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!

Marcus chose to develop on RIM’s platform because of the size of the installed base and relative lack of competition for the app he was considering building (a long format audio player).  This validates a key tenant of becoming a platform I outlined in a past post:

The value of your platform to a partner and the likelihood of their developing to it is directly proportional to the amount of business the partner is able to capture through the platform.

However having a ton of potential consumers for your partners to service isn’t enough.  One of his first struggles was with RIMs SDK, specifically with regard to backwards compatibility:

All BlackBerry phones are java based, and there are two SDK options for developing software on them: MIDP/CLDC and BlackBerry specific APIs. The generic MIDP/CLDC route would work on any java based phone (or at least could be debugged on any java phone). Or you can opt to use RIM specific APIs that give you more BlackBerry specific functionality. Initially I leaned towards CLDC to maintain portability, but I eventually decided I’d rather take full advantage of the platform. I could always port it later if it came to that (if there is a later).

He also laments the lack of SDK features that would give his app the polish available from other platforms, such as the iPhone:

I envy the iPhone developers out there. From what I understand the iPhone SDK provides all sorts of pretty widgets that come pre-made to fit in with the platform. Right out of the box you get a clean UI that looks ‘modern’. To put PodTrapper 2.0 in the same league a significant portion of the code is dedicated to drawing lines, bezier curves, bitmaps and shading rectangles in just the right way.

There are other great quotes in there about Marcus’s interaction with users (his favorite part), how he chose to price his app, market it, and so on.  The point for Product Managers who are building out a platform is that we need to consider the entire lifecycle of a customer when we offer a platform, not just the API or SDK.

When you think about building out a platform, remember that for potential platform partners have several go to market choices.  They can build a standalone application and go to market direct.  Or they can come through yours or one of many platforms.  The size of your installed base (now their market), how frictionless you make sales, and how you take care of them in terms of billing and marketing are also key drivers of success.

I have led platform building projects at several companies, including my current role.  At each, we had an in-market product with an established customer base, and some number of interested 3rd party developers who wanted to extend our product with their own ideas.  Some of those projects failed, and some are (or will be) very successful.

Why Be a Platform

The allure of becoming a platform is easy to understand: your product gets the benefit of other companies investing time and treasure in extending its functionality for you.  Platforms are even more interesting when you factor in their positive feedback loop – as more developers add their products to your platform, the value of your platform increases to customers and attracts new customers, which increases the value of the platform to developers, in turn attracting even more developers.  Eventually, your platform has such a rich set of unique applications and services available through it, that customers have a hard time imaging getting the same experience through any other source.  They’re effectively locked in, not through force, but by choice.

Planning a Winning Platform

As you build a platform, you quickly understand that you have a new set of customers with new problems you need to solve: your development partners.  The brass ring that every company reaches for with a platform is OPM and OPT: Other People’s Money and Other People’s Time.  Some have made it work.  Others have failed miserably.  Many just fade into obscurity.

Platforms grow up in two ways: out of existing products, and as developer-to-developer programs.  Platform programs are dangerous because they are usually under-stated in time and resource commits – they have the potential to touch every part of your existing spaghetti code.  The urge in the development team to re-architect during a platform build is irresistible.  Product Managers: talk to potential partners, understand their needs and desires to work with you, find out which objects they want to interface with, and facilitate discussions between their developers and your development team.

Just as important when planning your platform is to understand your business strategy.  Me-too platforms almost always fail.  Look at your platform from your potential development partner’s eyes:

The value of your platform to a partner and the likelihood of their developing to it is directly proportional to the amount of business the partner is able to capture through the platform.

Questions to Answer:

• Are you building a platform as a competitive blunt, or to extend your core product?
• Does your company have the development resources to build a strong and deep API and SDK?
• Does your company have the development resources to support partners with integration questions
• Does your company have the marketing resources to publicize your platform?
• Can your product management team handle a massive increase in communications to partners whenever you make platform revisions?

Strategic Decisions

Business Model

Companies build platforms for two reasons: to increase sales of existing products (e.g. iPhone), or to make money on applications sold through the platform (e.g. Steam) – sometimes both.  One of the first decisions you need to make is will your platform be for free or for fee?

