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Recent Articles
05014 Striking Gold: Polishing Your Marketing Message
July 19, 2005
The effort to first define and develop the marketing message for your product usually takes place with a limited amount of research and input from customers, especially for new capabilities. For the many organizations that don’t have the luxury, either in terms of time or money, to spend all they want on market research to determine just which benefits resonate the most with which type of prospects, the marketing materials must be developed and printed nonetheless. This means that your product’s marketing message goes out to the world before you have really had enough time to discover some of its most compelling advantages. You mine what gold you can get your hands on, and sell it for all it’s worth.
But once your product is launched and customers begin to adopt and use it, certain benefits begin to clearly rise to the surface as the most important ones. And new positives appear that had simply never occurred to anyone on the team when the product was under development. These new benefits are like gold nuggets, and are incredibly valuable for solidifying, targeting, and extending the marketing message for your product. You need to mine this material as it appears.
Product Managers generally find themselves in discussions with a wide range of prospects and customers, and get knee-deep into the product and its benefits. This makes them an invaluable source of material for improving the marketing message.
Read on for ideas of where and how to mine these gold nuggets to create a more powerful message to the market about your product.
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05013 Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking
July 7, 2005
Product Managers find themselves at the center of their company’s debates and decisions on product design. They understand how crucial it is for the software to be well designed, so that it not only does what the market wants it to do, but does it in the way the market wants it to.
Good product design can mean the difference between success and failure. But it’s easy to think in such black-and-white terms. More subtly, good and bad design exists along a continuum, and most Product Managers find themselves working with software that has inevitable design flaws due to rushed release dates and the pitfalls of all-too-unstructured development efforts. Product Managers, by bringing about improvements to a product’s design, have a positive impact that results in a more profitable company.
In the software industry, there are two contradictory directions for product design. The first comes out of the design traditions of more classic products, such as consumer goods. The second stems from the very cerebral, and often very un-artistic, heritage of the computer industry. Software Product Managers feel the pull from both of these directions and must decide whether to choose one, the other, or a mixture of both, and why. Given the impact of design on profits and revenue, this is a key decision.
Read on for a discussion of these two conflicting design directions, and how understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each can help Product Managers guide the team towards the right design choices.
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