What makes people creative in the first place? How do you maximize creativity? What do you do when you hit the wall and can’t come up with an idea?

Even though it did rely on a few cliché examples , e.g. Pixar and 3M, I enjoyed this book and the way it explored creativity from a thinking perspective. It should come as no surprise that there isn’t a magic bullet when it comes to new ideas but there are different approaches you can use that can help improve your odds of success.

The book was a fast read and left you with several ideas to try next time you are seeking to find a creative solution to a complex problem. One of the suggestions I really liked was why you shouldn’t brainstorm. The problem with the “no idea is a bad idea” approach is that without discourse and criticism the ideas don’t get filter and pushed on to the next level. Turing the spark of an idea into something that is really creative takes work and without the pressure to make it better, it usually doesn’t happen.

Here are a few more of my favorite inspirational quotes that I captured while reading through the book.

Enjoy!

How Did You End Up Here?

There was a void in your roadmap. Your competitor launched a new product. You had extra budget that needed to be spent.

Whatever the reason, there was a gap and the pressure to fill was too great to resist.

The good news is that you responded by shipping. You got something out the door and made a big deal about it. Isn’t shipping always a good thing?

The bad news was the result.

Your customers response varied from “meh” to “yuck“. The market ignored you. Or worse, the market did respond with a “WTF?” and other questions of ridicule.

You’re Trying Too Hard

You should have delayed the launch when you realized it wasn’t going to happen. You should have killed the advertising when you realized it was all smoke and mirrors.

You should have said no when you realized the product wasn’t fully baked.

Our topic for the call was on the challenge of taking a product marketing or product management job in a new domain area. Scott and I both offered suggestions and tips on what has worked for us as you try to sift through the fire hose of new information.

I hope you enjoy the call and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime: 27  mins

• Starting from the product perspective – what’s it doing and for whom?
• Looking at the market by focusing on individuals
• The “T-shape” analysis  - wide view on the market, deep dive on the problems
• How do the internal teams talk about their products – what’s the pitch?
• Is their alignment between the teams when it comes to the buyer needs?
• Capturing the domain specific terms of the company/industry
• Concept mapping tool recommendation - CmapTools
• Mind mapping tool recommendation - FreeMind(PC)
• Mind mapping tool recommendation – NetNewsWire 
• Creating a list of influential competitors, analysts, bloggers to follow
• RSS feed tool recommendation – FeedDemon 
• Turing your research into a repeatable process
• Knowledge collection tool – Evernote
• Building a model of the drivers of the business
• Organizational soft skills and Paul Young’s X-Factor presentation 
• Don’t forget competitor analysis!

During the presentation I picked on a startup called PlanCast which was a schedule planning app that a lot of people were starting to use. Their home page made it impossible to tell what their application was supposed to do and why you should give it a try. As a counter example, I used Evernote which not only had a great home page but had an awesome “What we do” video that introduced the product.

Sometimes You Only Get One Shot

Whether you have a new product or a new company or both, sometimes you only get one shot to tell your story. Having a product video introduction can be a very effective way to convince a customer that you are worth their time and that they should learn more.

Here’s what I think great product intro videos do well:

1. Quickly introduce why someone would use your product/service – what problem are you solving for me?
2. Give us an idea of who the product was made for – who’s the target user?
3. Illustrate some (not all) of the features of the product – how do I use it?
4. Generate some excitement – leave me wanting to learn more!

There is definitely an art form for putting this together and in a package that you can watch in two minutes or less. It used to be that it was tough to find good examples but the secret is out.

Here are two recent videos that I think do a great job of introducing their product:

Don’t Get Lost in the Story

It takes a lot of creativity to turn your product message into a visual story. One of the biggest challenges you are going to face is getting lost in THE story. This  happens when your message gets lost inside the story that you are trying to tell.

Google recently released a video that I think is a perfect example of losing your product message while trying to tell  a story. The following video is very creative and well done but at the end of it, I am still not sure what it is their product does, who it is for, and how it works. Most importantly, I am not excited and am not rushing off to learn more:

Do use videos to tell the story of your product. Just make sure that your message doesn’t get lost in the story.

What’s your favorite product intro video that you’ve ever seen?

Designing a product to hit a specific price point is not easy. It means that you have to operate inside a set of constraints and make painfully hard decisions.

Making these trade offs will result in some features not being included. These features may be ones that your customers will tell you are very important. These features also may be part of your competitors’ products. This is what makes it such an interesting challenge and a difficult task.

When you find the right balance, you can deliver a product that stands out in the market even though it has limitations (think of the Kindle Fire compared to the Apple iPad). Pick the wrong combination and you end up with a product missing features, out of price position, or both.

