Pricing for the future

A lot has been written in economic and business literature about pricing. You remember, find the market clearing price, factor in elasticity etc. All very valid economics but not exactly reality in a world where you are selling software to a few dozens of customers for many thousands of dollars. In my experience, enterprise software […]

Where does your market data come from?

In classic marketing classes, a lot of decisions are quantitatively driven or at least backed. If you’ve had that training and go into classic consumer marketing, you probably feel right at home. However, in my experience, enterprise software marketing rarely has similar quantitative data available. This is particularly true in immature segments where you are […]

The New Rules? Same as the Old Old Rules

I got started on this as a response to a post at On Product Management talking about the “New Rules of (almost) Everything” and realized it needed (or maybe I needed) more than a comment should be. Please go read the whole post too, but I’ll highlight the rules here: The New Rules? Same as the Old […]

Do I care about SaaS, Multi-tenancy, Hosted solutions, “whachamacallit”?

Ok, here we go with buzzword bingo. If you are in the software product space at all and you aren’t thinking about SaaS, Hosted/ASP Solutions, Multi-tenant solutions, cloud deployments etc. you are likely making a big mistake. Note: I am fully aware that these terms are not synonyms, but they have a lot of overlapping issues in regards to product strategy […]

Do I need a Business Case

The level of process maturity varies greatly from one company to another. Some organizations need to have all steps followed and documented. Meanwhile, others have more flexible processes where only some steps are followed some times. In these environments one of the temptations I have often observed is to skip a real business case. However, […]

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Pick one thing (well, maybe 3)

Product managers have a great temptation to try to assemble a broad list of features for a release that maximally uses the resources, time or both. While this ‘kitchen sink strategizing’ might seem efficient on one level in that it gets as many things done as possible, it fails on two very important ones. Failure […]

Resource Content Schedule: Remedial Project Planning

Sometimes it is worth reviewing the basics. I was listening to a fellow product manager recently who was complaining how they couldn’t ever lock plans and deliver as expected because things always change. This is not good management. Sure things can change, but it must be done in context and intentionally. At the end of […]

“Internationalization”, “I18N”, whatever. It’s just good planning

Ok, this one is a pet peeve of mine, I’ll admit it. First a quick bit a definition: Internationalization (I18N in some geeky circles): This is the design of software to be able to operate in a global context. This includes things like: Not hard coding text strings into functions. Better yet, storing them in an […]

Write the press release before the code (or anything else)

What? Why should I write the press release before I’ve done anything else? That makes no sense. I don’t know what we’re going to do in the release. That’s exactly the point. If you think about the PR that will eventually be written for the release, it will help you and the team focus on […]

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System for Prioritization of Features

I know, everybody has some magic formula for setting up prioritizations in their product plans, MRDs, PRDs, Go-to-market plans etc. However, I have found most of them overly complex. This leads to more argument about what each tier really means than it is worth. Years ago at Remedy I learned a simple system that is […]

Competitive intelligence and strategy

Product Managers and Marketers spend a meaningful amount of time doing competitive research and planning strategies to be successful in the competitive market. While time will often prove the merits of such strategies, one of the most interesting opportunities is when you end up merging with a competitor and can trade notes. You may both […]

WELCOME!

Having recently gone through yet another acquisition and the resulting changes, I got to thinking about what it is that draws me to product management and marketing and what things I’ve learned through experience (i.e. the hard way). I figured that it might be time for me to start blogging to share this information. I […]