rocky shelf. We scrambled out and looked around us dazed. Suddenly we were very small and the canyon was huge, towering above us and entirely surrounding us. We could no longer see the overall topography, but were stumbling over stones, with our feet slipping on the red rubble that was testament to the erosion that had created the canyon.

Now we were amongst beautiful desert plants with bright yellow and blue flowers. Cacti were dotted all around.  Below us was the Colorado: huge, mud red, and lazily boiling as it swept around the corner and disappeared from view.

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Post tags: film, markets, television, vision

But is magic a good way to communicate your marketing message?

effectivus is in Vegas this week (again) at the National Association of Broadcasters annual jolly; lots of fat old television engineers complaining bitterly at the spotty young geeks who’ve nipped in and taken over their industry. If you’re wondering, effectivus fits into both categories.

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Post tags: marketing

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”

Read the rest of The Early Adopter Gullibility Curve

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Post tags: fun, lifecycle, process, theory