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?

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!

Keynote: How to Accelerate Your Product Management Career

I'm doing the keynote presentation at the PMEC (Product Management Education Conference) in San Diego at the beginning of April. Come join me for an excellent conference if you get the chance.

Here's a description of the talk:
Do you ever wonder why some product managers seem to get promoted and advance much faster than others? Are you interested in learning strategies and tactics you can use to speed up the advancement of your own career? In this presentation Brian Lawley, Founder of the 280 Group and President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association will share the different ways he has seen product managers successfully accelerate their careers during his twenty year career in product management.

More details here...

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.