Product Matters

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  (If that link is out of date, it's because the SVPMA doesn't create unique URLs for its workshops.)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,...

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 a...

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...