1. I think Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing should be required watching. 
2. If you are focusing on a SMB SaaS product, read Tomasz Tunguz’s article on the subject. When it comes to a successful SMB offering Tom is spot on when he writes, “The most successful SMB SaaS products typically offer a 2 step value proposition: an initial value proposition to the end user and a longer term value proposition to a manager/decision maker.”
3. If you have not read the book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, stop right now and go get it.
4. At some point when building a new company, you have to move from building a product to acquiring customers. Seth Levine writes about the importance of focus during this stage. Seth says, “The important shift here isn’t the shift in hiring more sales people or more marketing people, it’s the shift to recognizing the most important thing is to get more customers. If the whole organization is thinking about this, including engineers, I bet you would come up with a variety of ideas and priorities to meet this. And instead of just the sales guys thinking about sales, you involve the whole team.”
5. If I had a nickel for every book that was published in the last year about innovation, I would have a lot of nickels. HBR has a good article explaining why more organizations can’t seem to find a way to change - “Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward. ”
6. I think it is worth paying attention to how you can Engineer Serendipity. You never know what you are going to get.
7. If you are working on a freemium product, learning about your customers is hard. There is a big difference between all the feedback you are going to get from the free users on your site and the select few that are willing to pay you money.
8. How many times have you heard, “Make it simple”? Probably not enough. David Lieb writes about minimizing cognitive overhead and how if you want to make things simple, sometimes you need to make your users do more – “Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc.) into meaning and purpose.”
9. Want more engagement? Create a movement - “In a digital and social age, pipes are less important. People are the channel. You don’t own or rent them. You can’t control them. You can only serve and support them.”
10. Just when you think you have found every useful site there is on the net, you run into a couple of more worth checking out - 100 Websites You Should Know and Use.

Finally, I  put together some thoughts on developing new products and the challenge of trying to tackle two markets at the same time. If you want to check it out, it is on the On Product Management blog.

• It all started as a place to jot down notes on a side project and learn WordPress
• It became a place to learn how to blog
• And then to experiment with video
• Evolved into thoughts on product management and product marketing
• Then added a podcast

It has been a great learning experience and honestly, a lot of fun. But something has been nagging at me that now is time to take it in another direction. The hard part is figuring out now what? If this was all just a side experiment, what to tackle now? Should I officially shut it down, let it fade away, or do something else?

Looking at the blogs I have been reading the most at as of late (SVBLTE, Om.co, Seth’s, Quora, cdixon to name a few  ) they seem to focus more on quality than quantity. They share good advice, lessons learned, food for thought, and lots of personality.

Some writers write occasionally and put together novel worthy prose. Others focus on sharing quick, snack like content meant to prompt a thought or an ah-ha moment.

The best advice I have found on the subject was to write for yourself – “Writing is therapeutic. To teach is to learn“. That sounds like a good reason to me.

The agenda for the call was to discuss what happens when Product Management gets pulled in too many directions. While the aim is to be the product leader, spreading yourself too thin can result in product management becoming more of an administrative function in the organization. Jim’s latest blog post, That Sucking Sound…, did a great job of describing the problem so we wanted to spend some time digging deeper into what’s happening and how to best handle if you find yourself in a similar scenario.

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

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime: 46 mins

•  What’s happening and how did we get to this point?
• Product Admin and Product Janitor?
• Signs of trouble
• Feeding the agile engine
• Who’s replacing product management as the strategic product leader?
• Not losing track of the Voice of the Customer
• Final thoughts/comments on 2012

How’s that?

By providing you a weekly update on what’s working today for marketers and what you should be thinking about next. By letting you hear directly from thought leaders like Avinash Kaushik, Mark W. Schaefer, Jeremiah Owyang, Ben Casnocha, David Weinberger, Seth Godin and many more. And by letting you hear from the authors about upcoming books so you can figure out what to read next (and what to skip).

The most impressive part? The Twist Image Podcast has been released weekly since May of 2006.

Just think about that for a moment. Putting together 333 episodes of marketing advice for FREE is not only a ridiculously amount of work but also takes some serious dedication.

Definitely worth some thanks!