A few weeks ago, the WSJ ran a review of a sports car that I think highlights a good example of designing for a price point. From the start, the reviewer is aware that this car has had to make compromises compared to higher end sports cars. The reviewer notes,

If this car were built by, say, BMW, the designers would have packed the fender wells with no-profile tires and splendid 19- or 20-inch alloy wheels. Such footwear looks great and commands serious cornering grip.

However, the product designers made choices designed to create the best experience they could given the limitations of their price point. These choices helped to provide the perception of a better, “faster”, experience even though they couldn’t afford to install all the high-end bells and whistles.

The review continues,  noticing the impact of the design choices,

The BRZ, very much by design and very much in the style of the great Mazda MX-5, goes in the other direction, drawing out and exaggerating automotive cues that give the impression of going fast at wholly more sane speeds. One hugely affective cue is auditory: Thanks to resonator tubes pumping intake and exhaust sounds into the cabin, the BRZ snarls and burrs and howls like a garage-built retro rod, even when it’s accelerating away from a light like an ice-cream truck (0-60 mph in about 6 seconds)….The BRZ thus perpetrates a splendid and useful fraud on its buyers: a not-so-fast sport coupe that is an absolute riot to drive.

What a great lesson! Just because you can’t compete head-to-head with a competitor doesn’t mean you can’t find creative ways  to still provide a compelling experience for your target market.

Image Credit:  Klaus M

A few months ago, I was asked by the 280 Group to contribute to a new book “42 Rules of Product Marketing“. The book is a collection of insights and practical advice from over 35 real world practitioners. For my part, I decided to focus on what I truly believe is the foundation of product marketing and what guides my decisions every day as a product marketer. Enjoy!

Forget about your product.

Product marketing is less about what you sell and more about who purchases it. Understanding your customer is what matters most, mainly what they care about and how they purchase and consume products. Only at that point should you strategize how to position, package, price, and sell to your customers.

Planning with the end in mind (the purchasing transaction) distinguishes a good product marketer from a great one. Great product marketers map their marketing strategy and sales initiatives around their customers’ buying journey. Most importantly, they strive to live, breathe, and think like their customers.

Doing so strengthens the product marketer’s best effort to:

Create a memorable story. The best product marketers create an emotional connection with their audience by casting their customer as the story’s main character and speaking in their customer’s voice. They search diligently for the perfect tone of authenticity that resonates best with their customers and focus their message on solutions, benefits, and value without superlatives and buzz words. Think Apple’s iPod “1,000 songs in your pocket” or Southwest Airlines “You are now free to move about the country.”

Create an enchanting experience. The best product marketers lead their customers through a beautifully orchestrated buying experience. They appreciate that their customer cares about the cumulative product purchasing experience including the initial website visit, first interaction with the sales team, online registration to community and support sites, and so on. They continue to escort their customers throughout the implementation phase ensuring that each customer is getting the promised value from their product. They know, especially in the B2B space, that a cohesive purchasing and on boarding experience will build the strongest relationship with their customer and increase the likelihood of an initial and subsequent purchase. Think Rackspace’s “Fanatical Support” brand promise and delivery.

Create passionate brand advocates. The best product marketers transform enchanted customers into their most effective sales agents by nurturing their customers’ passion and providing them the communication channels to voice their love for the product, whether an online forum or offline user conference. They root for their customers more than anyone else because they know that in these days of growing peer influence on purchases, their best customers are also their best marketing assets, their best brand advocates and ultimately, their best sales reps. Think Harley Davidson and their “Live to ride” official riding club (HOG) or Zappos and their mission to “Deliver Happiness.”

With the growing use of social media, product marketers have more ways than ever to connect, engage, and insert themselves into their customers’ habits while building a genuine relationship with their customers. With intimate customer knowledge, product marketers are best positioned to lead their company’s go-to-market strategy and execute upon Peter Drucker’s vision:

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Every journey begins with a single step, so slip into your customers’ shoes, walk a few miles in their problems, and…forget about your product

The 42 Rules of Product Marketing is available here

The Startup of You is a book on career management authored by two successful startup entrepreneurs, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha.

The theme of the book is that you need to take ownership of your career, much like an entrepreneur takes ownership of his/her business, and create a plan to adopt to a changing marketplace (see The End of Business as Usual). While this is not necessarily a new thought, their framework and advice does make sense and sounds very applicable to today’s technology related careers.

Here is some of the advice I noted while reading the book:

Professional loyalty now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your boss.

Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.

Imagine you got laid off from your job today. Who are the ten people you’d email to solicit their advice on what to do next? Reach out to them now, when you don’t need anything specifically.

Golden opportunities are not wrapped in pretty packaging with a clear label; killer job opportunities are rarely advertised on job boards.

Almost every case of serendipity and opportunity involves someone doing something.

