It’s hard to see, but there is at least 400% more selection of “Birthday for her” than “Birthday for him.”  It’s an interesting coincidence that the ratio is about the same for males and females sending text messages.  The greeting card companies and the retailer aren’t dumb, this is very intentional: they know that women expect a card for their birthday and that they look for more personalization.  While I was in the aisle, there were three women browsing and I was the only male.  Not scientific, but I am willing to bet that you’d see similar results in most groceries.

On the buying side, aside from being selection limited, the for him options were also modeled in a choice-directed fashion: there was only one or two choices for “humor” or “grandpa.”  The card company and retailer know that male buying patterns are quick strike, vs. the more deliberate compare-and-contrast for the female market.  Which is exactly what I was after – a quick choice that would be acceptable.  The irony?  I would not even have thought to get a card (until maybe the day before), except for my wife reminding me as I walked out the door.

What’s interesting for me is how much room there still is to improve on this market.  I’m content to choose from 30 cards at retail because I am OK with good enough, but that doesn’t mean my problem is sufficiently solved.  My buying patterns, and I am guessing that of many men, are different online.  Online I am a researcher, compulsively drilling down on specifications and comparing/contrasting.  What if a greeting card company took their directed choice model online?  Did a choose-your-own-adventure, asked you 10 questions and generated a personalized card from there?  Not some cheesy “card” that you print at home but they actually printed it on-demand and shipped it directly to the recipient (or to you).  I’d go for that, and the biz dev possibilities with online retailers like Amazon would be huge.  Someone really smart could build the middleware between Amazon and iStockPhoto and make some good IP in the emotional choice models and associated verbiage.

Maybe that already exists?  Point me to it if it does!

UPDATE: Pictures below!

Through involvement in events like ProductCamp, as well as mentoring and teaching product management in my own roles, I have learned that I enjoy and am good at the teaching side of the job.  For that reason, I’m excited to announce that I will be joining the creators of the world’s most popular product management and marketing training: Pragmatic Marketing!  I will be an instructor at Pragmatic Marketing, traveling the world helping product managers and marketers learn to be more effective.  If you have been to one of their seminars, or have implemented their framework at your company, you know that their message of being market-driven and empowering product managers is absolutely essential for success.

As a side effect of this change, you should start to see a few more posts in this space.  I will provide a lot of credit to Dell as a company for being very progressive about their blogger policy.  However, this blog became a victim of its own success, and enough people at Dell knew me and read this space that it became difficult to write, even when keeping situations semi-anonymous.  I now appreciate the CrankyPM that much more.

There are a lot of smart people at Pragmatic Marketing that you should be reading, I will list a few of them here:

• Steve Johnson (Blog, Twitter)
• Dave Daniels (Blog, Twitter)
• Jon Gatrell (Blog, Twitter)
• Pragmatic Marketing Publications
• Pragmatic Marketing on Twitter

The roadmaps I have seen (and built!) in my career fall into a few categories:

• The Sunny-Side Up – hugely optimistic, contains the CTO’s and CEO’s wishlist for the next five years shown in the next three releases this year.  Everyone knows it has 0% chance of reality.
• The Void – only covers the very next release, in the least amount of detail possible.
• The Lewis & Clark – this roadmap covers the next 10 years.
• The Houdini – items appear and disappear on this roadmap so frequently that only a select few are allowed to present it.
• The Spinning Compass – your company doesn’t understand what it is good at or what it wants to be, so your roadmap wanders in the wilderness trying to drive a product in lieu of a company strategy.
• The Card Deck – friend of the Houdini, the items don’t change but are constantly re-prioritized in a vain attempt at eeking out more efficiency.
• The Zen Master – says everything while saying nothing, and contains only the highest level themes.  It can (and is) interpreted by Sales to mean anything they want.
• The Nirvana – a clear, concise, stable roadmap that communicates the product strategy quickly and easily, and has prioritization driven by real market data.

Nirvana is hard to achieve.  In companies of all sizes, the various stakeholders in the product want to insert their own features: support wants better trouble tickets, sales wants better reporting, the architect wants to rebuild the platform, partners want an API, current customers want support for a new OS, prospective customers want Feature X.  Before you even get to requirements, a good product manager needs to balance all of these wants and make some trade-off decisions.  Some of these are very easy, and some are very difficult.  Depending on the political dynamics of your organization, it can be hard to push back on stakeholders who aren’t used to hearing “no,” even for the right reasons.  You need data on your side, and more importantly you need a structure and process to transform that data into decisions.

There are a million ways to turn the data you’ve gathered into information.  You can look at the number of requests for a given feature and weigh them against one another, or you can attempt to “carve out” percentages of your development bandwidth for bug fixes vs. new features vs. internal requests.  Measuring what you can do is tricky, because much of development is not fungible – you might have only one GUI resource but you have several backend developers.  Focusing on volume of requests risks servicing the squeaky wheels first, which trains your customer base that screaming louder gets your attention.  In short, you have two problems: filtering down a huge list of items you could work on to a manageable list, and then brutally prioritizing based on a set of criteria that works for your business.

About nine months ago, Pragmatic Marketing extended to me the opportunity to be an early adopter for a new training course they call Pragmatic Roadmapping (see disclosures below).  The course is a departure from Pragmatic Marketing’s normal in-person training classes and is offered online.  You get a PDF of the training materials and view a high-def video of Steve Johnson and Jim Foxworthy taking you through how to roadmap the Pragmatic Marketing way.  During the course, they describe a process to solve the various problems I outlined above, and get to a “Nirvana” state in your roadmap.  The training was good at explaining very clearly and with examples how to use their processes and tools to achieve your goals.  If you’ve been to a Pragmatic Marketing training it has the “feel” of a classroom session.  On the downside you only get a PDF, not a nice bound book like the in person training, and there’s no live Q&A, although you can email them.  You can also only view the video once, you can’t go back and re-watch a la YouTube.

As part of the class you learn their process for getting to what is important on your roamdap, and how to use two tools: the project evaluator and the strategy matrix.  It is hard to describe the tools without giving away the farm and drawing them for you here, but I can tell you that I put them into practice in my last planning cycle, and they work.  The project evaluator is a tool that helps you drastically cut down the number of projects that you are being asked to undertake by mapping who they are for and what they will do.  You’ll find that you can quickly eliminate two-thirds to three-quarters of the asks on your list.  After you narrow your list, you use the strategy matrix tool to prioritize what’s left based on some defensible criteria.  In the end, you can build out your roadmap into a much more usable document.  Beyond the document, you can show that your product strategy is sound and based on market-data and process-based decision making, not emotion or product de jour.

It’s not rocket science – in fact you probably already know in your gut what the roadmap needs to look like.  What the tools and training give you are a process and method to explain your decision making instead of saying “I think this is right” and getting ripped by your CEO who doesn’t understand why his/her pet feature didn’t make the cut.  The roadmap is really important, and it impacts everything downstream.  Before you write your first MRD you need to get a project onto the roadmap – if we can collectively raise our game in this area then we can cut out a lot of unnecessary product churn and lost opportunities by focusing on what matters.  I still recommend splitting your roadmap from your release plan, depending on the maturity of your processes and team.  Good luck, and happy roadmapping.

If you’ve got any questions about the training, feel free to email me.

Full Disclosure: Pragmatic Marketing allowed me to take their new Roadmapping class for $1 (normally $695).  I was not asked to write a blog post.  Pragmatic Marketing is a sponsor for ProductCamp Austin, an event that I organize.  I have brought Pragmatic Marketing training into several companies that I have worked for and sent many employees to their public training courses.   I consider several people who work at Pragmatic Marketing to be friends.

PCA Spring had about 200 people participate and about 40 sessions offered for 30 available slots.  The voting in the morning went really well, and for the first time, we rolled out a mobile version of the schedule that people could pull up on their iPhones so we could reduce the mob around the schedule wall after the intro session.  The feedback on that app was very positive and it really helped.  Thanks again to Common Sense for developing it!  As usual, we had sessions on every product management and product marketing topic imaginable, from product strategy to social networking to product marketing.  My friend and colleague Josh Duncan won Best Presenter for his topic “Start with the Story.”  I even offered a session about my new venture, Leaf: more on that in a second.

By all accounts, PCA was another big success.  We’re doing the post-camp survey now, but over the past 3 camps we’ve run, over 99% of the respondents say that they would come back to ProductCamp again and that they would recommend ProductCamp to a peer.  Many people also remarked to me and to the planning team that the quality of the sessions was very high at this ProductCamp, relative to past camps.  Big kudos to Tom Evans for heading up the sessions team and recruiting great session leaders.

There has been a lot of drama recently surrounding ProductCamp.  I generated some controversy with my session “Leaf is Launching.“  Leaf is a social productivity tool that I am creating on my own, outside of my day job.  In the weeks before ProductCamp, I hired a developer to create a prototype and get it to a beta state so that I could launch it at ProductCamp.  My hope was to spend the first half of the session explaining the app, what problem it solved, and why I was doing it, and offer it (free) for use by a potential target audience.  Then to spend the second half discussing potential marketing avenues and strategies on a tight budget, to “crowdsource” the marketing.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it came across, and the fault is completely mine.  About 10 minutes in, one lady raised her hand and said that she felt like she was being “pitched” to, a strict no-no at ProductCamp.  I stumbled through the rest and ended up with a session that didn’t meet my expectations for excellence and I’m sure didn’t meet the desires of the people who came and participated.  For that I’m sorry.  I talked with a lot of people after the fact, trying to gauge how people perceived the session: was it a collaborative discussion, or was it a pitch?  The general themes of the people that I talked to were:

• It was only half-a-pitch but if you had positioned it differently it would have been a non-issue
• Yes it was a pitch but I like you personally so I didn’t take offense
• Yes it was a pitch but I like the idea of that type of session and would like to see more in the future

As my old boss used to tell me, in Marketing, perception is reality.  So, it was a pitch, and that means that I broke the rules of presenting at ProductCamp.  Being a session leader at PCA is a privilege.  At the last PCA, we had around thirty session slots and almost sixty sessions offered!  That means that half of the people who prepared content went home without the opportunity to present.  It’s not good enough that I’ve built up enough goodwill that people might be willing to give me a pass.  Because I’m the founder of PCA, it’s even more important that I avoid even the appearance of impropriety.  If I can get away with pitching my own venture, how can I lead a team with a straight face to tell other presenters that they’re not allowed to do the same?

For all these reasons, I am banning myself for 1 year from offering a session at any ProductCamp Austin event (PCA, ProductPotluck, ProductParty).  I think that’s fair and is what I’d suggest for someone else that offered a pitch and was contrite and promised not to do it again.  If you don’t think that’s severe enough, feel free to leave your comment below.  This is painful; if you know me you’ll know that I’ve presented at each of the last four PCAs and that I love doing it.  I’ll continue to do the welcoming, but won’t be doing new sessions until Spring 2011.

In happier news, tonight we had our post-PCA wrapup, which is also our planning kickoff for PCA Fall 2010.  PCA Fall will be held on Aug 7th, 2010 at the AT&T Center.  We’re throwing down the gauntlet to Silicon Valley, and are going to claim the title of largest ProductCamp in the world!  It will be a tall order for little Austin to attract 550+ participants, but I believe we can do it!  Dallas, Houston, San Antonio – we need your help!

The PCA planning team is an amazing group.  We have had a consistent core team of about 10 people for the last year that have built up a great amount of institutional knowledge about what it takes to put on a ProductCamp event.  As a result of the excitement that PCA Spring just created, we about doubled the size of the planning team with interested new members.  If you’d like to join up, we’re happy to have you, just hop on the GoogleGroup and introduce yourself.  We will have in-person planning get-togethers roughly monthly.  I am really looking forward to seeing you contribute and influence the shape of ProductCamp Austin to come.

First, the AT&T Conference Center are some amazing digs. This is probably the nicest place to ever host an unconference…probably too nice. The juxtaposition of our Winter 2009 camp (held in a trio of 40 year old TV studios) and this one will be interesting to watch. Also, the attached AT&T hotel is pitching in and donating a free weekend night’s stay to some lucky participant, by random draw.

Once again, our sponsors have stepped up to make things interesting. 280Group is busting onto the Austin scene in a big way in conjunction with PCA planning team member Tom Evans and his business Lûcrum Marketing. Pragmatic Marketing and ZigZag Marketing will be there, as always. Planview is a first time sponsor and will be bringing their newest product aimed at Product Managers, and even give away a copy, plus discount codes for everyone else!

The sessions and networking are the main reason that people keep coming back. Over three ProductCamps, we’ve achieved over 98% of participants answering “yes” to the questions “would you come back to ProductCamp” and “would you recommend ProductCamp to a peer?” This high customer satisfaction is why our local community loves to come out – in droves. Last time, we had over 500 sign up and over 300 participate. This time we are limited by our venue and won’t be able to hold more than 300 or so, so register today and reserve your space. It’s free of course.

Sessions are being actively submitted, and if you’re on the fence, just do it. Presenting at ProductCamp is a fun experience. These are “your people” and it is a great opportunity to practice your presentation and facilitation skills in front of friends in a collaborative, low pressure environment. Everyone is rooting for you. Session types include traditional presentations, round tables, panel discussions, workshops, and more. There are plenty of fun ways to contribute, and if you need ideas, please reach out.

We encourage participation for everyone as their “ticket to entry” to ProductCamp. If running a session isn’t your thing, let us know. There are lots of way to participate, such as being a volunteer. We always need people to take a bigger, more active roll in the advance planning, so join our planning team and raise your hand when called.

Finally, we will have a ProductCamp first – I am going to launch my new venture and product, Leaf. It is a social productivity tool that I’ll expand on in a separate post, and will open for a private beta in my session at ProductCamp. This session will be fun and collaborative, and everyone who comes will get a beta login. I can’t wait to meet you there.

Join us on March 27 and help us keep the ProductCamp community in Austin vibrant! Find me to say hi, I’ll be in the green shirt with a leaf on it.

Also check out:

ProductCamp Austin Twitter

ProductCamp is a fairly large endeavour.  Participants give up a Saturday to learn from each other, to teach, and to network.  It’s a big investment.  We’ve settled on a twice per year schedule for ProductCamp Austin, and that seems to fit our community.  Austin is unique in that unlike the Bay Area, we do not have a strong Product Management and Marketing group to facilitate other face to face meetings.  ProductCamp is filling that need.

The first way is with ProductPotluck, which we introduced a little over a month ago.  ProductPotluck is a mini version of ProductCamp.  It is held on an evening, has only one session slot with two sessions to choose from, and is paired with a happy hour for networking.  It’s a low time commitment way to get the community together.

The second way we’re filling the need is with ProductParty.  ProductParty is a networking and fun event from the ProductCamp planning team, just focused on networking.  We’re going to get together at the AT&T center and have a few drinks, and some fun activities that will make you laugh, prime your creative juices, and help us get to know each other.  Get ready…for the Product Manager SMACKDOWN.

For the Product Manager Smackdown, we will get four teams of product managers and present them with a “mystery product.”  The PM’s will have 10 minutes to evaluate this “product” and then 5 minutes to deliver their best product pitch to the judges.  It will be funny, creative, and irreverent.

ProductParty will be held on Wed Dec 2, 2009 from 6-9PM, at Gabriel’s Bar at the AT&T Center next to the UT campus.

We hope that we’ll see you tomorrow night!  For all of the details, hit the ProductParty Austin page.

• Participation continues to grow by leaps and bounds.  The first PCA, we had 90 show up.  The second, 160.  The third – over 300!  In just over a year, we’ve experienced over 300%+ growth.  Many businesses would be envious of that kind of growth.
• We’ve managed to maintain the spirit and character of the event as we grow it.  We do a post-camp survey after each event, and for the third consecutive time, our “customer sat” metrics were off the charts great.  98% of our participants would recommend ProductCamp to a peer.  For the third PCA in a row, we scored a perfect 100% on the question “Would you come to ProductCamp again?”  That is a testament to the team we’ve grown around this event.
• Sponsorship is increasing.  We run ProductCamp on a shoestring budget – less than $10,000 not included donations such as venue.  In the beginning, we had a big sales job to get national level sponsors like AIPMM and Pragmatic Marketing interested.  Now, all of the major national product management sponsors are involved: Pragmatic, ZigZag, and Sequent Learning.  Local companies such as SolarWinds and AustinVentures are also taking notice.  SolarWinds used ProductCamp as a recruiting tool – it makes sense, since only the most motivated, passionate people are going to give up a Saturday to geek on on Product Management topics with their peers.
• We’ve (re)validated Austin’s corner of the world.  Austin’s tech community has always perplexed me.  There are so many of us here, and we are so disconnected.  Austin doesn’t have the pulse that Silicon Valley has, and we definitely don’t have the density.  We do have passion and strong leaders in spades.  This third PCA proved that we can drive huge turnout here, and outside of the Valley can claim to put on the biggest ‘Camp.
• ProductCamp is spawning leaders and building a critical mass.  We’ve built a great core team: people like Colleen Heubaum, Mark Suchanek, Bertrand Hazard, John Peltier, John Milburn, Roger Cauvin, and Scott Sehlhorst (and many others) have all contributed to the planning and execution of multiple ProductCamps.  This team makes me believe that we have established momentum.  It will be exciting to see the next generation of leaders step up, and the established team can work with them and mentor them to keep ProductCamp fresh and exciting.

Gaining critical mass has been a huge undertaking for ProductCamp Austin.  Setting up and tearing down the leadership for each event, twice per year, is a massive undertaking in manpower and logistics.  One consitent piece of feedback that we’ve heard from the ProductCamp participants is that they would like to continue the ProductCamp experience between the semi-annual ‘Camps.  In Austin, we don’t have a strong central Product Management and Marketing networking group like in other areas of the country.  That does not mean that we have to settle!

To fill the gaps between ProductCamps, the team that brought you ProductCamp Austin is introducing a new flavor of the ProductCamp experience: ProductPotluck Austin.  ProductPotluck is a mini-version of ProductCamp: instead of an all day event, it will be a happy hour plus a one hour session.  Instead of many topic areas and dozens of potential presentations, ProductPotluck will have 2 topic areas of focus, and a handful of potential presentations (or roundtables, panel discussions, or workshops).  Just like ProductCamp, ProductPotluck is by and for the participants – we will still have participants voting on which sessions make “the cut,” and the majority of sessions will be offered by the participants themselves (we’re leaving a little wiggle room to bring in distinguished guests, too).  We’ll cap the whole thing off by providing more time for drinking and networking, which is always popular.  As always, ProductPotluck is FREE; your only cost is your participation.

Austin’s first ProductPotluck will be October 21st, at the AT&T Conference Center near the University of Texas campus.

Happy Hour will be in Gabriel’s Cafe, which is located in the lower lobby (Level LL), to the north inside the University Avenue entrance.

ProductPotluck Sessions will be held in Classrooms 101 and 103.

Parking is available in the AT&T Center underground parking lot.  Pay for parking in Gabriel’s Café during Happy Hour and receive the $7 discounted rate.

1900 University Avenue
Austin, TX 78705
(512) 404-1900
www.meetattexas.com

Agenda:

5:30-6:30pm  Sign-in, Networking Happy Hour, Final Sessions Voting – Gabriel’s Café

6:45-8:00pm Marketing and Product Strategy Presentations – Classrooms 101 & 103

8:00pm -?? Networking Happy Hour – Gabriel’s Café

The two topics we will focus on this month are: Marketing and Product Strategy.

In true ProductCamp spirit, the participants determine which sessions are ultimately presented. Here’s how it will work: five Sessions have been submitted for voting consideration.  See the PPA wiki for detailed descriptions of each Session.

Marketing

• Applying buyer personas to marketing strategy – Mike Boudreaux
• Top 10 Ways to Use Facebook to Promote your Business – Christopher Sherrod
• Error 404: The Panel You Are Looking For Does Not Exist – Jonathan Gesinger, Alex Jones, Amanda McGuckin Hager, Jason Sugawa

Product Strategy

• Help! I work for an engineer who knows nothing about Product Strategy – Jeffrey Eversmann
• From customer centric design to customer centric marketing to customer centric companies (Enterprise 2.5?) – Andreas Voss

At the PPA October 21 meeting, the five sessions will “face off” during the 5:30-6:30pm networking Happy Hour in Gabriel’s Café.  Each participant will be given one vote to place on the session of their choice.  The top session in each category will be announced and will run in parallel in Classrooms 101 and 103.

To get all of the details, please go to the ProductPotluck wiki.  We’re looking forward to seeing you on the 21st!

ProductCamp, the free unconference for marketing and product management, is teaming with the McCombs School of Business to return to Austin for its Summer edition!  ProductCamp is a must-go event for marketing and product management professionals.  ProductCamp is a free, collaborative,  gathering for interesting, smart people to network and learn from one another.  ProductCamps have been held in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston, New York City, Toronto, Atlanta, with more in the planning stages.  This is Austin’s third ProductCamp, and will be one of the largest in the country.  If you are in Austin, or can get here, ProductCamp will be well worth your time.

ProductCamp Overview

If you’ve never been to a ProductCamp before, you’ll need to wrap your brain around a few new concepts.  First, ProductCamp is an unconference, meaning that everyone participates in some way.  For some people, that means offering a traditional lecture style 1-hour session on a relevant topic.  For others, it might mean being on a discussion panel, facilitating a roundtable, participating in a workshop, helping with planning, volunteering for venue setup, doing marketing activities, or managing the budget.  At ProductCamp, there are no attendees, only participants. Second, there is no direct monetary cost for ProductCamp to the participants.  The only cost is your investment in time and effort.  Third, the trappings of a traditional conference are gone.  There is no keynote speech, no thinly veiled sales pitches, and very little B.S.  As a peer-to-peer event, ProductCampers bring their very best stuff – and we keep each other on our toes.  ProductCamp is sponsored by corporations who enjoy supporting the marketing and product management communities, and often offer sessions of their own.

How ProductCamp Works

The first thing you do is register.  You’ll fill out a form asking you how you want to participate and what topic areas are the most interesting to you.  Next, check out the ProductCamp Austin website, and list of sessions offered by people like you.  Based on what you marked, you’ll be contacted by one of the ProductCamp Austin planning team leads to get your help.  For people interested in Marketing, you’ll post about ProductCamp Austin to your blog, or retweet @PCAustin‘s tweets.  You’ll receive several emails over the next few weeks from the PCA Planning Team, and on the day of, you’ll stumble out of bed early on a Saturday to come to the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas for your first ProductCamp experience.

When you walk up for registration, you’ll receive a badge, some goodies, and three small stickers.  A volunteer will take you to a wall where all of the sessions being offered by your peers are listed; there may be dozens of them.  You’ll be asked to “vote” by placing your three stickers under the three sessions that interest you the most.  This helps the PCA Planning Team understand the interests of the group and assemble the schedule.  When you’re done, you can grab a coffee and head into the auditorium for the Intro session.

In the intro, I will explain to you what ProductCamp is all about, and we’ll play some icebreakers to set the tone for the day.  Soon, the schedule will be done and posted on the website and on the walls, and you’ll go to sessions throughout the day, stopping just to grab one of the box lunches we provide.

At 3PM, everyone gets back together for a quick closing session.  Then we head to the bar to burn through any extra budget we might have!

During the day, expect to network with a ton of people.  You’ll meet product managers, product marketers, social media experts, marketing greybeards, executives, startup junkies, big company people, developers, agile experts, finance and ops people, and everyone in between.  You may leave with a stack of business cards, and should bring a stack of your own to give away!

ProductCamp Austin Details

When: Saturday, August 15, 2009

Where: The University Teaching Center (UTC) at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin (map)

Who: Anyone willing to participate!

How: Register Now! (space is limited)

Cost: FREE!

To learn more: ProductCamp Austin, Follow ProductCamp Austin on Twitter, ProductCamp Austin on Facebook

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!