If you have not been listening to the podcast, here’s a few of my favorites from 2012 that I would recommend you check out:

1. SPOS #329 – Avinash Kaushik Digs Deep Into Facebook Marketing - Want to really understand Facebook as a marketing platform? Start here.
2. POS #313 – From Economics To Likeonomics With Rohit Bhargava – Do you care if people really like your company? Hear why you should with this podcast.
3. SPOS #310 – The Startup Of You With Ben Casnocha – Startup thinking isn’t just for companies. Learn from the the author of the book on how you should be thinking more like a startup when it comes to your career.
4. SPOS #308 – Return On Influence With Mark W. Schaefer – Want to understand online influence and sites like Klout? This podcast is for you.
5. SPOS #306 – Truth In Marketing With Jonathan Salem Baskin – Let the truth set your marketing free.
6. SPOS #304 – Creating Brand Movements With Scott Goodson – Learn how you can move your company beyond the brand and into something much bigger – a movement.
7. SPOS #301 – Knowing Things With David Weinberger – some deep thoughts on knowledge and the internet and how’s it changing over the last twenty years.
8. SPOS #297 – The Hard Work Of Creativity With Julie Burstein – Understanding the processing and work that goes into being creative.
9. SPOS #296 – The Art Of The Pitch With Peter Coughter – All marketing professionals have to sell their ideas. Learn how a master of pitching  ideas approaches the task.
10. SPOS #295 – Mobile Marketing Impact With Gary Schwartz – mobile and marketing. Need I say anything else?
11. SPOS #289 – Content Marketing With Joe Pulizzi – Want to understand content marketing and how it may work for your business  Start with this podcast.

This is where context can help. If you are trying to tell a story about your product, context is the background information that helps the scene make sense. Without this context, you leave it up to the customer to figure it out on their own.

I recently wrote an article highlighting Box.com as an example for setting good background context on their web site.  New visitors can quickly understand what their product is (secure cloud file access) and who they are positioning it to (business users) thanks to messaging supported by good background context.

I would like to highlight another example that I don’t think does as good a job in providing support for the product message, Microsoft’s new Surface product launch video (see video below).

Microsoft is running this ad as an on-air introduction for their product launch. It is most likely the first contact that people are going to have with the first hardware tablet built by Microsoft  So, what does Microsoft do to help provide context for the product story in the video?

• They rapidly and repeatedly attach and detach a keyboard from the tablet
• They leverage an upbeat soundtrack
• They have young dancers
• They have old dancers
• They have kids dancers
• They have office workers dancers
• They have hipsters dancers
• They make a lot of clicking sounds
• They user tablets as a drum set??

I would say that the music and dancing are about trying to create an emotional message associating the product as being fun and consumer oriented. Now there is nothing wrong about trying to build an emotional message for a product, but this is easier said than done for a new product. Somewhere in this message there needs to be a product, that not only does something, but does it better than the competition.

My best guess for all the clicking noises  is that this is about helping viewers understand that this device has a detachable keyboard and a kickstand (the functional part of the message).

However, if this is the main differentiator of the new device, shouldn’t it be a bit clearer why this is a big deal? Is it about being more productive? If so, you’d think you would see a reference to productivity and getting something done (maybe someone using Microsoft Office?). They don’t even show anyone typing on the keyboard during the entire video.

Without more context around the functional uses of the product, Microsoft is leaving it up the viewers of the video to decide on their own if this solves a problem they have. I believe they are trying to position the device as a “living room and office device” but I think it completely misses the mark on helping us to see why this is important.

What do you think? See something I am missing that pulls it all together?

For this week’s call, Scott, April, and I had a chance to talk on the latest marketing buzz word, Growth Hacking. What is a Growth Hacker?  How do they Hack Growth? Do I need a Growth Hacker?

All great questions and part of the discussion. Here are a few of the great quotes from the call to give you a taste of the conversation:

 ”Growth Hacking is a way to describe a particular set of tactics that you would do at a particular state of time at a particular startup when you have a specific goal – April”

“I actually met a real, live growth hacker – April”

“Is this really just highlighting data driven marketing? – Josh”

“You can put analytics into old media stuff – Scott”

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

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime: 36 mins

• Some background reading:
  • http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/
  • http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/
  • http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/07/defining-a-growth-hacker-5-ways-growth-hackers-changed-marketing/
  • April’s post – Growth Hacking and B2B
• Should marketers start coding now?
• What about the revenue model?
• What is traditional marketing anyway?
• Revisiting our RIM discussion from April 2011, Podcast #3 - What happened to the superior device?

There is no shortage of information out there about how hard it is to get noticed and how short attention spans are these days. Within seconds of contact with a potential customer, you need to start telling your story. However, with limited time you need to make sure you are putting your message into a context that makes sense to the customer.

Context helps provide background information, almost like a setting for your story.

Seth Godin recently wrote an article that helps explain the need for putting your story in context. Seth explains,

What is this thing? What are you like? Are you friend or foe, flake or leader, good deal or ripoff, easy or hard, important or not? Are you destined for the trusted category or the other one?

Make it easy to categorize you and you’re likely to end up in the category you are hoping for.

Having a good story is a must. However, if it takes too long for a customer to relate, you may lose them before the story can finish.

How to get started?