The concept from the book that resonated with me the most was on risk taking. The Startup of You advocates that taking calculated risks with your career not only helps you reap the rewards of new opportunities but also better prepares you for future surprises. From the book,

Without frequent, contained risk taking, you are setting yourself up for a major dislocation at some point in the future. Inoculating yourself to big risks is like inoculating yourself against the flu virus. By injecting a small bit of flu into your body in the form of a vaccination, you make a big flu outbreak survivable. By introducing regular volatility into your career, you make surprise survivable. You gain the “ability to absorb shocks gracefully.”

Looking back at my career, I would point to a few startups during the dot.com days that I worked at that seemed highly risky at the time. The companies ended up being failures which is never what you hope to have happen.

However, if I would have passed on the roles, I would not have gotten to work with so many great people while trying build a business. Being asked to own something and take on new challenges gave me a firsthand experience on how to generate and execute ideas and what to do when things don’t turn out as planned.

While the risks didn’t have an immediate payoff, the return came over time as the expertise learned and networked gained helped me move on to bigger roles and other companies over the years.

Speaking of building a network, the Startup of You also introduced some interesting thoughts around the benefits of strong allies and weak ties that you need to help support your efforts.

Want to learn more about it? Read the book!

Image credit:  koalie

When it comes to being busy, I usually fall into one of three categories:

1. Busy – lots to do but manageable
2. Very Busy – enough going on that I need to start putting some project off till later
3. Beyond Busy – so much to do that that there is not enough time in the day

While at stage 1 and stage 2 of being busy, I have alway been able to manage things by keep a running list in my head. While I have tried a lot of different time management system (remember those giant Franklin Covey books?), I have always found that the process creates more work than benefit and I quickly return to my old habits.

The challenge is that when I cross over into stage 3, my system breaks down. I start keeping lists but then I need a list of lists to track them all down. I have grown to love Evernote for keeping track of content, but as a time management system it just doesn’t work for me.

Enter Prabhakar Gopalan, a friend of mine that has been looking at the process of time management for some time.  Prabhakar is a fan of the Kanban process for task management, which he call the a primordial way of getting things done.

The basic idea is that you keep your lists, which is how the mind likes to think, but then sort them three basics ways – stuff you need to work on, stuff you are working on, stuff you have finished.

While I loved the idea, I struggled with how to carry out the process. Keeping three different notes in Evernote and then moving stuff around still seemed like too much hassle.

This is where kanban2go come in. Prabhakar liked the concept so much that he built his own free web app to solve the problem. Not only did he design the app so that it was simple to use, he spent extra time building mobile and tablet interfaces as well so that you could use it on the go.

Don’t take my word for it. You can find the site at kanban2go.com and give it a try yourself.

Good luck getting even more of the right stuff done!

That being said, here is the most important thing you have to do when exhibiting at a trade show,

Clearly explain what it is that you do on your trade show booth. 

Yes, I know you are mandated to show your awesome marketing tag line like,

“We Do More!”

“Exceeding Expectations Since 1999″

“Leading Technology Innovation”

“We Do More while Optimizing and Bring Best in Class Value”

but that doesn’t mean that you can’t add descriptive text that explains what part of the industry you are in and what problem it is your are addressing. If you are a tech company that specializes in network security software, say so. If you are a mobile design firm focused on gaming, put it down in writing. Don’t make me guess!

It doesn’t have to be creative, just clearly written and in a big enough font that people can read it from 8-10 feet away.

The trade show floor is a noisy and chaotic environment that is already filled with enough distractions. Don’t make it even harder on the audience. Especially, those that are there looking to learn about a solution to a problem that you can address.

Image Credit:  ShashiBellamkonda

How did it get to this point? Let’s start at the beginning.

Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate has been on my reading list forever and I figured with my plans to present at ProductCamp Austin, it couldn’t be a better time to read it (also, it worked well with my 2012 book reading goals).

The book was highly recommended and I can honestly say that it lived up to the hype. Nancy’s philosophy for presenting is that it is up to the presenter to inform and inspire. To make this happen, Nancy advises that you take the audience through a journey to a destination. This means that every piece of content needs to build towards your final goal.

To accomplish this goal, you need to take time turning the information you have gathered for the presentation into a meaningful story. Here are a few of the techniques that I tried to use in my presentation:

So, where did it go wrong?

When my presentation started, the system running the 20 foot display screen crashed. This meant that I had no audio or visual in a 300+ person conference room. As you can see in the picture above, it was kind of hard to see my 15″ laptop screen.

While I had practiced delivering the presentation several times, I had never done so without the slides. I was dependent on the visual cues for my supporting points and guiding the flow of my presentation. Additionally, I had quotes, like the following, that I had not memorized but needed for support.