Setting prices for a software product is definitely one of the more daunting tasks for a Product Manager. While it's a little easier to set the price for shrink-wrapped, mass-marketed software for consumers, finding your way to a satisfactory and satisfying price for enterprise software is like finding your way through a labyrinth. It's hard to ...
15Sep 2003
03032 A Sales-Driven Product: Perversion and Conversion
Remember the good ole' days, the days of the dot.coms? People didn't just build software. They set out to build the best transformational software ever. Development groups held meetings that never had action items and talked excitedly about how they were going to apply cutting edge technologies. They didn't plan to upgrade the existing software (when ...
03Sep 2003
03031 The Interrupted Life: Time Management Tips
If I could point to a common trait of Product Manager positions, whether the focus is technical or marketing, it's that Product Managers spend much of their time in what I call interruption mode. Interruption mode is when it seems like everyone, from the CEO to the UPS delivery man, pops into your office to ...
06Aug 2003
03030 Effective and Practical UI Design
Reams of advice have been written about how to design a highly usable user interface for software products. There are experts who have devoted their entire careers to this subject. Far be it from me to try to compete with this body of knowledge. However, as a Product Manager, I have usually found myself in a ...
30Jul 2003
03029 That Sisyphean Task of Change
Some of you may be familiar with Sisyphus, the Greek king who was punished in the afterlife by being condemned to roll a boulder up a hill. Whenever he neared the top of the hill, the stone would roll all the way back down to the bottom again. For those Product Managers who are only just ...
22Jul 2003
03028 Clarifying the Why of Requirements
(Today's issue has a fun challenge question that demonstrates just how much the software industry has changed in the past 20 years. See Can You Answer This? below.) Requirements are the fuel that Product Managers produce to feed the company's software development engine. As part of refining the quality of those requirements, it's helpful to understand ...
14Jul 2003
03027 Requirements: Envisioning the Product
With product requirements, one temptation a Product Manager has to fight is the desire to jump into the details. You already know what you want, lord knows you've heard what people want often enough, someone's got to actually put them on paper, and that someone is you, so you might as well get started. But there's ...
07Jul 2003
03026 Losing the Battle to Win the War
Product Managers are tasked with managing a product. Yet they do not have control over the many departments who do the work of building, marketing, selling, and delivering the product. This means that Product Managers must learn to manage by influence. For Product Managers, having to manage by influence can lead to a mindset where they ...
29Jun 2003
03025 Breaking Through to New Technology
Implementing new technology in the product is a task that often stymies software companies. Because the change frequently goes to the very core of how the software works, and developers are on unfamiliar ground, there is lots of potential for your company to get stuck delaying the use of new technology year after year. The key ...
24Jun 2003
03024 For Sales: Dispatch to the Front Lines
One of the key contributions that a Product Manager can make is to provide regular, bite-sized input to the sales force about product benefits and competitive advantages. So often, sales reps are thrown into quarterly (or even less frequent) product training sessions consisting of more than an hour's worth of material poured into a single hour's ...