Panel on Agile Product Management:

• John Mansour, ZigZag Marketing. They sell training around Product Management - "if you don't need it, we don't sell it"
• Greg Cohen - Dir. Business Development at the 280 Group - Product Management contracting/consulting company
• Jason Tanner - General Manager at NetQoS - responsible for the end to end management of a specific product in need of attention and expertise.

As to agile development in general - John thinks it's not that prevalent in the industry. There's still a lot more talk than there is walk, and most of it seems to still be waterfall. The rest of the panel concurs. Audience query: more resistance from Product Managers to agile than from Developers?

"Ask 10 different companies to define agile, and you'll get 10 different answers". You need a Product Manager who is open to change, or you won't get it. Financial Services firms came up, and it's noted that iterative/agile is more common there, because they are in a constant "arms race" with the competition.

"A lot of product managers are actually functional designers" - they should just re-title themselves. What is functional design? These are customer surrogates who will work with engineering to create the way the interaction works (User Experience Design). This is often a missing function at a company, and it often gets lost in the PM role.

What about trying to walk into agile from waterfall without help? ("on the cheap" to quote the questioner). Why not pay for a week or two of training that will get everyone on the same page? Getting an external expert (with the consultant "halo") to explain why this is a good idea is a good investment. Note from the panel - failures happen when agile gets adopted in isolation, and an attempt is made to follow a cookie cutter "straight from the book" process.

Question: How does agile change what PM does? "It forces them to get out of the building and meet customers" - find out what they do, how they do it, why they do it - and use that information to align requirements with what customers really need.

The real benefit of an agile approach for Product Management is that you are validating the things you are building can actually be sold - bearing in mind that you cannot become so "customer focused" that you forget the market.

Wrap up question: If agile teams could do one thing better, what would it be?

The one thing that keeps agile ticking is discipline and testing. Concurrence on the panel: unit testing is crucial, because it keeps the team focused. Solid unit testing dropped Q/A from 2 weeks per sprint (3 week sprint) to 4 hours. One more comment: trying to adopt without training of some kind is a potential failure point.

Technorati Tags: product management

James Morehead heads up Product management and Marketing at SupportSoft. he's giving this talk in terms of where he works.

So - traditionally, Product Management and Product Marketing are separately organized, although often with the same management. He's advocating having a single marketing organization for all of that. Where he works, the organization is one centrally located and managed group. Responsibilities?

• Customer interaction (supporting sales)
• Outbound - web content, collateral, press/analyst, speaking, etc
• Inbound - market research/planning, roadmap/release planning, pricing, training

Metrics for the merged organization:

• Quarterly MBO process - aligned with corporate objectives and quarterly bonuses
• Pipeline per product
• Release completeness - aligned with engineering, focuses each PM on shepherding reqs to delivery

By combining the two pieces, you get aligned communications. To ensure this, they set up a system of "gates" to ensure that products get to where they need to go - miss a gate, slip a release.

• Market Opportunity
• Use Case Definition
• Functional and Usability Reqs
• Engineering Development Timeline
• Functional Completeness
• Release Readiness
• 6 Month Assessment

These gates have various people who are notified of progress, and who have approval/decline power.

Benefits:

• Credibility with customers as you have one group in charge of all messaging - roadmap and communication
• Reqs tied tightly to customer interaction
• No communication gaps between PM and PMM
• Efficient Staffing Model

Challenges:

• Constantly being stretched between sales, engineering, and corp. marketing
• Hiring is more difficult - staff needs to be articulate and detail oriented
• Both sales and engineering can end up feeling under-served

One caveat: James is not sure that this would scale up to a larger firm (his has 220 or so people). In the summary, he figures that the roles will eventually split to some extent - probably around industry verticals, followed by field marketing.

Technorati Tags: product management, product marketing

It's after lunch - time for another session. This is with Hugh Richards of the Product Point Group. Hugh consults with companies on product management issues. The talk: Why we innovate and how to do that successfully.

Profitability comes from scalable growth - you need to be able to grow your revenues without letting your costs outstrip them. Meaning, innovation has to come in a scalable and repeatable fashion. Innovation in this context could mean culling projects that are dragging, or it could mean tackling new markets, or it could mean buying companies. Bottom line - innovations can be strategic or tactical.

