product strategy
Product Requirements: How to Figure Out What to Put in the Stew
Even though it’s often a no-win situation, I’ve always enjoyed the process of coming up with product requirements. I really like taking all those disparate threads and coming up what will be in the next mix.
Things have changed, of course, since I was establishing product requirements. With the development tools available, release cycles, at least [...]
Progress is good, right?
The New York Times wrote about the return of the browser wars last week. The browser world is getting interesting again; Firefox 3 will be released this month, Microsoft is showing test versions of IE8, and Apple’s Safari is making inroads thanks to the iPhone and their unfortunate decision to push out to Windows users [...]
For the beach bum who has everything…
The other day, my sister Kathleen forwarded an e-mail she’d gotten from Zappo’s and suggested I take a look.
I combed through it, and what to my wondering eye did appear but a blurb for some high-end flip-flops with a built in church key.
First off, I want to say how gratifying it is to know that [...]
Products Must Solve a Problem
One of this week’s tech news stories is the end of Wal-Mart’s experiment with selling Linux PCs in its stores. It was not a success.
Advocates of Linux have been insisting that the open source OS will take off this year for quite a few years now. It never seems to happen, and I doubt it [...]
Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
Friends know that I am not a big fan of business books. In fact, one of my favorite business books every is the The Witch Doctors, which talks about why most business books are nonsense. That said, I do read them - one must keep up, right - and sometimes they are valuable. Meatball Sundae [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #14
This is the fourteenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #14: Look for opportunities to deliver the remarkable.
I’ll have to admit, when I saw that word “remarkable” my first thought was, ‘is this one of those annoying words like passionate and personal brand that pop up [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #13
This is the thirteenth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #13: Every “product” needs a product manager and a business case.
In my experience, most B2B technology companies do a pretty good job with making sure that all their products have a product manager. Of course, sometimes [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #12
This is the twelfth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #12: The answer to most of the questions is not in the building.
When I first began working at Genuity, a temporarily high-flying Internet Services Provider of the dot.com era, I was struck by the fact that [...]
Those Darn Customers
From the “Customers, they are so annoying!” files, Pragmatic Marketing’s Tuned In blog comments on Microsoft’s response to customers having problems with Outlook 2007:
Yesterday Microsoft released an update to Outlook 2007 to help speed up the downloading of messages and reduce the annoying and highly criticized freezing associated with moving or deleting messages. Microsoft indicated [...]
When Life Hands the Other Guy Lemons… Chinese Toys and American Toymakers
Recent news about lead-tainted toys manufactured in China have been helpful to one segment of the toy industries: small companies making hand-crafted toys in the US. But it’s hard for small operations to gear up to meet unexpected demand, so we see - for example - things like this from a toymaker in Maine:
This is [...]
