280 Insider Newsletter
November 20, 2003

• The 280 Insider
• Companies to Watch: LinkedIn
• 280 Group Services
• Books: Now, Discover Your Strengths
• Partnership with Accept Software
• Evolving Product Planning Technology



The 280 Insider

Dear 280 Group Subscriber,

In this issue we’ll be covering a startup named LinkedIn that you won't want to miss and reviewing the book Now, Find Your Strengths. We also have a guest article by James Davies from Accept Software discusssing Evolving Technology for Product Planning.

Interested in contributing an article? Contact us...

Brian Lawley
President
280 Group LLC



280 Group Services

Need a Marketing or Product Management consultant or contractor? Contact us for a free quote and proposal.

Here's a list of some of work that we do for companies:

PRODUCT MARKETING:

- Managing product launches and review programs

- Crafting product positioning and messaging

- Setting product pricing

- Developing sales tools

- Working with press and analysts

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT:

- Market analysis and customer/market research

- Writing MRDs (market requirements documents)

- Working with engineering teams to ship new products

- Competitive analysis

MARKETING

- Demand generation programs

- Corporate and product branding

- Increasing search engine placement and website traffic

- Customer surveys and ongoing communications


Partnership with Accept Software

We are excited to announce a new partnership with Accept Software.

Accept makes a phenomenal new software product named Accept Product Planner. Accept Planner represents a quantum leap forward in product strategy, product portfolio management, and product planning. Providing a comprehensive and complete solution, it gives Product Management professionals the tools and environment for defining and executing market-leading product strategies.

Need to build a well-thought out product roadmap? Want to try several "What If" scenarios with your release schedule? Want to make sure that the requests from your most important customers are taken into account in your product plans? Accept Planner does this an much more.

The 280 Group will be helping Accept customers to get up to speed with Accept Planner and with Product Management best practices.


Companies to Watch: LinkedIn

Use the Internet to leverage your network in a low-risk, highly-effective manner

As a Marketing and Product Management consultant here in Silicon Valley I rely heavily on my network and the contacts I have built over the last 15 years. Much of my work comes through these relationships and corresponding referrals.

I was recently invited by an acquaintance to join LinkedIn, a new online networking service (if you know me I HIGHLY encourage you to join LinkedIn and invite me as a connection so that we can share our networks).

LinkedIn is one of the new Social Computing companies. The most well-known company in this space is Friendster, which uses a six degrees of separation model to help people meet others for dating and to build new friendships. Friendster has enjoyed much success thus far, with extensive media coverage, top-tier funding and a user base that is approaching 3 Million users since April of 2002.

What Friendster does for dating and meeting new friends, LinkedIn does for professional networking, providing a powerful and efficient new way of using your network. The difference is that because it deals with the valuable resource of your professional connections, LinkedIn takes careful steps to ensure that your network remains protected and is not abused.

LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, formerly EVP at PayPal, and has a seasoned and talented team behind it. The company was recently funded by Sequoia Capital to the tune of $4.7 million.

LinkedIn is all about providing a more efficient mechanism for using your network, while maintaining the quality and reputation of your interactions. It is a great tool for:

- Looking for a job
- Finding new companies to partner with
- Connecting VCs and entrepreneurs
- Finding consultants or contractors
- Locating industry experts

LinkedIn is currently in Beta and is free to sign up and get going. If you begin to use the service a lot and make connections they ask you to take a short survey about the service, payment options, etc. It is likely that when they begin charging they will either use a monthly service fee or a per-contact transaction fee.

When you join LinkedIn or accept an invitation to join, you set up a profile for yourself. This includes what you are currently doing, previous positions, areas of expertise, companies you have worked for in the past and what you are interested in having people contact you about.

The next step is to add some of your own connections from your network. Inviting them to join is easy - you provide their email address and use LinkedIn's standard invitation message or customize it to tell them a little more about why you are inviting them.

You can also have LinkedIn scan your contacts (if you use MS Outlook) to tell you who you already know that is in the system. This makes it easy to connect with them since they already understand the benefits of LinkedIn and are already signed up. LinkedIn gives you a list of people in your Outlook database that have LinkedIn accounts and you simply choose which ones you want to connect with and send them an email suggesting that you link up.

