Category: Product Marketing
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Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers” – Seth Godin The simplest ideas are the best. But they can also seem the most banal. Hidden in the Seth Godin quote above is, I believe, one of the key differences between a mature and immature organisation. Between a company that is ready…
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To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something
I guess this is more a post about sales rather than marketing per se, but still – understanding buyer journeys and how you can help at different stages is an important part of the marketing role, particularly when the sales cycle is complex. I’ve read quite a lot about marketing funnels – how customers at…
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Why You Can’t Pivot as Quickly as You’d Like
There’s a great scene, towards the end of the film American Sniper, where Bradley Cooper’s character has to take a shot from over a mile away from his target. But the point is, there’s a long time between the point he takes his shot, and when he finds out if he has hit or not.…
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How Short Term Data Driven Decisions can be Dangerous in the Long Term
Jeff Bezos’s letters to shareholders are, of course, famous for their insight, not only in to how Amazon functions, but also for their advice on how to run a certain type of business. One of my favourite excerpts, from the 2005 letter is: As our shareholders know, we have made a decision to continuously and significantly…
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Getting Stuff Done as a Product Marketing Manager
I hardly know a Product Marketing Manager who isn’t overwhelmed by his or her workload. As I’ve written previously, this is at least in part because of the vast number of activities that PMMs “should” be doing – how can you not being doing your job properly if you don’t, at least, have a full…
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Market Sizing – Old vs. New Markets
I was attempting some market sizing activity this week. It’s something I haven’t done for a few months and quite frankly I’d forgotten how hard it was. I start from a premise that the future is completely unpredictable. Really, aren’t we kidding ourselves when we think we can predict how many people will buy our…
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Working on the Coalface
Everyone who works in marketing and product management should be spending as much time as they possibly can with customers. Period. This is, of course, a bit of a bland and obvious statement (like all those marketing books that promise so much and deliver so little!) – we know this, we don’t have to be…
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SaaS Product Management, Lovefilm and Getting Stale
Lovefilm have just revamped the app that is used by devices such as Blu-ray players and the PS3 and it is, in my opinion, a great improvement. There are a large number of changes but I think also, and I’m speculating massively here, that the improvements were heavily shaped by some great data driven product…
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Value and Predictable Revenue Improvements
I really like this very simple post about how to buy wine, when you don’t really know much about it (which is definitely me). Basically, select a price (say, £7.95), then select a wine at that price. That’s kind of it. And what Evan Davis is saying is “Statistically, give or take anomalies, most wines…
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Competition, Disruptive Innovation and Total Recall
A key part of any product marketing role is analysing the competition for your product. Put simply, when your potential customers are looking to solve a particular problem or take advantage of an opportunity, what are the options that they see, one of which (hopefully!) is you? Sometimes this job is easy when you have…
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Why Product Managers Often Aren’t Great at Marketing
Back when I was a developer, many years ago, I worked with a superb sales person – an ex-McKinsey sales person – who had been tasked with explaining to all us techies “What Sales Did”. Of course we already knew the answer – “Nothing, except get paid more than us, drive nicer cars, get more…
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Product Management and iTunes 11
Just to start – this isn’t another post written just to whinge about iTunes. It’s a post written to whinge about iTunes and its relevance to product management. Is the following situation familiar? Product manager or marketer wants to add new features, use-cases and options to their product, based on customer feedback, that they think…
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Lean Personas – How to Make Personas More Useful
First of all, I prefer the term “Personas” to “Personae”. Doesn’t “Personae” just seem pretentious, n’est-ce que pas? Anyway, the point is, I’ve always struggled, over the years, to find personas a useful tool in marketing. I’m specifically talking about marketing here, rather than user-centred design – I know these are two sides of the same coin,…
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Product Marketing and Product Management Roles
I wrote a brief post, about the different roles in the area of product management and product marketing, so it was interesting to read what Saeed Khan had to say on the subject in the following two posts (the first one in particular): http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-1/ http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-ii/ These posts give really great insight in to what the…
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Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc
As mentioned a few posts ago, I attended the Agile 2012 conference a few weeks ago. As far as I can see, one of the products of this movement has been the advent of the “Product Owner” role in the scrum team. This is someone who, as far as I can gather, does some of…