Update your marketing and selling approaches by starting with pain.  Focus on what pain you solve for your customers / prospects.  People buy solutions to their pain, not features and benefits.  Pain is the only thing they identify with.  Lead with the pain and use products, features, and benefits as proof points to the solution.

Start with positioning the pain.  Traditional marketing teaches positioning as describing your product / service in terms of benefits, target customer segment, and k...
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It is an honor to be considered as someone who exemplifies the role of product management.  I want to thank Pragmatic Marketing for including me on their home page.  My picture is cycled with those of other product management, product marketing and executive leaders whose philosophy aligns with Pragmatic Marketing and who illustrate the best of the role.

I especially appreciate the fact that Pragmatic Marketing links to this blog on their Product Management Solutions page.

Thanks, Pragmatic Mar...
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Listed are some take away messages from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 that I thought would be important for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers.  I went to many of the sessions and also interviewed several of the exhibitors local to Silicon Valley.  This post will provide insight into trends, business challenges to address, and areas to innovate.

General Messages

• Be more agile – massive networking drives increase in dynamics and complexity
• Feedback loops rule �...

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We all need to anticipate for change whether we have a job or are in between jobs.  Change is stressful but it is how you deal with change that can bring you success.  To survive and succeed you must sense change, make sense of change, and respond to change.

Product managers and product marketing managers have an advantage when it comes to managing change.  For the products you manage, you are already (or should be already) monitoring the market for trends, updating your product offerings to k...
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If you’re a product manager starting to add user-centered design processes to product development to create more user-friendly products, consider how the product creation team will look like.

First of all, congratulations in recognizing that the revenue stream will continue as long as the customer experience is agreeable.  Just having this bit of knowledge will help you get closer to user-friendly products.  If you still don’t see why usability is important, read my post called “Poor Exp...
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The number of product management jobs has decreased by 19% since April 2007.  The good news is that the number of job postings per capita in San Jose, CA is the highest in the country according to Indeed.  Also, there are more product management positions posted than product marketing or other outbound marketing disciplines.

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Many engineers have come to me asking for advice on how to get into marketing.  I first find out why they want to make the switch to the "Dark Side" and their expectations of the position.  If these engineers still want to transition into product management after I've provided them the gory details of what the role entails, my advice is for them to build their marketing skills and experience.

One option is to find positions, like technical marketing, that will allow engineers to build their ...

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Wenger Giant Knife

The picture above is a Swiss Army knife gone wrong.  This is what happens when there is failure to focus on specific markets and usability.

In Silicon Valley, many organizations are engineering driven.  Technology is king.

First of all, to assume that a technology product meets customer requirements for all market segments is delusional.  Providing 90% of the solution for specific markets is much more effective than providing 10% of the solution for 90% of the available...

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Just the other day a serial entrepreneur, who had a few failed businesses, told me that he painfully learned that marketing is needed way before product development.  Like many others, he unfortunately waited to bring on marketers because he thought there was no reason to promote a product that wasn’t been built yet.

Marketing is mostly portrayed and perceived as an outbound “marketing communications” function—promotions, PR, advertising, event management, etc.  However, for compan...

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