After you invite connections you can get endorsements. Endorsements are key - they help build your reputation and give further credibility to the connections and network you are identified with. In fact, according the folks at LinkedIn if you have endorsements you are far more likely to have people contact you with requests.

Once you have invited some contacts and set up a profile you can search for potential connections using keywords, physical distance from your location, number of connections the person has, number of degrees the person is away from you, and reputation/number of endorsers. LinkedIn provides search results back to you, showing you the people who meets your criteria, how many degrees away from you they are, and their profiles.

When you first start searching, you'll find that LinkedIn has an impressive group of initial users. In many ways LinkedIn is like a Who's Who of Silicon Valley venture capital and the startup world.

If you find someone you want to connect with, LinkedIn will tell you who you are connected to them through and how many degrees of separation exist. From there you can send an email to this person (or through a chain of people) asking them to forward a request to the person you wish to meet.

If the person doesn't want to connect you to their acquaintance they can politely decline via email. If they are okay connecting you they can easily do so.

This is where LinkedIn's philosophy and design become so important and differentiate it. Because you can't directly see who is connected to each of your connections, the ability to abuse or circumvent the system is minimized. And in many ways it is self-policing and self-regulating - if someone contacts you too many times you can choose to either ignore their requests or end the connection.

As you interact with and spend additional time with LinkedIn your results change over time. The more connections you add, the greater your reach and the possibility for making meaningful connections. And as your connections invite other people, your network continues to grow.

There are a few things that we'd like to see added to LinkedIn. One is the ability to choose which path you use to contact other people. Currently if you are connected to someone through more than one contact the system decides for you which one to use. If you have already made a few requests through that person or you don't know them as well as another contact you might want to use a different route for making the connection. A second feature we'd like to see is the ability to save search queries. Both of these things are fairly minor - overall the system is easy to use and very effective.

I found that with LinkedIn I was able to pretty easily build up a core group of connections. Using it is simple and non-obtrusive, and when I invite others they are usually pretty intrigued about joining the service. I've got about 40connections right now am adding a few more each week, focusing on quality people that I know well.

If you know me, give LinkedIn a try and invite me to join your network!

Books: Now, Discover Your Strengths

Now, Discover Your Strengths, By Marcus Buckingham
3 out of 5 stars
Review by Brian Lawley

An acquaintance of mine named Jim Reekes (www.reekes.net) recently mentioned a book to me, and told me that it was a very powerful and useful tool for him. Jim is a very smart guy - a great strategist with a strong blend of technical, marketing and business insight. On Jim's recommendation I decided to read and review Now, Discover your Strengths for this issue of the 280 Insider.

Now, Discover Your Strengths provides a refreshing way of looking at managing your career and other parts of your life. The premise of the book is that truly successful people focus on what they are really good at, and minimize spending time doing the things that they aren't good at. While this may sound obvious at first blush, it is actually contrary to the messages we often hear. Many times we are told that in order to succeed we need to look at where we need to improve, that we should strengthen areas where it turns out we have may have no desire, natural talent or aptitude for success.

For example, if a child gets an A in math and a C in writing on their report card, what are they told to do? Work harder on writing, right? Maybe they have no chance of becoming a great or even above-average writer. Instead they are destined to become a world-class mathematician. No matter how hard they work on writing they may end up with minimal improvement and maximum frustration.

Rather than focusing on areas of weakness, the book argues that you should focus on your absolute greatest areas of strength. For areas of weakness find workarounds - other people or resources that can help you get the critical work done without sacrificing the quality or your own enjoyment.

The book also includes an online test. To take the test you go to Strengthsfinder.com and enter in a code that comes with it. You then go through a fairly rigorous set of questions and are provided with a report that shows your top 5 strengths.

My report showed that I am a problem solver and that I am motivated by what is possible in the future. I found this to be right on target - much of my work as a consultant is with companies that are trying to create an exciting and meaningful through new products, and I'm brought in to help them solve the problems they are facing.

The latter half of the book is about how to use the strengths approach to manage your team. Most of the good managers and leaders that I have known in my career end up doing this anyway, but I don't believe it is necessarily intentional. Spending some time thinking about this as a strategy can yield even better results.

