Small Marketing Changes Can make a BIG difference

I read a clever marketing line on a half gallon of milk this morning and it reminded me of a story.

In the shampoo industry a smart product marketing manager was able to double sales in a very short period of time. It turns out that you really don't need to wash your hair twice each time, as most people do. People used to only wash it once. The marketing manager decided to change the instructions and simply added one word. The old instrutions said lather and rinse. The new instructions said lather, rinse and repeat.

The result? Sales nearly doubled.

By the way, the marketing line on the milk was "Shake well. Buy often."

Are you reminding your customers to use your products?

Product Management 2.0 Newsletter April 2009

PM 2.0: The Product Marketing & Product Management Newsletter
April 9th, 2009

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT MANIFESTO
A stake in the ground about what product management is and why it is critical to a company's success.

PRODUCT NAMING GUIDELINES
Naming a product is difficult. These guidelines will help you choose a compelling name that makes your product more successful.

WHAT MAKES A DEMO TRULY REMARKABLE
By Peter Cohan

Read the newsletter here.


Brian Lawley
CEO, www.280group.com
Author, Expert Product Management

Webinar: How to Work More Effectively With Your Sales Team

I'll be doing a Webinar on How to Work More Effectively with Your Sales Team. To sign up click here.

Here's an overview:

Salespeople can be a Product Manager’s best friend or their worst nightmare. If they are on your side, believe in your product and are given the tools and information to succeed they can be the difference between a winning product and a failing product. However, if you don’t provide them with what they need or nurture the relationships they can inundate you with questions, make unreasonable demands or even ignore your product or refuse to sell it. This webinar will talk about how to get your sales people on your side and get them excited and properly armed to sell your product. Brian Lawley will share the tips, techniques and strategies for leveraging your sales force that he has learned during his 20+ year product management career.

Along with Brian, David Dersh will also be participating in the Webinar. Dave spent the last twenty years of his career as a top sales rep for Apple Computer, Intel and Sun Microsystems. He will share experiences about the best and the worst product managers he has worked with and what they have done to maximize the product management and sales relationship.

Speaker Bio: Brian Lawley is the CEO and founder of the 280 Group, which provides consulting, contractors, training and templates. During the last twenty years of his career he has focused on Product Management and Product Marketing and has shipped more than fifty successful products. He is the former President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, won the 2008 AIPMM award for Excellence in Thought Leadership for Product Management and is the author of the best-selling book, Expert Product Management. Mr. Lawley has been featured on CNBC's World Business Review and the Silicon Valley Business Report and writes articles for a variety of publications including the Product Management 2.0 newsletter and Blog.

Amazon, Brian Lawley, Bugs, an Angel and the Devil

If you are putting together your test matrix and wondering about which "corner cases" to test for you might want to read this article.

I almost named it "How to lose $250 per sale" by Amazon.com. :-)

Webinar: How to work more effectively with your engineering team

Webinar: How to work more effectively with your engineering team

Wed. July 3oth 9AM PST.

Register Here...

OVERVIEW:

Working effectively with your engineers is one of the key factors in product management success. To build great products you have to understand how to influence, motivate and collaborate with them orall of your other efforts may be wasted. This session will cover how to establish yourself as themarket and customer expert, how to increase credibility with your team, how to read and interact with different personality types andhow to subtly influence your engineers to getthem to help you achieve your objectives. Drawing on over twenty years of experience working with dozens of teams (many good, but some horrible), Brian Lawley will share the tips, tricks, storiesand best practices he has learned that will help you to be a better product manager.

Hope you can join us!

Webinar: How to work more effectively with your engineering team

I'm doing a webinar about how to work better with your engineers. Here are the details:



Summary

Working effectively with your engineers is one of the key factors in product management success. To build great products you have to understand how to influence, motivate and collaborate with them or all of your other efforts may be wasted. This session will cover how to establish yourself as the market and customer expert, how to increase credibility with your team, how to read and interact with different personality types and how to subtly influence your engineers to get them to help you achieve your objectives. Drawing on over twenty years of experience working with dozens of teams (many good, but some horrible), Brian Lawley will share the tips, tricks, stories and best practices he has learned that will help you to be a better product manager.

Date: Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT



Register Here!

Product Management Productivity Tip

For those of you who watched my product management productivity webinar you know that I use Outlook to its full extent.

Here's a blog and tip (very useful if you work with people in other time zones) that you'll find saves you some time in Outlook.

Let me know what other productivity tips you have!

Announcement: Expert Product Management Toolkit Bundle

We are very excited to announce the availability of a new product, the Expert Product Management Toolkit Bundle! The bundle is based on the best-selling book, Expert Product Management, by Brian Lawley, CEO of the 280 Group.

Included in the bundle are a copy of the book (either ebook or printed) and four of the corresponding 280 Group toolkits that cover the content (Product Roadmaps, Product Launches, Beta Programs and Product Reviews). In all there are four narrated on-demand training presentations (one for each topic) and over 130 templates for the corresponding tasks.

You can check it out here or you can buy it on Amazon.com.

Product Roadmap Webinar

I'm giving a free Webinar on Friday, Feb 29th covering "How to Develop a Compelling Product Roadmap".

Details and sign up are here:

http://www.aipmm.com/html/events/webinar.php

Product Management in IT

We've been seeing an interesting trend - IT departments hiring product managers and setting up a formal product management function and process. For example, Intel IT licensed our product manager's toolkit and product roadmap toolkit for their IT staff and have set up a centralized product management resources portal for worldwide use. They also had us do some training and consulting work.

It's not surprising to see this happen. IT departments have a wide range of projects with requirements that change often and need to be defined up-front. Using MRDs/PRDs and roadmaps to prioritize, get commitments and communicate plans is a proven best practice, and IT is leveraging the resources and knowledge that has been developed over the years. There is an interesting article about it here if you want to read more about it.

MBA Jargon Generator

For Product Managers who don't already have an MBA this is a fun site. Just click on the button and it'll give you a three word phrase.

Product Management Productivity Tip #2: Master Email

As a Product Manager you can't afford to waste time.

Email sucks up your time for a number of reasons. You may read the same email multiple times. You may be tempted to respond immediately to messages as they come in. You may allow emails to get you off track from doing what is most important. Not to mention the fact that having an overwhelming amount of email is just plain stressful.

I get about 100 valid (non-spam) emails a day. Over the years I've read several books on how to manage email and have come up with a system that works pretty well. Here are the highlights:

• Only check email three times a day. When you first arrive. Right after lunch and right before you leave.
  
• Turn off outlook notifications - they just tempt you to be distracted.
  
• Process email rapidly and empty your mail box. Try to process it as quickly as you can. For each email immediately decide to delete it, write a quick and short response (if it will take less than a minute), file it to read later or, if it will require a lengthy response, turn it into a task (drag it down to the bottom left corner of Outlook, drop it on the task menu and choose to save it as a task with an attachment.)
  
• Send short responses quickly. Don't spend a lot of time writing and rewriting your responses.
  
• Use keyboard shortcuts. In Outlook Alt s saves and sends your email, F9 sends and receives for all accounts and Ctrl1 gets you to email, Ctrl2 to calendar, Ctrl3 to contacts.
  
• Avoid jumping in on long threads - oftentimes they work themselves out within a few responses. Let other people chime in - wait and see if they can resolve the issues. If the thread continues wait and read all responses at once. You'd be surprised how many times things just work themselves out if you just resist the urge to instantly jump in.
  
• Turn long responses into tasks. If an email response needs a long time and lots of thought to write turn it into one of your high priority "A" items for the day (see previous article on prioritizing).
  
• Save all email that you want to read but doesn't require a response for later. Read it once a week when you are out of energy or not motivated to do other work (Friday afternoon is a great time to do this).
  
• Clean out your email each night and before you leave for the weekend. This is another great thing to do on Friday afternoon. You will be amazed at what a relief it is to start your evening or weekend without the burden of email hanging over your head, and it will make starting the next morning much more pleasant.

I've found that by using these ideas I can usually keep the time I spend on email down to less than thirty minutes a day.

Product Management Productivity Tip #1: Prioritizing

As a Product Manager you will always have far more work to get done than you can possibly get to. Between thinking strategically and driving things related to your products from a high level to executing the day-to-day tactical work required for product success, you will have a full list of to-do items and plenty of requests that go unfulfilled. Ivan Chalif has an interesting post related to this and life balance in his blog, the Productologist.

The ironic things is that the more competent you are, the more people will ask for your time and help. If you become known as the person who can do the absolute best demo and answer customer questions extremely well, your sales people will constantly ask you to come along on customer visits. If you are responsive to customer problems your technical support team will come to you more often to ask for creative solutions. And if you are good at influencing cross-functional teams you'll be asked to step up to the bar and lead efforts that go beyond just making your product successful.

So how do you deal with all of this?

I've used the Franklin system for prioritizing for the past ten years (even though I haven't owned a Franklin planner since Palm Pilots and then SmartPhones came out). I took Franklin's full day course and it was extremely helpful. The goal of their training is not only to help you be more productive, but also to DRAMATICALLY reduce your stress level.

Their system is simple. Every morning before you begin work take your to do list and capture everything you can think of. Then prioritize each task as A, B or C.

A = MUST do today

B = Would like to do today

C = Not important today

Ideally you want to have about 5 items on your A list and 8-10 on your B list maximum. From there you assign all the A's and B's priority numbers.

Then you just work your list straight down, beginning with A1. Having put just a few minutes of thought into it you can be assured you are working on the most important items. If you feel like priorities are shifting you can take a second 10 minute break later that day to reassess, but either way you don't need to feel guilty or anxious about not working on what's important.

There are several other benefits to this approach:

- At the end of the day you can look back and judge whether you accomplished the A list items. This is a great way to assess whether you are staying on track.

- If your boss insists on putting something on your to do list for that day (what Product Manager's boss doesn't) you can show him/her what your estimation of priorities are. If you both agree it is more important then something else can drop off the A list.

- You can capture virtually anything on the list as a C so you never have to worry about forgetting good ideas.

There are several other organization methods I use - I'll cover these in future posts.

Product Management 2.0: Smart Help Systems

I recently gave the keynote presentation at the AIPMM 2007 PMEC (Product Management Education Conference), and the topic was Product Management 2.0. In it I summed up where Product Management is as a discipline and added some ideas about where it might be headed in the future. I'll be sharing some of these ideas in this blog over the coming months and would love to get some feedback and opinions.

The first topic is smart help systems. Why don't help systems keep track of all of the most popular searches, questions and topics and then provide information back to the Product Manager about what is being asked? Imagine if you could have a detailed report that showed what capabilities people are asking for (both the ones already in the product and the ones not yet part of it). This would take user interface design to the next level, and would also give us all much better insight into use cases for our products. To that end, why not have a simple survey built into the help system that is on all the time (similar to what the folks at Orasi offer) so that you can ask users to quickly rank possible new features?

It's possible this is already being implemented by Google, eBay and others, since the web-based nature of their help systems allows for capturing the data and aggregating it. If not, I certainly hope that they and others (are you listening Microsoft?) build an efficient engine and let the software world out there tap into it. Maybe there is even a market for someone to build this for SaaS offerings? Does anyone know of any efforts like this that are underway?

Product Management Education Conference

I'll be giving the dinner keynote presentation this week at the Product Management Education Conference in Lake Tahoe. The topic will be Product Management 2.0.

If you attend the conference find me and say Hi.

CNBC World Business Review: Trends in Product Management

On April 3rd and 4th CNBC's World Business Review will be doing a segment on trends in Product Management and Product Marketing. Topics covered include the rising importance of Product Management in organizations, new challenges facing companies and what the hottest tech trends are in Silicon Valley. Alexander Haig, former Secretary of State interviews Brian Lawley, President and Founder of the 280 Group and President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. A complete list of airing times is available at http://www.wbrtv.com/broadcast/1826.htm. Additionally, the entire segment can be viewed on the 280 Group website at http://www.280group.com/news.htm.