Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy

All products ship with one label – your brand label – IBM, Microsoft Office, HP Pavilion, whatever your company’s brand name is. That is all what your customer gets to see. No product/feature ships with the name of the person who came up with the idea. So it “was my...

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This week, I started my new job as Director of Product Management at Gazelle.com (aka Second Rotation Inc.) What do we do at Gazelle? We allow consumers to get cash for their used electronic gadgets such as cell phones, GPS, laptops, camcorders, MP3 players and even ebook readers. You can find out...

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The results of the Massachusetts senatorial election this week to elect the replacement for the senate seat held by Ted Kennedy shocked the entire nation. A Republican named Scott Brown who not many people had heard about about as recently as a month back won the seat convincingly in a...

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I am currently reading the book Art of Scalability by Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher, both of them ex-eBay executives. An approach they have described to make sure the entire product development team stays on top of things caught my attention. The model they recommend to use is called the...

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Sincere request to all readers of this blog : Unconfirmed reports in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake put the death toll at 50,000 and the suspicion is that 100,000 may have perished. The earthquake has affected more than 1 million people. This makes this earthquake a disaster of epic proportions. I...

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This is a continuation of my previous blog post of Software product manager’s first 30 days at a new job ….. Now that you are already settled into your new job and the first 45 days have gone by. You have done everything that was listed on the 30 day checklist. You...

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Happy New Year! I wish you all a prosperous 2010. So you found a new software product management job or you are moving into a software product manager’s role in your current company. Congratulations! Now what do you do in the first 30 days to make sure you start off on...

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I am sure you have heard about Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to by its abbreviation of SEO. If not, which planet have you been living on? Welcome back to Earth! SEO efforts in companies are often handled by someone who knows more or is very interested in SEO (smaller...

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As a software product manager, you are more than likely called to make the decision whether a product/service is ready for prime time.  Often it is a challenge because there is a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders to release it. There is a fine line between what I call...

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As a software product manager, I spend a lot of time working with my development team in making sure that they are well aware of the customer pain points and the requirements of the solution we are trying to build. I have heard from time to time from my colleagues...

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You are a software product manager trying to start a software company on your own. Or you work for a startup or a small software company and don’t have much money to spend. But you still need to design a good user experience, do early usability testing with your prospects,...

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Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is a travel ban in companies, so as a product manager, how do you get a travel budget so that you can get out of your office for on-site customer visits? It is hard, but here are two creative ways you can...

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The KISS principle – Keep it simple stupid – something all of us as software product managers have heard one time or another. But when it comes to products, what exactly is product simplicity? Product usability and simplicity typically falls into three different categories, in my perspective. This perspective is...

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In my last post, I discussed the benefits of doing an on-site customer visit where you get to observe customers/prospects use your product or competitive products to get their job done. In my experience doing these visits, I often discover what I call “death by a thousand paper cuts” issues....

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I am a big fan of customer visits – ones where a software product manager visits customers on-site and observes them using your or competitor’s product. Now why do this? What are the benefits of doing this over talking to the same customer/prospect over the phone, while at a conference/trade...

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In the last post, I talked about best practices for doing usability testing. But how does a software product manager go about finding participants for usability testing. Here are some tips: 1) Define your target user who will benefit from the product/feature you have developed. If it is an IT management...

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I have been doing software usability testing for the past 10 years or so and here are 10 rules I go by every time I do a usability test. I have taken the liberty of calling it “best practices” only because these work for me really well. Take that as...

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I am big about making “data driven” decisions. I have written in the past as to how wiring your product can help you make data driven decisions. You cannot make the right decisions unless you know what is happening in the market, in your product. Data can be collected in...

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As a software product manager, we have to be cheer leaders for our team. We have to make sure our sales team, marketers, developers, the QA team are all staying pumped up about the products that we have asked them to sell/market/develop/test. But optimism that is not well grounded in...

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As software product managers, we are chartered to unearth painpoints by interviewing customers/prospects. But how many do we have to talk to before we feel comfortable that we have talked to enough? How many is too many? I have always used the following guidelines which I picked up from the great...

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