Overall I recommend this book. However, there are two things that I think sell the book short and make it much less worthwhile than it might have been.

First, the code that is provided to do the Strengthsfinder online test is only valid once. This means you can't re-take the test, you can't loan the book to anyone else and you can't resell the book. I see this as a short-sighted tactic by the publishers and author to get corporate managers to buy multiple copies for their entire teams.

The second thing that the book didn't deliver was concrete suggestions for using my own personal strength report. I was surprised when immediately after I got my results the book shifted to "now here is how you use this as a manager". I was expecting to get some insights as to how to use the report for myself. On further investigation the website indicated that if I wanted to learn how to use the results I should sign up for their $99 newsletter.

Despite these two misrepresented product promises, I still recommend this book. It is an easy read and provides a refreshing way of looking at how to use the unique set of talents you have to pursue success.

Evolving Product Planning Technology
Automating the Enterprise

The last twenty years have seen a steady flux of technology aimed at orchestrating and automating practically every business process found in the enterprise. From manufacturing planning to supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise solutions have helped both to introduce and support best practices for these core enterprise processes.

In the least two years, product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions have gained momentum addressing the need to manage the "product record" (in the same way that CRM systems manage the "customer record"). However, attention to date has centered on product execution and managing product assets through the product lifecycle. Only recently have solutions emerged for the pre-requisite and equally critical product planning process.

Common Tools for Product Planning
Readers who manage their product roadmaps in MS Powerpoint, features in MS Excel and Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs) in MS Word know all too well the challenges. These desktop productivity tools still prevail in most product planning organizations. However as product and market complexity increases, these applications quickly fall far behind the curve for many reasons including:

* Data is distributed and not readily shared, residing on individual's desktops and local machines
* Documents are potentially out-of-date as soon as they are published
* Spreadsheets lack the versatility necessary for detailed planning analysis

Even with enterprises adopting corporate intranets and document management systems, documents might be shared or centrally available but the data they contain still remains disconnected from other pertinent planning data.

It should surprise no one that software companies have turned to other systems to try and tame their product and market data (software companies just can't turn down the opportunity to stretch systems beyond their intended use!). As an example, defect tracking systems and requirements management systems are sometimes used to try and "bridge the planning divide". However these systems simply were not designed for planning - they track data (and track it well). But when it comes to constructing and analyzing product roadmaps and plans, no amount of gymnastics makes the system really workable.

Enter Enterprise Product Planning Solutions
A new breed of application is now emerging aimed squarely at tackling the complexities associated with product planning, and dislodging desktop applications as the tools of choice for product managers. These enterprise solutions, such as Accept Software's Accept Planner 2tm platform, provide an immersive environment that unites the different organizations and processes that touch upon product planning. Previously fragmented data critical to the product planning process can now be centrally managed and made available in context.

Planning solutions do more than just centralize data - they directly support each of the inter-related product planning processes: portfolio planning, strategic market planning and product planning, and more tactical product/release planning.

With such solutions, companies are able to:

* Model a market environment
* Create market and product strategies
* Manage products and features
* Develop product roadmaps and release plans
* Identify engineering tasks and estimates to support plans
* Use scenarios to compare and contrast alternative plans using cost, payoff, and alignment analysis
* Perform what-if analysis and making trade-off decisions
* Optimize market-facing offerings
* Perform competitive analysis

Summary
Enterprise product planning solutions offer great potential for increased product planning effectiveness. However it is important to remember that technology alone is not a "magic bullet" for planning success. World-class high technology companies have understood the power of process, and turn to enterprise product planning solutions as "process enablers" once well-defined planning processes have been established. With the right combination of process and technology, your company too can transform the way you think about product and confidently approach product planning.

James Davies is Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Accept Software Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise product planning solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Accept Software's flagship product, Accept Planner 2, provides a fully integrated, collaborative product planning solution that allows software companies to translate product strategy into winning, tactical product plans. For more information on Accept Software, visit their web site at www.acceptsoftware.com.

Copyright 2003, Accept Software Corporation. All rights reserved.