Product Matters

It has been a long time since I've been able to sit down and write a lucid blog post.  This one will not be one of them. I've come to realize that my full-time job as a Product Manager, my other full-time job as a husband, and my newest (and most demanding) full-time job as a parent (to a delightful son) consume roughly 100% of my time; leaving precious few moments in the day in which to gather and synthesize my thoughts.  Thus, I've been using Twitter more often and blogging less. " Blogging less?  What?  You only have 3 prior entries! " I used to blog quite a bit under a different moniker.  However, as a parent, I have come to the realization that composing longer, thoughtful essays are a luxury that I generally cannot afford. With that, I've added my Twitter feed to the left, and will make an effort to write "larger-than-micro" blogs here on at least a weekly basis, if not more frequently. And now it's back to full-time job #1, follo

In a previous blog entry , I wrote that Starbucks was at risk of becoming Dunkin Donuts.  While the green giant is undoubtedly more successful than its northeast competitor, my suspicion that they were sliding off the fidelity axis and reaching down the convenience axis (there is, after all, usually a larger market share on the convenience axis) was recently confirmed during a recent trip back to Boston. The coffee served at conferences—is predictably lousy.  Therefore, I knew that I didn't want the complimentary coffee provided by the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, and instead made my way up and out to a nearby Starbucks (the only coffee shop within walking distance). I waited in line, and then ordered my usual; Double Americano, No Room.  Despite the short walk, I was still foggy, and was eagerly awaiting my caffeine fix.  Given the size of the line, I told myself that it might be a few minutes before my drink arrived.  To my astonishment, they had my americano in my hand in

Today was the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston .  Unfortunately, I only have an Expo pass, so I wasn't able to attend the majority of Monday's sessions .  However, I was able to attend the Evening in the Cloud session that took place at 4:00pm. From the description : David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly . The "major players", unfortunately, were limited to Microsoft and Google.  Rather amusing considering that the event was sponsored by IBM.  The talk was rather high-level, and the key takeaways were as follows: How could an ideal cloud application improve collaboration? David began with a nice "what if" scenario in which a person just opened a word processing application and was able to save the document, share it, send it, publish it, etc. all from one spot.  He then posed the question as to

On June 2nd, I'll be attending an open session hosted by the Silicon Valley Product Manager's Association (SVPMA) entitled Best Practices for Product Management for V1 Products .  (If that link is out of date, it's because the SVPMA doesn't create unique URLs for its workshops.) Having a mere few years of direct product management experience, this workshop interests me considerably.  It's not that often that PMs get to work on V1 products.  The ability to discuss and define the business objectives, to formulate a strategy , and to work with a clean slate presents itself.  Having managed Vx products, this seems like such a novel and exciting idea.  Of course, it's also fraught with peril. I recently read the book Trade-Off by Kevin Maney in which he explores two factors that can determine whether a product is successful or not: Fidelity & Convenience.  The idea is rather simple; successful products either have high fidelity (quality, caché, brand, and

Last night I attended Social CRM: Putting Customers First , hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Social Media Club .  It was a great event, and I'll briefly recap some of the discussion and my observations. The panelists were first asked why Social CRM (SCRM) was relevant.  Their answers were as follows: Vendors need to know who their customers are out there on the social web. Vendors need to be able to identify customer pain points from conversations on the social web.  Vendors need to know what to do with these conversations on the social web.  These discussions are the center of business today; their importance cannot be understated. The social web grows too fast for vendor solutions to keep up.  Therefore, vendor solutions must embrace the social web, and learn how to crowdsource.  There is no way that you can scale communities and community managers that fast. Customers don't care about your organization structure, they just want answers and solutions. One of

About two weeks ago, I attended my first event hosted by the Silicon Valley Product Manager's Association (SVMPA). The main speaker was Barbara Nelson, a consultant for Pragmatic Marketing who gave a presentation entitled " Why Have a Strategy ?" What follows are some takeaways from that presentation. One would think that by now, most organizations would know precisely why a strategy is necessary. When I say organization, I don't just mean high-tech companies, as many in the valley naturally assume. This applies to all organizations; large, small, corporate, non-profit, etc. Think about it for a moment. Think of all the activities that your organization is engaged in. Are they strategically aligned to accomplish a goal? What is the strategy? Is there even a goal or a vision in place? A 2006 study titled " Making Strategy Execution a Competitive Advantage " showed that only just over half (54%) of companies surveyed have a strategic execution proces