product bytes
Since 2002, Rich Mironov has been writing the Product Bytes newsletter on product management, technology, start-ups and getting things done. With his move to Enthiosys, it is again a monthly column. Here you’ll see all of the latest issues along with reposts of selected favorites. some of which have been collected in “The Art of Product Management.”
- grocers and chefs: software service models
This is based on an April SVPMA talk. I’m talking with more and more with companies considering a shift from traditional licensing models to hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). It’s important to recognize the radical changes such a move may force within your entire company...
- service revenue and upsell marketing
Much of my consulting lately involves on-demand services (aka software-as-a-service, or “SaaS”). I’m seeing ever-growing interest from business customers in subscription pricing and online services, especially since they pay much less “up front” versus software licensing...
- Burning Your Boats
I spent 2006 consulting to small tech companies, including seven months as an interim executive. I also nearly co-founded a start-up. Come year-end, though, I find that I haven’t created a new company or joined a fledgling venture. This brings to mind discussions of commitment and “burning your boats...
- Crowding Out Tech Support
{This column was co-written with Marcia Kadanoff, customer marketing expert at Firewhite}. This week, there’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and popular press about ”crowdsourcing” — empowering crowds of amateurs to do tasks previously filled by professionals. (See Jeff Howe’s Wired story and blog at http://crowdsourcing.com/...
- avoiding the post-course correction
As early as 1961, Soviet and American space scientists planned for mid-course corrections: those tiny bursts of rocket power designed to keep spacecraft on their trajectories to the Moon, Mars and beyond. With such long voyages, mid-course corrections are crucial to keeping space flights on track with the minimum of effort – and reserving fuel for later adjustments...
- owning the gap
Product managers are usually the people who “own the gap” for their specific products: identifying all of the missing or incomplete features and services and supporting processes that customers need for a successfully experience...
- defensive processes
New ventures begin with an entirely empty slate: no products, no customers, no desks, no organization charts, no established procedures for creating value. Only blank pages and empty office space. This is part of the exhilaration, the chance to do things better and more simply than the last time. Of course, your founding team has lots of experience: ideas about how things get done...
- Girls Getting a Head Start(-Up)
Most founders of VC-backed start-ups tend toward technical degrees, MBAs and forty-something gray hair – with a strong male bias. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, though, there’s a group of seventh-grade girls who are doing it all: writing business plans, raising venture capital, manufacturing products, and running their own profitable companies...
- sharks, pilot fish, and the product food chain
When you’re launching a new venture, one of your hungry competitor earliest considerations is how your innovation might fit into the existing technical environment: should it replace some dominant species or improve the overall market climate? In ecological terms, is your new company going to produce fish food or fight the largest carnivores for survival...
- Product Management is Inherently Political
Recently, I had lunch with a bright young product manager trying to perfect the process for deciding which features to include in his next product release...
- Risk-Sharing and Customer-Perceived Value
Whenever customers buy your product or service, there’s a leap of faith that they will get value from you. An alternative is to offer your solution in return for some of the savings — and to measure this in the customer’s own business units. Even if you fall back on traditional pricing, it will help the customer assign real value to what you deliver...
- Why are there Serial Entrepreneurs?
From the outside, it might seem that joining a fledgling start-up should only be about economics and the big payoff: the popular business press always has stories of farsighted technologists, instant millionaires, and thirty-somethings coping with Sudden Wealth Syndrome. And there are certainly enough folks in the Valley who have made it that most of us know one...
- sales-friendly price lists
Price lists are never quite current enough, sufficiently detailed, or cover enough of the awkward special situations that customers raise. So, there’s a tendency for HQ product and pricing folks to do a lot of tinkering on the margins with their price lists...
- Insider Thinking
Product managers and other product champions spend a lot of their time driving internal processes and decisions — the daily incremental struggle for progress on pricing, packaging, release schedules, upgrade policies and other bits of the production puzzle. This relentless motivation is indispensable, the tech equivalent of keeping the trains running on time...
- Where Should PM Report?
A perennial problem for Product Management (PM) is finding the right organizational home. In companies large enough to have a PM department, it has a tendency to oscillate between Marketing and Engineering. Two root causes for this are role confusion and organizational distance. Let’s walk through each in turn, while trying to map a PM’s place in the grand scheme. What’s in a Title...
- parenting and the art of product management
Over the years, I’ve told variations of this story many times: being a product champion is a lot like being a parent. We love our products, make multi-year commitments to their development, hide their shortcomings, and look out for their best long-term interests while other organizations live in the moment...
- The “Null Service”
As customers get more interested in hosted services and ASPs, a lot of product teams are re-conceiving their packaged software as outsourced Internet offerings. The assumptions and infrastructure needed for hosting a service, however, are very different from traditional licensed software...
- The Strategic Secret Shopper
I’ve often played the “secret shopper,” hired to approach key competitors as a customer or as a consultant to a prospective customer. The goal is to find out in detail what the Other Guys are really saying about themselves — and about you — plus specifics on their products, pricing, positioning, channels and delivery dates...
- what’s your pricing metric?
I’m often involved in pricing discussions, which are typically introduced as “what’s the right price for my product?” Much more important is the strategy that should precede this question, namely “what is the right pricing unit for my product and my market...
- Mo’ Beta
At some time in every product cycle, the executive team wants to help product management “improve” its customer beta process.* This is generally because the last beta took too long, didn’t get enough useful customer feedback, or failed to prime the revenue pump for a post-GA sales blitz...
- “Goldilocks” Packaging
Established companies in established markets generally have some standard ways to package and price their new offerings. Product extensions are benchmarked against the existing product line or the other guy’s features and prices. This leaves product managers focusing on “faster, cheaper, better, more.” In a brand-new market, though, there are fewer guideposts...
- Early Selling: Thoroughbreds and Explorers
Start-up selling is different from selling established products. It includes navigating new product waters and locating islands of early adopters — and calls for different skills than classic quarter-driven account selling. Knowing which you need is critical. (I’ve seen organizations repeatedly hire the wrong sales force, with terrible results...
- So Your Product Wants to Be a Service…
Sometimes we take a fresh look at a product, with the thought of turning it into a service. This is especially attractive if sales of our product-as-a-product are less than planned. Here’s a short exploration of the opportunities and pitfalls in moving from a product model to a service model...
- Getting into Customers’ Heads
Sometimes, at the end of a heroic development effort, we find lukewarm prospects instead of purchase-order- waving customers. How can we get inside our prospects’ heads early in the product cycle so that our “next new thing” meets their needs and desires? Or…paraphrasing Freud’s famous question about women, “What do customers want...
- Avoiding a Ticking B-O-M
In our enthusiasm to get started on software projects, we often jump right into the coding and UI design that make software fun. I’ve done it. A few weeks before final shipment, though, someone identifies a missing item or service that costs the team some sleepless nights – or a month’s schedule slip...