Free usually doesn’t mean that all partner apps are free, otherwise they’d have no incentive to develop, rather that the developer has the option to offer free functionality through the platform.  You can see this model in action today in the App Store, with free apps vs. their “pro” upgrades.  The advantage to free is that end users get functionality at no cost, which entices them onto the platform.  If you sell the platform, like salesforce.com, you can use free partner services to add value to your core app and sell more at no direct cost to you or your customers.

Another common model is revenue sharing.  In this model, the partner sets their own pricing and the platform owner takes a share of the top-line revenue.  For example, Apple takes 30% of all apps sold through iTunes.  You have to strike a delicate balance between the amount of sharing you demand from partners and the incentive for partners to develop through the platform.

Packaged resale is a model that we are using at Dell.  In the packaged resale model, we purchase apps in bulk from our partners to provide them with stability.  We setup volume tiers, much like a traditional distribution model with price breaks as we move up.  Then we turn around and repackage partner apps to our customers, pricing them as we see fit to be competitive.  The advantage of this model is that you get more control and flexibility with the pricing of apps through your platform.  The downside is that partners may fear losing control of their pricing models.

Open-ness

How open will your platform be?  Will you adopt a salesforce.com model of being an “open field,” meaning that there is a relatively low bar a development partner must pass in order to offer their application?  Or will you model your platform after the “walled garden” that is Apple’s iTunes App Store – and require that partners meet certain guidelines for functionality?  Or will you be more restrictive still and have an invitation only “planned community” approach?

The open field model means that you want a high volume of partners and you want to offer them low-to-no touch.  Facebook is considering opening their platform to partners and will probably adopt this approach.  Salesforce has used this model to great effect, attracting thousands of independent developers to their platform.

The walled garden approach raises the bar for partners enter your platform.  It may mean setting guidelines about what applications can or cannot do, like Apple has done.  Depending on how strict the guidelines you set, you can throttle partner demand – just be consistent in your application of the rules.

A planned community is another approach to platform building.  In this model, you go for quality over scale.  It may mean setting very strict requirements that partners must meet in order to play on your platform, such as security or functionality requirements.  The tradeoff is that you as the platform owner have more control over what is offered through the platform, and can stand behind any partner offering.  This model may be appropriate for co-delivered services or SaaS.

Customer Ownership and Branding

By virtue of owning the platform, you are bringing customers to the table.  Depending on the model you choose above, you may allow developers to use their own brand, co-brand, or re-brand partner apps as your own.

If you are co-delivering a service through your platform with partners, co-brand or re-brand works well.  This model is popular with telecommunications companies who use their broadband platforms to offer re-branded partner services such as online backup or anti-virus.

Factors for Success

As you consider launching a platform, there are key metrics you should consider.  Number of partners, number of applications or services, revenue derived from the platform are all good starts.  Even before you set metrics, there are some key success factors that you can whiteboard that will let you know at a high level if your platform will fly.

The most important consideration that will make your platform succeed or fail is how much business a potential partner can capture from the platform.  All of your other strategic decisions must line up to the reality of this number.

Next is the strength of your target partners.  Depending on the platform model you choose, you may be targeting anyone from individual developers to large, established ISVs.  The key is that you match your target partners with the level of investment required by a partner to develop to your platform.  You can’t ask independent developers to operate a service out of SAS70 Type II data centers, for example.

Consider the problem that end customers solve by buying partner applications or services through your platform.  If there is marginal added value to buying through you, your platform will not be sustainable and you will churn customers, and eventually collapse.  Remember when every new PC you purchased had an AOL icon preinstalled on the desktop?  There was no value to customers in purchasing AOL this way, in fact it annoyed most people to see it there, and created a negative perception of the “platform (the PC).”  You don’t see that as much anymore.  You have to add something other than a channel to the customer – Apple adds a great user experience, Saleforce adds great analytics to hard-to-manage data, Steam offers digital gaming management so you never have to find a CD again.

