Archive for November, 2007
on thought leadership
Posted by: | CommentsI have written hundreds of articles on product management and marketing. These articles have brought people to our website where they learn that we offer training courses and consulting. I don’t think I have to jump up and down on everybody’s head, saying “BUY BUY BUY” to get people to sign up for a seminar. Thought-leadership programs drive sales.
My friend David Scott has written about thought-leadership as a key marketing strategy in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” Watching from afar has been fairly interesting. His blog has driven people to buy his book; both his blog and his book has driven people to hire him to do keynote speeches where more people buy his book. Ah, the circle of life.
David’s discussions on how youtube can be used as part of an overall thought-leadership strategy has brought him to the attention of “Fox News” and “The Wall Street Journal.” And today, he’s is in the paper.
And here’s the great part: he didn’t call them; they called him!
Old Rules; beg for coverage and beg for each sale;
New Rules: create thought-leadership by participating in a community that helps customers buy.
White papers, technology briefs, industry articles, interviews and speeches at conferences: these show that you and your company are not following the pack but leading it. You should definitely investigate thought leadership programs as a key element of your marketing strategy.
haiku
Posted by: | CommentsMore haiku to add to the ones the Cranky PM whipped together:
Bad executives
make commitments that, alas,
we cannot keep.
Kevin, poor Kevin.
No loss is ever your fault.
The world's worst sales man.
This emergency,
from poor planning on your part,
is now mine. But why?
O please tell Satan,
V P of Development,
quality matters.
and finally,
Good news! Successful
product managers use the
Pragmatic framework.
Happy Thanksgiving.
on working from home
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the great things about this time of year in the U.S. is the number of holidays right in a row. The irregular pattern of work days makes traveling a little more problematic and gives many of us the chance to catch up on things. I know the sales people are hysterical–it's the end of the fiscal year for many–but despite a daily call from Kevin-the-world's-worst-salesperson, the typical product manager has a few quiet days to think about this year's accomplishments and next year's planning.
Ah, a day at home to get some work done.
In case your boss is still living in 1989 and missed the whole telecommuting thing, research supports the value of working from home. It's a win-win for employer and employee. You know what isn't helping? IM. Turn it off before you try to do any real work. Disconnect from the internet until you've finished your project.
And even if your company doesn't ask you to do it, send your manager an annual status report on your projects: a "State of the You" status report.
on survey research
Posted by: | CommentsWe at Pragmatic Marketing like to balance qualitative research from interviews with quantitative research from surveys. Every week we meet hundreds of product managers and technology executives; we hear their stories; we observe the magazines they read (such as our own Pragmatic Marketer) and what web sites they visit (such as my blog at productmarketing.com). We supplement this info with quantitative research from our annual product management survey.
Are all surveys created equal? Not according to Wharton. Read more in Polling the Polling Experts: How Accurate and Useful Are Polls These Days?
Product managers tell me that their execs don't value research. Actually I find that executives do indeed value research–it's just that they tend to value the qualitative over the quantitative. They want product managers to call face-to-face on customers while many product managers prefer to hire the work out to a third-party.
Of course, you need both. You need both stories and data. So go visit three customers and then survey a hundred. Deliver market facts to your executives in their preferred format.
on personas
Posted by: | CommentsRecently the folks at 37signals started an opinion storm over the subject of personas by saying:
We don’t use personas. We use ourselves.
When writing about Buyer and User Personas, I wrote:
In developing products and creating market messages, product management must have clarity on the ideal user and buyer. The industry has adopted the term "persona" to refer to the ideal profiles of our customers.
The issue of course is that it’s better to program to a real person when you can but as vendors, we are usually programming for people who are not us. The problem with most approaches to programming is that they assume you have access to an onsite customer. But if you’re a vendor, you need to create a profile, a biography, of the ideal customer to show that we’re not programming to ourselves.
As 37signals points out, this is not a creative writing exercise. Instead the persona should be a profile grounded in market research. That’s how we know Robin the typical product manager is 32 years old, has a Dell D610 running Windows XP and Office 2003, and is always connected to the internet. This profile is based on our qualitative research with product managers as well as our quantitative research from our annual product manager survey.
Want to add some color to our research? Take Pragmatic Marketing's Product Management and Marketing Benchmark Survey for 2007.
UPDATE: Read a great post Building a Data-Backed Persona at Boxes and Arrows and Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas at User Interface Engineering.
