If you have ever watched people playing on the tennis courts, you see two, or four, players in a game, actively running around and hitting a ball back and forth. Many rackets, one ball in the game. Have you ever taken a look at the edge of the court? There are tennis balls, lots of them, ...
04Nov 2005
05020 Big Talk and Small Steps: Implementing Strategy
In many companies, the management team, Marketing, and Business Development are full of ideas about where to take your product. They come up with all sorts of potential applications for it, applications that would be competitive and profitable. These ideas sound great, but they have to be implemented before they'll make any type of substantive difference ...
18Oct 2005
05019 The Host With the Most: Hosting Software
Many companies today want to package their software product as an Application Service Provider (ASP), or hosted, offering. Hosting your software brings a number of advantages to your business. But hosting software is not for the faint of heart. Read on to understand the dynamics, the limitations, and the considerations involved in successfully hosting software. Continue Reading...
23Sep 2005
05018 Giving a Good Product Presentation
You hear lots of theories - some of them pretty cockeyed - about how to give an effective sales presentation and demo of your product. Everyone will have suggestions on how to do it. Every experience you have will give you new ideas. Here are some ideas from my own recent experience presenting a software ...
07Sep 2005
05017 Working the Plan Using a Plan That Works
Software development organizations struggle mightily with planning their development efforts and sticking to the plan. Some Development departments fail to plan at all, other than following constantly changing, seat-of-the-pants estimates, much to the chagrin of the rest of the company that depends upon their output. Others have solid plans that they can follow and use ...
23Aug 2005
05016 Pushed and Pulled: Development vs. Production
Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to ...
05Aug 2005
05015 Degrees of Ability: Hiring Into Product Management
Product Management is not a job that people can go out and get a degree in. You can get a degree in Computer Science that covers the knowledge you need in order to start out as a programmer. You can get a degree in Marketing that gives you the basic foundation to get started in ...
19Jul 2005
05014 Striking Gold: Polishing Your Marketing Message
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 ...
07Jul 2005
05013 Software Design: Seeing vs. Thinking
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 ...
22Jun 2005
05012 Focal Point: Adding to Sales Discussions
Product Managers provide a unique role in a software company, something that may include skills in Sales, Marketing, and Development, but reaches well beyond the scope of any of those three functions. It's a role nobody else fills. Yet because of their in-depth understanding of the market and the reasons people want and need their ...