Creating a to the point product story supported by the right context is no easy task. The work can require building and taking apart your messaging over and over again until you get to where there is nothing extra  left to distract.

I don’t think there are any short cuts here, but there are some approaches that can help guide you. Here are some examples that can help as you work through the process.

Explain your story in a paragraph or less

Brad Feld, VC at the Foundry Group, believes that if you are just getting started, you need to explain your product (company) in a paragraph or less. Brad writes,

I strongly believe that a founder should be able to explain what they do in one paragraph. I’m not a believer in the “one sentence mashup approach” (e.g. we are like pinterest + groupon + facebook for dogs). Rather, I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you should care. Sometimes this can be two sentences; sometimes four, but never more than a paragraph.

Remember, you don’t have to try and fit everything your product does into that first paragraph. The idea being, that this is the foundation that supports the rest of your product messaging. From here, as you  continue to build out your assets such as web sites, marketing collateral, etc look for ways to help set the context so that customers immediately begin to understand the direction you are heading.

It helps to see how other companies have done this well. Take a look at the home page of Box.com for an example of putting it all together. In less than 30 seconds you can see context points that help explain what Box means by Simple, Secure, Sharing:

1. Giant documents that serve as visual cues that Box is about sharing work documents (Notice how they didn’t include music files or videos here)
2. A giant padlock to imply strength and security
3. Clouds to amplify the point that this is a cloud based offering that you can access from anywhere

Without setting the work context, it might take you a little longer to figure out Box is aimed at solving a business collaboration problem. Box also gets bonus points for supporting their message with customer logos, a how it works video, and other links to learn more.

Done right, providing context can help accelerate customer understanding and keep them around to learn more about your offering. Without context, you are assuming that they will get the point of the story on their own which can be a dangerous assumption when you only have seconds to impress.

For this week’s call, Scott, Saeed, and I had a chance to talk on the topic of customer research. Specifically, it was Saeed’s question, “How well do we really understand customer environments and problems?“, that was the inspiration for the discussion. During the call, we covered the approaches you can use to gather the voice of the customer, how to avoid mistakes like confirmation bias, and how to apply to your product development process.

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

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime: 37 mins

• Building solutions requires understanding your customer needs
• How do you take data from customer conversations and process?
• Customer pain point discovery - ethnographic research
• How many interviews is enough?
• B2B vs. B2C research
• The challenges of experimenting with enterprise software
• You can never get all the data – still need to make decisions
• “The art of product management“
• The opposite of analysis paralysis is “utopia myopia“
• Recognizing confirmation bias in your research
• Communicating your research through and up in the organization

I love this cartoon from Hugh MacLeod (GapingVoid). It is so simple but at the same time, so powerful.

There are lots of ways you could interpret this message but I have been thinking about it in the context of product development.

More often than not, you don’t have the time or resources to tackle everything. This means as a product manager, you have to make some tough choices of what not to do.

Great products (and companies) intentionally leave out features that some customers find unacceptable. While this means that some customers won’t buy their product, it means they can focus more on the ones that will.

I also ran across another example that I think really highlights the point of intentionally making decisions not to do something. Doc Searls’s new book, the Intention Economy, has a great overview on the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a company that has been historically very private about its operating strategy).

Here are some of the things that Trader Joe’s says no to:

• No ads, sales, loyalty cards, etc. No gimmicks.
• No trade shows. They don’t chase the latest fashions.
• No muscling suppliers. Instead they partner to offer the best product at the best price.

Most importantly they say no to selling a lot of products. They don’t try and sell every type of food item. They don’t sell electronics. They don’t sell toys. They just focus on selling “innovative, hard-to-find, great-tasting foods.“

Trader Joe’s have consciously made the decision to try to not sell everything under the sun. This allows them focus on adding “unconventional and interesting” products that keep customers delighted and coming back for more.

Stick with Hugh’s advice and pick your sliver well, my friend and your customers will reward you.

Cartoon Credit:  GapingVoid

For this week’s call, Scott, Joy, and I had a chance to talk on the topic of gathering product requirements. Joy works on implementing new methodologies and best practices that improve requirements gathering and recently published the book, Visual Models for Software Requirements. For our conversation, Joy shared some of her thoughts on the approaches product managers can use during the product development process.

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

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime: 38 mins

• What’s required to deliver the minimum set of features to deliver value
• Using objective chains to compare dollar value of features
• Requirements research and what data can’t tell you
• User’s experience with the features / where does usability fit into the process?
• Dollar value of usability: learning curves
• How does Requirements Modeling Language play a role here?
• Downloadable templates for all of the RML(R) models 
• Process Flows – what they are trying to do
• Blog example – Using RML® Models to Organize Personal Life Decisions