Write That Down

Musings and observations of a product manager.

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Product Management Open House

Nov 5, 2009 7:02am

There is an open house tomorrow at Forrester being hosted by Tom Grant of the Heretech fame. It starts at 5:30pm, and is happening in order to host lively discussion on, what else, product management and product marketing issues. Specifically for this first session, there will be a focus on how...

reBlog from avc.com: A VC

Oct 28, 2009 7:00am

I found this fascinating quote today: If you look at our portfolio, you’ll see quite a few startups created by young visionaries and quite a few startups created by serial entrepreneurs who are swinging for the fences. There isn’t much else to be honest.avc.com, A VC, Oct 2009 You should read the...

Competitive Analysis – Gathering Marketing Data

Sep 11, 2009 8:45am

The last component I’ll discuss of the competitive analysis process is culling marketing and sales collateral from your list of identified competitors. Why do this? You want to be acquainted with what they are putting out there. It should give you a sense of how their products are being positioned (however poorly...

Competitive Analysis Series – Pricing

Sep 9, 2009 8:45am

One of the regular questions I (and I’m sure others) face when it comes to competitive analysis is, “what are they charging?” This is an especially tricky question to answer accurately. I’ve gone about this in a couple of different ways – obviously, when you are dealing with B2C companies that publicize...

Great Companies

Sep 4, 2009 10:06pm

How I missed this one yesterday I don’t know. But whatever you do, be sure to read through Fred Wilson’s post Ten Characteristics of Great Companies. Awesome stuff, and well worth the time to check out....

Competitive Analysis Series – Positioning

Aug 13, 2009 8:45am

One of the key take-aways from a competitive analysis exercise is how you end-up positioning your product (and your organization) against those competitors. Especially early on in a product’s lifecycle, this is crucial. When you have executives out there talking up what you’re doing, the last thing you want is...

Competitive Analysis Series – SWOTs

Jul 27, 2009 5:30am

Many things have been written about SWOTs, so I won’t take up a lot of space here. However, I will always do them for each identified competitor while executing a competitive analysis. There are great, more detailed, descriptions about SWOTs over at QuickMBA and Wikipedia you can check out – both...

Competitive Analysis Series – Feature Breakdowns

Jul 15, 2009 6:40pm

One of the hardest aspects of competitive analysis is to perform a detailed feature-by-feature breakdown of each of your identified competitors. This is much easier to do within a B2C space than B2B – simply because within B2B, you (more often than not) don’t have access to the products themselves...

Industry Immersion Article

Jun 23, 2009 10:19am

I wrote an article for the latest issue of the Pragmatic Marketing monthly magazine on industry immersion – essentially, how to learn a new industry when you step in to manage a product within it. And then of course, keeping up to date with that industry and all of the...