Pitfalls? Underestimating costs involved (merger costs, development costs, etc). Announcing something new too soon, such that it saps sales of existing product. Having developers leave due to the way development is happening - you need to look ahead to prevent these. Also: make sure you aren't trying to innovate in a commoditizing field.

You want to be in for the long haul: Compare when OS/2 came out to when Windows Vista came out. You want to innovate "just enough" for the time you're working in.

You need to understand your own company and product before you can go forward. Sometimes it's more useful to stand pat than to innovate (commoditization vs. optimization).

Innovation must be led from the top - without executive buy in, you won't get there. You also need leadership to sponsor a repeatable process.

Well - I've got power and an internet connection - things are looking up. The before lunch session is with Alyssa Dver (who used to work in product management at Cincom, well before my time here). Alyssa is the author of "Software Product Management Essentials".

Alyssa has 20 years of experience in the Product Management experience, as well as consulting experience in the field. Some objectives for the talk:

• Benchmarks against other PMs
• Insight on best PM practices
• Ideas and metrics in the field
• Other expectations (and how the field has changed)

We are starting off with a question for the audience - "What is a Product Manager?" - the issue is, it's not an easy field to define. The role tends to differ by company and product sector. There is no standard definition. The average PM crosses multiple business and technical boundaries. The Average:

• 36 years old
• 88% claim to be somewhat to very technical
• 91% have college degrees, 39% have a Masters
• 29% are female (down from the past)

The typical Product Manager represents three products. Typically, PMs report through marketing. The stat that's down is how many report to the CEO (now 8% - was as high as 25% as recently as 3 years ago). Typically receives 50 emails per day, sends 25 (this number is down "sales is finding links on their own"). We are attending more internal meetings - as high as 2 days/week (equivalent). What do we do?

• 71% researching market needs
• 51% preparing business case
• 18% perform win/loss analysis (down historically)
• 82% monitoring dev projects
• 80% writing reqs
• 54% writing specs
• 44% writing promotional copy
• 41% approving promotional materials
• 9% working with press/analysts (down)
• 49% training sales or going on sales calls

You need to get in front of relevant press/analyst people and be able to explain what you do to them. If you aren't talking to them, you are letting them form their own conclusions.

PMs do lots of ad-hoc training, manage product road maps, manage alpha/beta programs, perform ongoing competitve analysis. Spend time defending pricing/packaging/licensing. Product Managers also tend to manage the release paper trail (whatever that is - regulatory compliance).

How do you know that you are doing a good job?

• Successful product
• Customer Acquisition
• Customer Retention (need to be careful about how you play this)
• Invited to participate in sales
• Invited to participate in engineering
• Invited to participate in investor, management, board meetings

Seven Habits:

• Know their products but they know their own limits
• Listen First - ask what they do before you explain what you do
• Ask why, not what
• Decisive - make calls, don't wait forever
• Responsive - get back to people, period
• Communicate frequently, concretely, and concisely
• Manage Passion

Get face to face with sales, customers, engineering, and management. Find out why you aren't being invited to meetings. Benchmark your own processes, and measure progress. Alyssa is also pumping classes and training from a variety of sources.

Technorati Tags: product management

Best Practices in marketing are shifting right now, and a you need to keep up with that in real time. This is a talk from Anne Marie Beasley of Symantec. There's no time to stop "take the temperature" of the market - you need to make that an ongoing process.

Big challenges:

• Stay in touch with your customers
• Anticipate/Respond to your competitors
• Align your organization appropriately - know what you're good at

You need to track customer shifts in needs, behaviors, and buying dynamics. Keeping track of their satisfaction and loyalty is crucial. Understand what your brand actually means to people.

Follow on from the morning talk: the Product Managers at Symantec get a daily report on things that come up in the Blogosphere - the report aggregates content from influential blogs in their segment(s). They do the same thing to track competitors. This allows them to do deep analysis of what their customers and competitors think about the market segment and the product(s).

