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. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated! You can reach him at RMironov (at) Enthiosys (dot) com.
- 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...