Finally, if you have created value for the customer, value for the partner, and settled on a model that makes sense, you are ready for the last analysis: how will you and your partners make money?  Is there enough margin to revenue share – or are you willing to forego revenue sharing and offer your platform for free to partners in order to get more apps or services in order to move more of your core product?  This analysis is hardest and will require talking to lots of potential partners and field testing your pitch.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.  Happy platforming.

If you’re interested, drop me an email with your resume. No recruiters pretty please!

UPDATE: I missed it, but Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain, another Austinite is also pictured.

What if we didn’t refactor our roadmap…again?

What if we didn’t spend time fighting for headcount from HR, phones from IT, or travel from Finance?

What if we ignored all of the built up processes and built something awesome anyway?

What if instead of 20 hours of meetings, you spent 20 hours blogging, tweeting, and talking with potential customers online?

What if we stopped trying to connect our internal projects and started connecting with customer needs?

What if we never used another quantitative report again?

What if all of the analysts disappeared from the Earth tomorrow?

What if we became a brand?

What if we became THE brand?

What if employees sought us out?

What if customers sought us out?

What if we created a product category?

What if we scaled 10, 100, or 1000x next week?

What if we built a Billion dollar business?

What if?

This is a great interaction because it illustrates the rift between marketing and product management.  First, I suspect that Godin isn’t really saying that for any given company it is better to have an inferior product.  He’s saying that for a marketer it is better.  I’ll go a step further – for a great marketer (which Godin is) it is better.  The first question I always get from Marketing is “what are this product’s differentiating features?”  Lazy marketers love to have the leading product in a market because they just need to maintain the status quo.  A great marketer likes the challenge of winning with a product that doesn’t necessarily win on all of the features.  It was a painful lesson the first time I learned that it is not enough to have the best product on the market, you must also have great marketing to let people know about it and get people excited about buying.

Have you and your competitors reached near parity?  Do you differentiate using price?  Does sales laugh when you point out differentiating features of your product because those features don’t really matter?  Do you wordsmith new “features” just to have something the other guy doesn’t on your product slicks?

We’ve had “winning product solve customer problems” beaten into our heads as product managers.  In every market there is a set of features that solves the customer’s problem that everyone’s product has, e.g. the “baseline” feature set.  This is the barrier to entry that any new competitor must meet to play in your market.  You use features above that baseline to differentiate your product.

In commoditized markets, the size and relevance of the features above the baseline shrinks to near zero.  The importance of marketing increases as differentiation shrinks.  Eventually the barriers to entry become so low that nearly anyone can enter, at which point operational efficiency becomes the most important aspect for success, and marketing becomes primarily packaging and pricing.

One of my mentors used to work as a brand manager in consumer goods for P&G.  He told me a story about laundry detergent that is a great metaphor for where we are heading in technology.  The laundry detergent market is highly commoditized.  There are dozens of companies selling everything from luxury to economy detergents and everything in between.  P&G sold several different brands under different names, aimed at different customer segments.  The ability to segment and target customers in consumer goods is astounding – they have it down to a fine science.  “College educated Caucasian mothers under 40 with 3 kids living in a major metro area with a household income of >$125,000″ is an example of the level of their segmentation.  If you go to the grocery and turn the detergent boxes on their side and read the ingredients, they are all nearly identical.  The major differences are pricing, and packaging.  It turns out that the mother above just doesn’t feel comfortable buying the “economy” brand, and will instead opt to pay more for Tide to basically buy a prettier box.  That much is obvious; the really interesting piece was the product differentiation.

People buy the pretty box but they aren’t dumb.  They open the box and see the white powder, the same stuff in the economy box, and they resent paying more.  P&G experimented with lots of options, and ended up adding green crystals to the Tide powder.  What did these crystals do?  NOTHING.  People assumed that they got their clothes cleaner or smelled better.  They were there to make you feel better about buying a nicer box with “power crystals.”

Over time, if you take several companies competing for the same market, they will commoditize it even without product management.  You don’t need product management to copy your competitor.  Lots of companies that have identified operational efficiency as their core competency are happy to let other companies take the first mover risk and be the second mover into a market.  If all of those companies have good product managers, they’ll be talking to the same kinds of customers and potentials, hearing similar problems, and developing similar products and features.  Price will become the differentiator and the market will commoditize.

I see a lot of green crystals in technology today.  There are lots of products where the baseline has risen to “good enough” and the differentiating features either aren’t compelling enough to justify paying for them, or customers just don’t care.  On the cost side, we’re squeezed by free and open source products.  What role does the product manager play in a commodity product?  I hypothesize that the markets where companies need product managers will shrink at roughly the rate that those markets commoditize.

What do you think – are we entering the post-Product Management economy?

You might be a Product Manager if:

1. You’ve created a roadmap through 2015
2. You can’t remember working less than 70 hours a week
3. You’ve lost your hair (if you haven’t consider yourself warned!)
4. At your annual customer summit, you stay late to setup and test products for the next day while Sales runs up a historic bar tab
5. You used to be a programmer but were too extroverted
6. You used to be a salesperson but were too introverted
7. You use customer interview techniques with your spouse to discover the root cause of their problems so you can build a “solution” (”That’s interesting…tell me more!”<smack>)
8. You wake up at night worried about getting your product’s feature-set right or hitting your ship date
9. You find competitive and win-loss analysis fun (ugh, I can’t believe I just realized I find those things fun)
10. You walk through the store and look at products thinking “what problem does that solve?”
11. You do a SWOT analysis before making any major purchase
12. The last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up is to check your email
13. You’ve ever written “The System Shall…“
14. You never have less than five #1 priorities
15. You’ve sat behind the one-way mirror at a focus group
16. One or more of the following groups is pissed at you: Sales, Development, QA, Tech Support, Marketing, or Operations. Special bonus if you get all at once.
17. You enjoy writing requirements that constrain easy way out from the Programmer.
18. You’ve actually learned how to herd cats.
19. You own an iPhone.
20. You wonder how the iPhone product manager prioritized all the possible features.
21. You wonder how many engineering hours it took to create a new feature in your favorite web app.
22. You try to envision the next 3 design updates for any product you see.
23. You think in Use Cases.
24. You’re always looking for an alternative flow of events.
25. You can’t live without OmniGraffle or Visio.
26. You had to reset expectations with management, customers, engineering, and finance.
27. You had to produce a WW product forecast for sales since they are too busy to do it.
28. You enjoy watching “How It’s Made.“
29. You plan “features” for your children and have a “roadmap” for their skill growth
30. Your wedding included a powerpoint presentation.
31. Major life events require a MS Project file.
    
32. You get “phantom buzzing” in your pocket when you forget your Blackberry.
33. You’ve talked to more customers in the last month than all of your executives combined.
34. Your marketing person said “you’re technical…explain this to me like I was 10.” then, “…now like I was 3…”
35. You know what all of these are: MRD, PRD, BRD, Functional Spec, sprint, scrum, CAB, spiff.
36. Your favorite question is “why?”
37. Your favorite application is Excel.
38. You’ve built your own product P&L template in Excel to save time.
39. You’ve used your P&L template across multiple companies.
40. You know what the “analyst dance” is, and you’re definitely a PM if you’ve done it.
41. You know what your customer is going to say before they say it.
42. Your spouse knows who your 3 biggest competitors are by name.
43. You’ve flown on every major (and some minor) airline this year.
44. You’ve used Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to connect with a customer.
45. You’ve dreamt about competitive kill sheets.
46. You’ve been to ProductCamp
47. You’re the one your CEO comes to when he/she really wants to know how things are going.
48. “They” remembered your revenue commitment but not your product’s funding.
49. Everyone thinks they do a part of your job.
50. You’ve ever had to explain to a founder or executive why customers don’t want their great new idea.
51. You’ve been asked for the revenue impact of deleting a single feature.
52. You’ve been held accountable for Development’s schedule slips.
53. You’ve been the person that everyone brings the hard questions to at the trade show booth.
54. Caffeine is one of your primary food groups.
55. You spend more time with your development counterpart than your spouse.
56. You write a blog about Product Management…gulp!
    

Special thanks to my twitter friends: @joshua_d, @imusicmash, @chriscummings01 for contributing to this list!  You can follow me on Twitter, too.  Happy New Year!