All of this information is useless if you don't get the information out to your field people (sales/tech sales/etc). You need to turn that information around so that the field knows how to address both the positives and the negatives - and how to react to them. You need to be transparent - everyone else will know about the positives and the negatives already.

You also need to aggregate that information up the food chain to the executive team. Give them a single view of what's happening across the company's offerings. As a product manager, you want to be a strategic advisor by providing a real time pulse of competitive information (from customers, prospects, and competitors).

Technorati Tags: social media, social marketing, marketing, marketing intelligence, product management

Morning Keynote: Larry Weber of W2 Group is talking about "the social web" and community building. Larry thinks of the current web as "web 4.0":

• Web 1.0: 1989 - 1994 - HTML
• Web 2.0 (1994-1997) - the browser
• Web 3.0: (1997-2001) - early social media
• Web 4.0 (present) - social media

Branding is changing due to the social web - users have control of the message, and the conversation is now running in multiple directions. In terms of community: Go back to the 17th century, New York City had 39 newspapers, and they were the social media of the day. A lot of the conversations you need to track are happening online on new media sites (example: Boing Boing) that are growing in importance.

Good point about getting links and attention - you need gto make your content interesting, and make an effort to be found. There have been a spate of "faux blogs" (he's bringing up "Ford Bold Moves" as an example) that corporate marketing groups have been setting up. If the site isn't authentic, it will cause problems. Larry mentions that he tried posting some feedback on that site, and the feedback was somewhat negative - it got dropped down the memory hole by the site editors. Being inauthentic doesn't help you.

It's not about talking at customers and prospects - it's about the conversation (you could get all of this by spending a few days reading Doc Searl's blog, btw). Larry thinks you're going to see more growth in niche social networks devoted to specific interest groups - and those groups will be partially walled gardens for those groups (this I'm not sure about, but it might run that way).

Interesting things here at the end: Media Relations and Crisis Management - those are going to be moving more and more to a need to react to online buzz storms (there are plenty of business and political examples of this; Larry mentioned a campaign that ran against a specific Wal-Mart policy).

Interesting point: forget demographics. It's all about behavior now, and you can split out that information much more easily now. "Marketing should be more like running a 24x7 TV show" - constantly adapting and changing. You need compelling content and it needs to be updated constantly. When aggregating the information being spread about you, you don't need to track all of it - you need to track the most relevant ones (Google/Technorati reputation).

Engage your communities in conversation, and they'll come to you. Very important - make sure the relevant influencers know who you are. Very important: Don't squelch negative feedback. Accept it as valid feedback and react appropriately to it.

Interesting reaction to a question - Larry thinks that Second Life will fail. The idea of virtualization works for entertainment, but he doesn't think that a general purpose virtual world will work out in the long run (i.e., he thinks you'll see niches).

Larry thinks blogs and podcasts should go aggressively niche - meaning, no "general purpose" corporate blog. He mentions that Jonathan Schwartz disagrees with him on that :)

Technorati Tags: social media, social marketing

Last session of the day - a panel discussion on breaking through the noise in the marketplace. The panel:

• Craig Fairfield - VP Of Marketing for QlikTech (BI)
• Michael Salerno - In the CRM group at Oracle. Also associated with the BPMA (Boston Product Management Association)
• Paul Zengilowski - Director of Product Marketing at DataCert.
• Paul Gannon - Senior Director of Corporate Marketing for TMA Resources

Paul Gannon: his firm is business to business, but they've found some success acting like business to consumer. This has been something of a tough fit culturally at the firm. What does that mean? They've started doing more "fun" stuff (example: jugglers in a trade booth) to get attention.

Paul Zengilowski: they realized that they weren't big enough to play the same game as everyone else. They settled on two sales channels: direct sales and their existing customers (who were driving perceptions of the company). They focused on "Thought Leadership" as a way of driving authority. They did that by creating a client advisory board (made up of clients and partners who they do business with). They got a lot of traction out of setting up these directed events. They are now starting to see their clients and prospects calling them to get meetings set up in their locales. They aren't using blogging/podcasting.

