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Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy
Products/features don’t ship with inventor’s name tag
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...
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...
4 lessons from Massachusetts Senatorial election
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...
Communications – RASCI approach
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...
Donations for Haiti earthquake victims
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...
Software product manager’s first 45-90 days at a new job ….
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...
Write That Down
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...
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
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
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...
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
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...
ZIGZAG Marketing - Tips & Articles
Product Management - The Conscience of Every Product Company
It’s not a dirty job, but someone has to do it!...
The #1 Reason Sales Cycles Stall After a Demo
The short answer is most product companies don't understand the real reasons buyers are evaluating their products....
Top 3 Culprits of Under-Performing Products
Any number of factors can contribute to under-performing products, but the root causes are usually tied to a combination of......
What's the Product Management IQ of Your Organization?
The Product Management IQ (PMIQ) of your organization refers to the cross-organizational discipline required to be a market driven product company, not......
Product Management's Role in Creating a Culture of Innovation
Every company needs to innovate. Innovation is not just about developing new products or services; it's about process improvements, greater......
Requirements Defined - Seilevel's Software Requirements Blog
The Other 8 Groups in the Software Requirements Audience
Do you know who your audience is for your software requirements? Why, it’s the development organization, of course! And while that is true, development is the main audience for software requirements, there are many other audience members as well.1. Testing Team. I am sure that most of you also thought...
An Actual Case of Software Requirements Re-use
We have been using Caliber for a few years and we recently decided to research whether there was a requirements management tool that more cleanly supported working offline. I actually wrote a bit about our vendor selection process and our search for a requirements tool awhile back, so if you...
Spread the Word: Stop Password Masking
One of my pet peeves is password masking. I find nothing more frustrating than having a log-in rejected, and not being able to verify that it is correct because I can’t see the password. It was quite nice to find out I’m not alone. Jakob Nielsen’s article Stop Password Masking...
Requirements Specification Template
We’ve just updated our suggested business requirements document template, though it can be used as a template for any type of requirements specification. You can find it here on our Resources page. One thing we strongly suggest is that you create and update requirements within a requirements management tool and...
6 Basic Techniques for Successful Requirements Elicitation with Remote International Customers
In this global environment, there is rarely a project we work on that doesn’t have some set of customer users in a remote location, inevitably overseas. While we are typically eliciting requirements in English, we are always faced with ESL customers. So here are a few tips I shared with...
4 Tips to Not Destroy Your Project if you Must Use Spreadsheets for Software Requirements
A year ago, I was working on a project where we created a list of features in Excel to help development understand at a high-level what would be in the new system we were building so that they could provide quick and dirty estimates. Out of these estimates, a solution...
Product Management 2.0» Product Management & Product Marketing Experts
Thus if we want to regain control of our schedules and be more responsive to the market place, we need to shrink queues. One place to start is by looking at batch size because queue size can never be less than the batch size (It can be much larger,...
Queues, especially long ones, are the enemy of responsive and flexible product development....
Product Management Productivity Tip#3: Work from ONLY one to-do list
This tip is going to dramatically cut down your stress level – work from only one mastere To Do list. Once you try this you will find that it is a very different way of working. If you think about it, right now you probably have a few voicemails on your...
The Iron Triangle defines the relationship between scope, resources, and time. It is no longer true....
Product Management Productivity Tip #2: Mastering Outlook
I‘ve heard lots of people complain about Outlook — they hate it, it’s confusing — it’s a Microsoft product. I was one of those people for a long time. Outlook has just a boatload of features, is complex and the menu system can be confusing. It is not very well understood...
Product Management Productivity Tip: Mastering Email
This is the first in a series of posts on how to become a more productive product manager. The first productivity-killing topic we will talk about is email. Even though I can’t see or hear you I imagine there’s a big groan when we talk about email. I get 120-140 emails a...
spatially relevant
Sharing the the things I found for the day: This one time at Brand Camp: game changing innovation Why and How to Lead Your Boss at Work Would you choose social media or engaged employees? Story Hour in the Board Room Why you should always work on things that actually have engineers Been There, Done That...
Tomato, Tomaatoe, Usability, UX, Human Factors – Whatever it’s a good idea.
I was talking to Jason Brett this morning to get hands-on view of how SoCal Product Camp went. Jason went on about a great presentation he saw when he was out at the SoCal ProductCamp, so I decided to go out and find it and take a look. Mack...
Sharing the the things I found for the day: The burger map of the United States Do Commercials Still Matter for Brands? 10 Steps to Setting SMART Objectives Deadlines – The Fast and Furious Leaner, Meaner, Innovation Pricing...
PM Scenario #108: Webinars, Boxes, Arrows & Tech Acronyms Work Everywhere – Right?
Image by spatiallyrelevant via Flickr I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks focusing on consuming content, spending a good deal of time in PowerPoint and getting insights from folks which has been very rewarding and challenging. I’ve also been taking an inventory of situations I’ve been in/witnessed throughout my...
Where is that creative monster of yours?
Very often as product managers we have the need to get creative. We need to find ways to position into our differentiation and develop/edit/approve content which our buyers and customers will read, so it’s not all persona’s, powerpoint and math. Since we spend so much time dealing with facts, evidence...
Sharing the the things I found for the day: Social Markers. Here I Am, Brain The Size Of A Planet. Undercover Boss – Afraid of what you might find? Use SEO to ruin a good brand name: 3 easy steps Does Programme & Project Management have a “Long Hours” Culture? Top 10 Hurdles to Becoming...