Michael Salerno: There is a lot of noise that you need to cut through in order to differentiate yourself. A few things to develop:

• What is your message? What problem do you solve?
• Once you know what your value is, identify who your audience is/should be
• Execute with conviction. make sure that the content you deliver has real value - do more than "phone it in"

Craig Fairfield: Two things: What are you going to say, and how are you going to say it? Be truthful - don't try to push BS. If your business isn't at the C* level execs, don't craft your message as if you do. Likewise, if you do sell there, make sure you do craft it that way. Put more simply, keep it real. Don't change marketing strategies quickly: Stick with something consistently for a period of time (at least 6 months). One other thing: this is the software industry: demos are king. Craig is amazed at how many people he runs across who cannot do a useful demo of what problem their product solves. How do you get that message across? Try to get other people pushing your message - customers especially. A poorly articulated message from a customer beats a great message from the CEO. No one believes your CEO.

"Go big or go home" - if there are 10 trade shows in your sector, find the most relevant one and make a big splash, instead of going to all 10 and going small. Along those lines, less is more. Talk to one analyst instead of trying to talk to 20 of them.

In an answer to an audience question, demos should be quick and to the point - they need to convey the key pain point that the product solves quickly. If your demo drives a prospect into a feature comparison conversation, you created the wrong demo. You should get into the product within 5 minutes, and out of the demo quickly as well. Don't waste a lot of the precious time with the prospect/customer in powerpoint.

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR

It's after lunch, and time for David Meerman Scott's PR and marketing talk. The old rules - you had two choices:

• The media wrote about you
• You bought advertising

The new rules: You are what you publish. Marketing and PR are not about your products. The way to do web marketing is to publish content that your buyers/prospects want to consume. It's about participating in the community and being found by search engines.

David is a big fan of "The Long Tail" [ed: might be interesting to hear David talk to Nick Carr :) ]. I tend to agree with David on this one - the long tail simply means that niche products can get aggregated enough to create a serviceable market.

You want to optimize your site for buyer personas - move people into and though the sales cycle. And example: an electronics vendor with two buyer personas: "uber geeks" who know the products already, and know exactly what features they want, and "clueless" buyers who know they want an HD tv, but not much more. You need different paths for these two personas.

Bottom line: Create marketing for your buyers. Most of the marketing literature out there is dreck, targeting no one. You can spot these via terms like "next generation".

Blogging for business works if your buyer persona reads blogs. david is showing us a sampling of business blogs he likes and reads. The idea here is pretty simple - you enable conversation between customers, you, analysts (etc). Heh - he's showing us a YouTube video put out by IBM - it's hilarious, because it pokes fun at IBM.

Online Press Releases: A good way to reach buyers. The evolution:

• Printed Media
• TV and Radio
• Financial Media (Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg) over the wire (40 years ago)
• Lexis/Nexis, Factiva (etc) (25 years ago)
• Consumer outlets after 1995 (web)
• Feeds (2001 + RSS)

The news release is no longer for the media only - they are for the interested public. The old rules said that you had to have "real news" (analyst quote, customer quote, release, etc). They are now useful for getting information out via keywords to any interested party. And Example: keyword search for "accelerate sales cycle" - top hit brought back WebEx news releases. Following those links gets you to free trial offers, which takes you into the sales cycle.

The new rules: Send a press release whenever you have anything to associate with keywords you want to have linking back to you.

Viral Marketing: Publishing fantastic content and getting people to link to you. Even when you get negative reviews (Rubel panned david's ebook), you get lots of conversation and interest. That all led to a book deal, paid speaking gigs, consulting deals (via the 250k downloads). The investment: $2500.

Search Engine Marketing: does not rely on interruptions (ads) to get attention - it's the only form of marketing that does not rely on that. Interesting: He uses his full name (David Meerman Scott) instead of David Scott so that he comes up first for his name searches. When you want to "own" a space make sure to do Google searches.

Advice: Act the part of one of your buyer personas and visit your website. Do some Google searches for your company/product name. See what comes up, and where you are succeeding/failing. Some more advice for marketing people: get out of the office and meet the customers. Find out what language they use, and create your content based on those experiences.

Hey - since I got a mention in his book, I've got an autographed copy now. Neat.

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR